香港农业科学家与大西北的“山海情”

Lam Hon-ming, director of the State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, is a top Hong Kong expert in soybean genome research and functional gene discovery. Since 1998, Lam's team has been cooperating with mainland scientists.

In 2010, he met Zhang Guohong, an agricultural expert from China’s Gansu province, at a national soybean conference. They hit it off and decided to use their knowledge to help farmers improve their lives and to promote local agriculture.

Zhang Guohong, a research fellow at the Gansu Academy of Agricultural Sciences, said the ecological conditions in Gansu are complex, with arid and saline-alkali land, and the rainfall cannot meet the needs of local crops. “Farmers in Gansu depend largely on the weather for their livelihood, mainly on rainfall, which is also a cause of severe poverty in the area.”

“Soybeans are important in Gansu because they not only bring income to farmers, but are also a land-nourishing crop that does much to restore soil strength. At that time, we didn’t have drought and salt tolerant soybean cultivars,” Zhang stressed.

In 2016, they successively developed three new soybean varieties suited to the climate and soil of Northwest China: Longhuang 1, Longhuang 2 and Longhuang 3. All received official government approval.

As the land in Northwest China is not suitable for the growth of common varieties of soybeans, local farmers have never planted soybeans, and promoting the new soybean became a major problem. Lam and Zhang increased communication with farmers through various ways. Lam struck a partnership with a Hong Kong food company that will purchase all soybeans at market price when they are harvested to ensure farmers’ income.

By 2020, the cumulative planting area of the three approved soybeans in Gansu had exceeded 2.4 million square kilometers, covering 46 of the province’s 80-plus counties, and the output reached 7.71 million kilograms, adding about 30 million yuan ($4.4 million) to local farmers' income.

Zhang said that Professor Lam’s contribution has greatly promoted the development of poverty alleviation, rural revitalization and agricultural research in Northwest China. “It is hard to keep doing agricultural research with less funding. And it is more difficult to travel from Hong Kong to the poor areas of the Northwest to do agricultural research,” he added.

“I hope to explore a direction that poverty alleviation activities will no longer be a single-directional, consultation-oriented help, but encourage people to give positive feedback, so that a small amount of resources can have a greater impact.” In the future, Lam will continue to work with mainland scientists and inject more “Hong Kong power” into the development of the country’s Northwest.