Traditional plant breeding has greatly boosted yields of popular crops.
Officials see GM crops as a way of boosting yields on scarce farmland.In 2009 China granted safety certificates for two GM varieties of rice and one of maize.
Add in disastrous government policy officials in Hanoi demanded that farmers plant three crops a year instead of two to boost yields and stripped the soil of needed nutrients.
And never mind that, despite the hype, there's scant evidence that the involvement of genetic engineering in agriculture has done much to boost yields, reduce the use of chemicals or improve the food supply.
Take vertical urban farming that stacks plants, hydrates with mist and uses LED lighting to boost yields with a fraction of the space and resources required in traditional farming.
It may take as long as 10 15 years of dedicated work by a global scientific team, but C4 rice could boost yields and increase the efficiency of resource use more than any other advance since the first modern varieties of the Green Revolution.
The system is an advanced form of a trend that has seen large farms increasingly adopt "variable rate technology", to vary seeding, irrigation, fertilising and pesticide use according to information gathered by a variety of sensors to boost yields and cut costs.
But won't the continuing flood of government bonds depress bond prices and continue to boost yields?
