CATAS innovates unceasingly for 60 years, providing strong support for modern agriculture in tropical regions
This year's mango harvest is again a bumper one, thanks to CATAS. Without CATAS, there would be no Panzhihua mango industry! Recently, Zhong Fangxiang, head of Ruihua Agricultural Development Co. in Panzhihua City, Sichuan Province, arrived dusty from his journey at the South Asian Tropical Crops Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences (CATAS), and presented 100,000 yuan in bonus money to the scientific and technical staff. He was grinning from ear to ear, sincerely expressing his gratitude.
In the mid-1990s, the Panzhihua area had only a small number of mango trees, and they only flowered without bearing fruit, serving merely as landscape trees. After more than a decade of scientific and technological research and extension by CATAS and others, Panzhihua today has become the large-scale mango production base with the highest latitude, the highest altitude, the latest ripening period and the best quality in China and even the world. Mango has become a resounding calling card of Panzhihua's modern characteristic agriculture.
The Panzhihua mango advantageous industry belt is only a microcosm of CATAS's scientific and technological innovation and its support for the development of the tropical crops industry. CATAS possesses quite a few such scientific research achievements that both promote agricultural development in tropical regions and raise the incomes of farmers there!
CATAS is a national-level tropical agricultural research institution, whose predecessor was the South China Institute of Special Forestry Science established in Guangzhou in 1954. Over the 60 years, the academy has devoted itself to tropical agricultural research and has achieved remarkable and highly practical scientific and technological accomplishments in cultivating and introducing new crop varieties for tropical regions, promoting the development of modern agriculture in China's tropical regions, and safeguarding the effective supply of the nation's natural rubber and characteristic agricultural products, creating enormous economic value for tropical regions.
According to statistics, over its 60 years of development, CATAS has developed and integrated a large number of key industrial technologies, spawned a large number of new characteristic tropical agriculture industries in nine provinces and regions including Hainan, Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan, obtained more than 500 granted patents, including more than 200 national invention patents, and achieved nearly 50 national-level scientific and technological awards, including the National Invention First Prize and the National Science and Technology Progress First Prize, as well as more than 1,000 ministerial and provincial-level scientific and technological awards. These have greatly advanced research in fields such as natural rubber and other important tropical cash crops, Nanfan seed breeding, tropical food crops, tropical winter vegetables, tropical animal husbandry and tropical marine biological resources, enabling China's tropical crops industry to grow from nothing and from weak to strong, and making outstanding contributions to safeguarding the security of the nation's natural rubber strategic material, ensuring the effective supply of tropical agricultural products, and promoting the sustained increase of farmers' incomes in tropical regions.
⟦NL> In terms of support for the natural rubber industry, CATAS broke the assertion long recognized by the international rubber community that “above 17 degrees north latitude is a forbidden zone for rubber planting”, created a miracle in the world history of rubber planting by growing rubber trees on a large scale between 18 and 24 degrees north latitude, and realized the use of improved varieties as planting material for rubber trees 30 years ahead of schedule. More than 95% of the technologies and 75% of the relevant national standards and industry standards in the natural rubber industry were formulated by CATAS, driving three industrial upgrades of China's rubber planting industry. Facing the new situation of the fourth industrial upgrade of the natural rubber industry, CATAS is currently working hard on breeding new rubber varieties, technology for greatly increasing natural rubber yields, technology for improving production efficiency, efficient and safe tapping technology, automated processing technology and high-performance natural rubber products, providing all-round support for industrial upgrading.
CATAS's scientific research achievements are too numerous to list: it took the lead in completing the world's first whole-genome sequencing of cassava and a model of efficient transport and accumulation of photosynthetic products, and bred 12 high-yield, high-quality South China series new cassava varieties, directly driving the formation of a sunrise bioenergy industry with an annual output value of 10 billion yuan; in research on other important tropical cash crops, CATAS bred a series of fine new mango varieties, promoting the establishment of China's late-ripening mango advantageous industry belt; the extension and application of intensive production technologies for pepper, coffee, cocoa and sisal have placed China's per-unit yields of these four major crops at the world's advanced level and made China one of the world's major producers; it overcame the key technology for oil palm tissue-culture seedlings, which is expected to allow large-scale planting; it innovated the artificial pollination method for vanilla and developed more than 80 related scientific and technological products in 8 major categories, with a achievement conversion rate of more than 90%, direct economic benefits from conversion of nearly 500 million yuan, and social and economic benefits of more than 5 billion yuan……
More importantly, CATAS not only attaches importance to scientific research and development, but also to the conversion and export of scientific research achievements. The “going global” of tropical agricultural science and technology has repeatedly rendered new distinguished service for the nation's science and technology diplomacy. CATAS has successively established academic exchange and cooperative research relationships with 16 international scientific and technological organizations and more than 30 countries and regions, established 11 international cooperation platforms including the FAO Reference Center for Tropical Agricultural Research and Training and international science and technology cooperation bases, and undertaken more than 100 international cooperation projects. Using projects as bridges, CATAS has sown the seeds of science and technology in more than 90 countries. These seeds of science and technology have not only taken root and sprouted locally, but also borne abundant fruit, greatly enhancing the international influence and competitiveness of China's tropical crops industry.
China's tropical regions are small, while the world's tropical regions are large. CATAS is trekking forward to create a world-class tropical agricultural science and technology center.