Original: Rorschach
Last month, chinese businessman Haoyu Gao's appeal was dismissed and the New Zealand High Court awarded NZ$12 million (New Zealand currency, about 54.86 million yuan) in damages to global kiwi-producing giant Zespri.
Such a high amount of compensation is still greatly discounted, and when Jiapei first filed a lawsuit, it demanded a total of 30 million New Zealand dollars (137 million yuan). In February last year, the court finally ordered Gao Haoyu to pay 15 million New Zealand dollars (68.57 million yuan) in damages, this time equivalent to erasing a fraction of 2 million New Zealand dollars, which alone exceeded 9 million yuan.
And the source of this sky-high lawsuit is nothing more than an inconspicuous fruit tree cane.
This goes back 11 years to 2010, when kiwi canker disease (PSA) was rampant in New Zealand orchards, nearly 40% of which were infected, and the entire New Zealand plantation industry suffered a huge blow.
In the face of the spreading infection, Jiapei Company and other institutions invested millions of dollars to select 40 varieties from 50,000 varieties, of which 4 varieties were shortlisted for orchard planting experiments, and the final variety that stood out was the current "Sunshine Golden Fruit" (G3).
The matter should have ended here, after all, new varieties have been bred, and with the promotion of new varieties, infections will naturally be controlled. As a result, Jiapei Company had not had time to catch its breath, and suddenly found that in 2016, the Sunshine Golden Fruit and charm Golden Fruit (G9) that it had just cultivated had been planted in some areas of China.
Jiapei hired private detectives to investigate these orchards, and eventually traced them to Gao Haoyu. He bought a kiwi orchard from a small town in New Zealand and smuggled out a shipment of fruit tree buds to be sold for NZ$60,000.
▲Sunshine Golden Fruit
On the whole, this matter is just a small episode of agricultural cooperation between China and New Zealand, after all, in 2016, New Zealand also cooperated with China to combat kiwi fruit diseases and insect pests, after all, "New Zealand has a huge kiwi species resource, but the diversity of Chinese kiwi fruit is simply endless." "In the first half of 2021, Jiapei is still preparing to cooperate with China to plant Sunshine Golden Fruit.
But this incident also reflects another very serious problem, when Chinese buy fruits and vegetables in supermarkets, they rely heavily on foreign seeds and excellent varieties.
New Zealanders say that "the diversity of Chinese kiwifruit is simply endless" because China was originally the home of kiwifruit, and the earliest records of wild kiwifruit in China can be traced back more than 2800 years. Li Shizhen mentioned the origin of the name of kiwifruit in the "Compendium of Materia Medica", saying that "kiwifruit is shaped like a pear, its color is like a peach, and the kiwi monkey likes to eat, so it has various names."
In 1903, a New Zealand female teacher named Isabelle Fraser came to Hubei to visit her missionary sister, who went up the Yangtze River and found a fruit-bearing kiwi tree in Yichang. Conquered by the delicacy of the kiwi fruit, she brought the seeds back to New Zealand, and by the time she died in 1942, there were already tens of thousands of kiwi trees throughout New Zealand, when the kiwi was in New Zealand called "Yichang gooseberry".
▲ Isabelle Fraser
New Zealand began exporting kiwifruit overseas after World War II, initially changing the name to "Chinese Gooseberry", but the oriental name was ridiculed by McCarthyists in the United States, who had to come up with a name loud enough to win overseas markets.
Initially they wanted to call the kiwi "Mellonette," but because the tariffs on American melons were too high, the name was not adopted. During a brainstorming session, it was proposed to put the name of Kiwi, New Zealand's national bird, on a kiwi, and call it "kiwi fruit" (kiwi fruit).
▲ Kiwi bird
It turns out how important a good name is. It didn't take long for kiwi sales to start plummeting, and an ad for kiwifruit in the 1960s urged consumers to order quickly: "It's best to order immediately, kiwifruit is tighter than the screen door on a submarine!" "I have to say that this advertising slogan is a wonderful metaphor for New Zealanders.
Now, As the origin of kiwifruit, China wants to import excellent varieties from New Zealand, and some growers even smuggle buds from New Zealand to plant, which is indeed quite embarrassing.
In fact, not only kiwifruit, a large part of the fruits in Chinese supermarkets come from abroad.
In the case of grapes, many of the most popular varieties come from Japan, including "Giant Peak", "Summer Black", "Goldfinger" and "Sunshine Rose". In the citrus category, "Harumi", "Unknown Fire", "Ehime", etc. also come from Japan, not to mention the "Red Fuji" apples that almost all Chinese know.
▲Red Fuji apple
This wasn't a problem, at least not at first.
At the beginning of the founding of the People's Republic of China, it attached great importance to the introduction of foreign varieties of resources, and the principle at that time was "equality and reciprocity, mutual exchange, exchange of exchanges, exchange of treasures for treasures". In the 1950s and 1960s, China introduced about 20,000 varieties of resources, such as German potatoes, Italian wheat, and East African sisal.
From 1971 to 1980, China introduced 44,468 germplasm resources; from 1981 to 1985, 44,071 were introduced; and from 1996 to 2009, 80,000 were introduced progressively. These imported species of animals and plants have made an important contribution to the progress of China's agriculture.
Of course, since it is "equal and reciprocal, mutual exchange, exchange and exchange, equal exchange, and treasure for treasure", other countries naturally benefit a lot from China's species resources. The United States found and utilized the genes of resistance to waterlogging and root rot from soybean resources introduced by China; Japan used Chinese rice varieties that were resistant to rice blast to breed a series of excellent disease-resistant varieties. Japanese scientists and technicians used the pollen of Masson pine provided by China to breed the strongly stress-resistant Hehua pine through hybridization. China's Meishan pigs have been introduced by France, the United States, Romania, Hungary, the United Kingdom, Japan and other countries to cross with domestic pigs and breed new breeds.
In August 1994, in order to narrow the gap between China's agricultural science and technology and the world's advanced level as soon as possible, the State Council approved the implementation of the "948 Project Introduction of International Advanced Agricultural Science and Technology Program" (referred to as the "948" Plan) from the "Ninth Five-Year Plan".
The 948 project introduced a large number of excellent varieties and cultivated more than 500 new varieties, and it was at this time that Japan's red Fuji apples entered China.
However, the premise of "exchanging treasure for treasure" is that people are willing to change with you, what if people are not willing to change with you?
In December last year, Japan revised the Seedling Law and came into effect in April 2021. The new law stipulates that seedling developers can specify that the seedling is only allowed to be used in the domestic or even county and municipal markets when registering, and farmers or enterprises need to pay and obtain a license to use the registered varieties. Individuals who violate the amendment are punishable by imprisonment for up to 10 years or a fine of up to 10 million yen, and legal persons can be fined up to 300 million yen.
In other words, seeds and seedlings of agricultural products cultivated in Japan are not allowed to be brought out of Japan without permission, or even out of the local area.
Subsequently, Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries issued a list of seedlings that were prohibited from being brought out of Japan in 1975, including "Sunshine Rose" grapes, "Ganwang" strawberries, Hokkaido's "Momeliko" rice, and so on.
Of course, because the "sunshine rose" was already cultivated in 1983, and there were no corresponding regulations at that time, it is almost impossible for Japan to prevent other countries from planting the "sunshine rose" now. Today, south Korea's export value of "sunshine roses" is close to 5 times that of Japan, and China's sunshine rose planting area has reached more than 40 times that of Japan.
Because of this, the price of "Sunshine Rose" has fallen from the highest 300 yuan a pound to the current dozen yuan a pound, and the image of high-end atmosphere is gone.
Why the Japanese revised the "Seedling Law" is already obvious, after all, it often takes more than ten or twenty years to cultivate a new variety, and naturally it is not willing to flow abroad so easily.
Not just in Japan and New Zealand, last year U.S. breeding company International Fruit Genetics said the grape variety Sweet Sapphire was patented and had registered Chinese trademark in China.
▲ Sweet sapphire
IFG said it has successfully launched a series of legal actions in China. Among them, the local agricultural authorities in Jiangsu Province have responded to the company's demands and imposed corresponding administrative fines on the suspected infringing, illegal sales and promotion actors; in addition, the Shaanxi Provincial Bureau of Natural Resources has also ordered growers to stop illegally planting and trading IFG-related varieties of seedlings.
In addition to a large number of fruit varieties to rely on foreign countries, China's vegetable market is equally dependent on foreign countries.
In Keshan County, the "hometown of Chinese potatoes", half of the potatoes are "Atlantic" varieties from the United States. A large part of the seeds of the white radish we usually eat come from Korea. The price of these seeds is more than 20 times that of domestic seeds, but because of the good quality of Korean varieties, there is still a competitive advantage in the fact that the seeds are so expensive. As for chili peppers, many of the seeds come from Israel, which not only taste good, but also harvest one more stubble than domestic pepper varieties.
Broccoli is even worse, and the supply of broccoli seeds in China has long been monopolized by seed companies in Japan, Europe and other places. In 2017, China's self-bred broccoli varieties had a domestic market share of less than 5%, and this year it increased to 20%.
Chen Wenfu, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said in an interview that these high-end vegetables and fruits are currently in a state where they may be "stuck in the neck". "A lot of people will say that you can buy it if you have money, but it's not that simple. During the epidemic last year, Russia, Vietnam and other countries suddenly announced the suspension of grain exports. Soybeans can be bought, but the price is decided by others, which is to be 'stuck in the neck'. ”
Not only that, pigs, dairy cows, beef cattle... almost all large-scale breeds need to be imported from abroad. In 2020 alone, China's imported breeding pigs exceeded 22,000 heads, a record high. From 1994 to 2007, the market share of China's local pig breeds plummeted from 90% to only 2%. Today, foreign pig breeds have almost completely occupied the tables of ordinary Chinese people.
Whether it is to protect intellectual property rights or to monopolize profits, the protection of new varieties cultivated by countries will inevitably become more and more stringent. If you can't cultivate it yourself, you can only spend a lot of money to buy foreign seeds, or spend more money to directly import fruits and vegetables.
Wan Jianmin, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and vice president of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, once said that there is still a gap between China's breeding technology and developed countries, "the development of the seed industry can be divided into four stages, the 1.0 era is farm breeding, the 2.0 era is hybrid breeding, the 3.0 era is molecular breeding, including molecular markers, transgenes, gene editing breeding, etc., and the 4.0 era is 'biotechnology + artificial intelligence + big data information technology' breeding." At present, developed countries have entered the 4.0 era of seed industry, and China is still between the 2.0 and 3.0 era. ”
Of course, the gap is there, and it is not small, but the development of new technologies also makes it possible for China to "overtake in curves". According to the director of the Shanghai Plant Stress Biology Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, "If we rely on traditional breeding, it will take many years to catch up with the technical level of foreign seed industries, but new breeding techniques can make us do it faster." ”
Only after we catch up can we be qualified to sit at the negotiating table, exchange with foreign countries, and withdraw to meet domestic needs.
After the unremitting efforts of countless scientists, Chinese have been able to "eat enough", but more efforts are needed to make Chinese "eat well" and help Chinese achieve fruit freedom and vegetable freedom.