China has started rice production on salty land with the introduction of new salt-tolerant strains, developed by Chinese scientists as part of an ambitious plan to boost the country’s rice production and ensure the food supply of tens of millions of people.
Although China has a fifth of the world’s population, it only has 10% of arable land of the planet.
The strains of this grain (known as “saltwater rice”) they were created by overexpression of a selected wild rice gene that is more resistant to saline and alkaline solution.
The test fields in Tianjin, a municipality to which Jinghai belongs, recorded a yield of 4.6 metric tons per acre last year, which is above the national average for production of standard varieties of rice.
“Seeds are the ‘chips’ of agriculture,” he says. Wan Jilimanager of the Salt and Alkali Tolerant Rice Research and Development Center, establishing a parallelism between grains and the current world shortage of chips.
The objective of the institute is to use 6.7 million hectares of barren land to harvest 30 million tons of rice, which would feed 80 million people.
Zhang Zhaoxin, A researcher from China’s Ministry of Agriculture said that while saltwater rice has so far been planted in trial fields, commercial cultivation will soon take off.
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JP Morgan: Expects seven interest rate hikes
JP Morgan economists see it as highly likely the Federal Reserve (Fed) increase interest rates at 25 basis points in nine consecutive meetings in an attempt to control inflation.
The bank joins others in Wall Streett raising their bets on a faster policy tightening, after US consumer prices recorded the biggest rise since January 1982.
“We now expect the Fed to hike 25 bps in each of the next nine meetings, with the policy rate approaching a neutral stance early next year,” says the JP Morgan team, led by Bruce Casmanin a note.
US inflation readings for January “surprised materially to the upside,” the economists say. “We no longer see such a sharp slowdown in prices in the last quarter.”
Germany could fall into recession
Germanythe largest economy in the euro zone, seems destined to fall back into recession at the start of 2022.
As the German central bank (Bundesbank) warned yesterday, it is “likely” that the country’s economic activity has been reduced “notably” between January and March.
If confirmed, this would imply the drop in gross domestic product (GDP) for the second consecutive quarter (technical recession) after the contraction of 0.7% registered in the last quarter of 2021.
“German economic output is likely to decline markedly again in the winter quarter of 2022, according to expert assessment,” says the Bundesbank in its monthly bulletin, collected by Europe Press.
However, the German central bank stresses that the last wave of the pandemic it has hardly left traces in the labor market.
