There is some speculation around China’s appetite for corn. It is difficult to know what is going on exactly.
A U.S. Grains Council Chief says that the demand should grow moving forward. That is because he does not see their slow adoption of GMO corn as a “silver bullet.”
The biggest thing holding back China’s yield growth is its soil.
According to Bryan Lohmar, “Many of the pests are above ground pests. The ones that BT and genetic engineering have been very good at getting at is rootworm underground, but China doesn’t have rootworm. So, they manage much of their pests by spraying pesticides and they can do that, it’s just genetic engineering will lower production costs because they won’t have to spray so much and they won’t have to plow their fields as much, and lower accidental poisoning by farmers doing such activities. But, I don’t expect it to increase yields more than 10 percent.”
That 10 percent statistic is based on China’s adoption of BT cotton, which only increased yields by that much. Lohmar says that there could be problems for American farmers if they buy seeds from China. They could be counterfeit, meaning they are not actually tolerant of a herbicide.