Standardizing edible mushroom breeding is imperative

Recently, at the First National Promotion Conference on Mushroom Spawn, Mushroom Supplies and Inputs held in Beijing, representatives from the mushroom industry reached a consensus on spawn breeding: the edible mushroom breeding environment is chaotic and urgently needs strict regulation in terms of germplasm resource management and variety protection.

It is reported that China's total annual output of edible mushrooms currently reaches 10.38 million tons. However, because the products sold in various regions vary greatly in quality, this has constrained the rapid and stable development of China's edible mushroom industry to varying degrees. How to achieve standardized breeding and protect the legitimate rights and interests of variety rights holders became a common concern of the scholars and industry representatives at the meeting. Zhang Jinxia, a researcher at the Soil and Fertilizer Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, pointed out on this issue that the vast majority of mushroom spawn in China lacks independent intellectual property rights, while new varieties with independent intellectual property rights face loss. Due to a poor foundation, insufficient investment and a shortage of germplasm resources, the potential for breeding is clearly inadequate. At the same time, spawn mixing, arbitrary naming and different names for the same substance are serious problems. Some spawn enterprises have poor professional standards, production facilities are too rudimentary, and spawn quality is generally low. Moreover, the technical system for spawn quality evaluation is still blank, and regulatory authorities have deficiencies and vacuum zones in law enforcement and supervision. All of these have led to the extensive use of non-variety spawn, with aged, degraded and counterfeit or inferior spawn flooding the market, harming the interests of enterprises and mushroom farmers.

Therefore, experts suggest that the state should manage mushroom spawn germplasm resources in a unified way, protect the interests of breeders, strengthen variety right protection, encourage variety recognition, and at the same time implement a market access system for spawn production, so as to guarantee the standardization of the breeding process institutionally and at the source.

It is understood that during the conference more than 30 spawn enterprises and branded products were displayed, building a platform for exchange and cooperation for edible mushroom production base cities (counties), enterprises and spawn supply companies.