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China food security
EconomyChina Economy

China enlists AI in hunt for better soybeans, but self-sufficiency unlikely any time soon

New platform is China’s latest effort to improve home-grown soybean varieties and reduce reliance on imports

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Farmers tend to a soybean field in northeastern China’s Heilongjiang province in June. Photo: Xinhua
Mandy Zuoin Shanghai

Chinese agricultural scientists have launched a generative AI breeding platform for soybeans, which play a central role in China’s agricultural trade.

The Fengshu 2.0 platform marked “a shift in China’s soybean breeding towards data-assisted breeding and precision decision-making”, Xinhua reported recently, contrasting it with traditional methods that relied on experience and a trial-and-error approach.

The artificial intelligence platform, which is expected to optimise breeding plans by making the processing of research data more efficient, is China’s latest effort to improve home-grown soybean varieties as it seeks to reduce its reliance on imports.

The past five years have seen Chinese scientists develop a batch of breakthrough high-yield, high-oil varieties of the seed plant to replace imports, which currently account for over 80 per cent of total consumption, according to official numbers, and are seen by Beijing as a vulnerability amid heightened geopolitical risks.

Yet most new varieties remained a long way from large-scale commercial planting and had yet to meaningfully curb the country’s reliance on imports, researchers said, even as growing demand for meat from the nation’s 1.4 billion people kept pushing up the consumption of soybean meal – a key animal feed.
Since China launched a seed industry revitalisation plan in 2021, the development of high-yield, high-oil soybean varieties had transitioned from “quantitative accumulation” to “qualitative breakthrough”, said Wang Wenshen, an analyst at bulk commodity consultancy Sublime China Information.
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