Soil degradation affects one-third of the Earth’s surface, triggering dust storms, floods, and landslides. It is also a global threat to our food supply, and diminishes the soil’s ability to sequester carbon to mitigate climate change. China has only 0.21 hectares of agricultural land per person, which is well below the global average. Worse yet, over 40 percent of that land is already degraded.  

When Kevin Chen began his agricultural research 20 years ago, most dairy farms in China were small and family-owned. People of his generation did not grow up with milk deliveries or ice cream. Today, however, these farms have been replaced by massive agri-businesses raising tens of thousands of dairy cows, and dairy is a regular part of many people’s diets in China, thanks to rising incomes and years of governmental promotion of cheese, yogurt, and milk. 

Go to the Arkansas Rice Festival in Wiener, Arkansas and you will discover how delicious – and diversely flavored – this cereal grain can be. Savory, sweet, or even spicy: Each dish at the festival’s annual rice recipe contest shows the many ways to prepare this international food staple.

Why look to Arkansas for rice? The state produces 4 million tons of it every year, which is nearly half the rice grown in the United States.  But that U.S. annual total is dwarfed by the amount produced by China, which at 207 million tons is the world’s largest rice producer.  It’s also natural that the world looks to China for rice; genomic mapping has suggested that cultivated rice was first grown in the Pearl River valley in southern China.

China’s high-speed railway (HSR) is the most recent poster child for the country’s rapid development, with more HSR tracks than the rest of the world combined. Since 2004, the Chinese government has invested more than 10 trillion RMB to build a 40,000-kilometer (km) network of trains that zip between stations at speeds reaching 350 km/hr (or 220 miles per hour). Not to be outdone, by 2035 the government aims to expand this train network by 75 percent to help the country reach its transport connectivity and low-carbon transportation goals. 

The slogan “lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets” seemed omnipresent in China in 2015, highlighting a crucial part of Xi Jinping Thought on Ecological Civilization. Yet this powerful formulation proved vague in execution, giving local policymakers new headaches on how to strike the balance between development and conservation in making new laws. China’s judiciary faced an even stickier problem. How do you try such cases in the absence of concrete legal text and sufficient legal precedents? 

For decades, western multinational companies have been profiting by exploiting plant, animal, or microbial genetic resources obtained from less developed countries. Take the neem tree, for example. Since the 1990s, international companies have registered more than 70 patents on products derived from India’s “tree of life.” Yet these patents have prohibited local people from using these trees (as they had for centuries) to make cosmetics, fertilizers, and medicines.

International companies have now turned their eyes to the high seas in a new hunt for genetic resources. Concerned they will be left out of the potentially profitable patents once again, developing nations are demanding equitable use and benefit sharing of genetic resources in ongoing global ocean treaty negotiations.