A farmer smiles after a good harvest of the high-yielding “super rice” in Tiantai, Zhejiang Province. [China Daily]

Currently, 10 percent of the non-genetically modified rice output is lost annually due to pests, and "that means the loss can be avoided with wide use of the technology," he noted.

The two GM rice strains, developed by Huazhong Agricultural University, would help reduce the use of pesticide by 80 percent while raising yields by as much as 8 percent, said Huang Jikun, a scientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The ministry granted safety certificates to other GM crops like cotton in 1998 and tomato and pepper in 1999.

The United States is also a major developer of GM crops and most of the country's soybean and cotton are from GM strains. However, a rice strain which has been given approval for cultivation has not yet seen widespread use.

But given the controversy over the safety of GM food for a long time, such crops are not accepted in most countries, said Fang Lifeng, spokesman for Greenpeace China's GM program.

A 2007 survey by the organization found that 65 percent of the 2,000 polled in the country said they would not choose GM food for safety reasons.

"We firmly oppose the technology being put into mass production and commercialization in a rush," Fang said.

"To ensure food supply, we have other options with no potential health risks like biological agriculture," he noted.

GM corn sold by Monsanto, the US-based agriculture company, causes organ damage in rats, mostly in the liver and kidney, according to a paper by three French scientists published in the International Journal of Biological Sciences.

These substances have never before been an integral part of human or animal diet and therefore their health consequences for consumers, especially over the long term, are currently unknown, the paper said.

Monsanto, in response, denounced the study on its website, asserting that "these claims are based on faulty analytical methods and reasoning and do not call into question the safety findings for GM products".

(China Daily February 4, 2010)