Impact Assessment Of Rice Breeding In China

Since 1949, China has achieved great success in rice breeding. The most significant achievements were the dwarf and semi-dwarf rice delivered in the late 1 950s, which were prior to the worldwide green revolution, and the hybrid rice delivered in early 1970s, which is still the leading technology in the world. Given the importance of the rice among other grain crops and the breakthroughs in its breading, it is believed that the rice breeding has contributed a lot to China self-sufficiency policy. Despite the great achievements in breeding, the policy makers are still not satisfied with the problems existing within the R&D system for rice breeding in China. Among 16 rice production zone in China, there are 138 institutes engaged in rice breeding. All of these institutes have been established according to the official administrative regionalization rather than ecological zoning. The over competition for scarce research resources and the repeated low-level research among these huge amount of the rice research institutes have undermined the efficiency of the whole system. To provide decision-making support information to the policy makers who are seeking to solve the problems above, Economic Surplus Analysis, Partial Equilibrium Model and Pedigree Analysis are employed to evaluate the total surplus of rice breeding in China since 1981. The main conclusions and their policy implications are: The total surplus of rice breeding is 210.624 billion yuan RMB, which is very high compared with its limited investments. Of the total surplus, the producer surplus accounts for 82.11%, indicating that the rice grown farmers could benefit a lot from the public investment in rice breeding. Therefore, increasing funding for rice breeding could be a powerful policy instrument to help the rice grown farmers to increase their income, which is one of the top policy objectives in the Tenth National Social and Economic Development Plan in China.Since there are large amount of spillover effects for rice breeding between different provinces, it is suggested that the administrative regionalization- based research system should be adjusted to the ecological zone-based ones. In our study, some institutes have strong research capacities and large amount of spillover effects. They are: Agricultural Research Institute of Sanming City, Fujian Province and Guangdong Academy of Agricultural Sciences in the Southern China Rice Production Zone, Southwestern Agricultural University in Southeast Rice Production Zone, Zhejiang Agricultural University in Middle China Rice Production Zone, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Northern China Rice Production Zone and Agricultural Research Institute of Hejiang City, Heilongjiang Province. These institutes should get more financial support from the local and central governments and gradually become rice research centers in their respective ecological zones. Others could be integrated into these ecological centers.