The review, authored by Yaqi Bi, Ruijia Guo, and Xingming Fan, frames the comparison through two contrasting models. The first is an innovation-driven cycle, in which private companies are the principal engine of research and development, sustained by strong intellectual property protection and reinvested profits. The second is a public institution-centered cycle, in which government research organizations drive the core of breeding work. The distinction, the authors stress, is institutional rather than technological. Both countries now share access to the same molecular toolkit of genomic selection, high-throughput phenotyping, and programmable gene editing, which makes the stubborn performance gap all the more telling as evidence that institutions, not laboratory techniques, are doing the differentiating work.

In the American system, that machinery runs on private capital. Companies such as Corteva, which spent approximately 1.4 billion U.S. dollars on research and development in 2024, operate within a legal framework anchored by the Plant Variety Protection Act and patent law, allowing them to recoup massive breeding investments and plow returns into the next generation of hybrids. This closed loop of investment, protection, and profit has produced remarkable efficiency, particularly in selecting maize adapted to high planting densities, the cornerstone of large-scale intensive farming. But the model carries risks of its own. Strict intellectual property regimes and intense market concentration can crowd out small firms and public researchers, and the review notes that consolidation may narrow the genetic diversity of the germplasm pool, encouraging variety homogenization. The United States has historically balanced these pressures through public funding of basic research via the USDA Agricultural Research Service and the Land Grant University system, alongside policy measures aimed at promoting competition and transparency in the seed sector.

China’s system has followed a different trajectory. Breeding has long been concentrated in public institutions such as the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and provincial academies, and despite enormous government investment, the pipeline from laboratory to market has repeatedly broken down. Weak intellectual property protection historically allowed a practice the authors call imitation breeding, in which enterprises made slight modifications to existing varieties and profited at low cost. That business model gutted the incentive for genuine research investment, fragmenting the seed market into thousands of small companies with little capacity for innovation. The consequences are visible in the genetics: although thousands of new maize varieties are approved in China every year, more than 80 percent of the varieties promoted in the main production belts trace back to the backbone parental lines Zheng 58 and Chang 7-2 and their derivatives. That narrow genetic base proved dangerously fragile when southern rust swept the Huang-Huai-Hai region in 2021, causing large-scale yield losses because most promoted varieties shared a susceptible background.

The turning point came in 2021 with the launch of China’s Seed Industry Revitalization Action Plan, which explicitly designates seed companies as technological innovation entities and redirects research resources toward competitive commercial firms. Reforms such as the green channel and consortium testing have given enterprises more autonomy in variety evaluation, while approval standards have shifted from pure yield toward wide adaptability, accelerating the pace of variety upgrading. Perhaps most consequential is the 2021 amendment to the Seed Law, effective March 2022, which establishes an Essentially Derived Varieties system. Under the EDV framework, commercialized varieties modified from protected originals require the original owner’s approval, a mechanism designed to sever the profit chain of imitation breeding and push companies toward original innovation built on new germplasm and new technology. The authors caution, however, that a time lag is inevitable between policy enactment and market transformation, and that consolidating thousands of fragmented firms into globally competitive leaders will take years to materialize in measurable genetic gain.

Regulatory divergence over gene editing sharpens the contrast further. The United States, under the SECURE rule implemented in 2020, applies a product-based framework: gene-edited traits that could be achieved through conventional breeding, such as SDN-1 edits, are effectively exempt from regulatory review, enabling rapid commercial iteration of insect-resistant and herbicide-tolerant varieties. China historically regulated by process, treating the technique rather than the product as the trigger, but its 2022 guidelines for the safety evaluation of gene-edited plants introduced a tiered system for crops lacking exogenous DNA. Applicants can now proceed directly to a safety certificate after the intermediate test stage, cutting the commercialization cycle to roughly one to two years. The results followed quickly: China authorized its first safety certificate for gene-edited high-oleic-acid soybeans in 2023 and approved gene-edited maize in 2024. This positions China in the middle ground of the global regulatory landscape, between the permissive American model and the European Union’s process-based regime, which imposes full GMO-equivalent assessment and, according to the review, acts as a strong deterrent to private investment.

The quantitative indicators assembled by the authors reveal how deeply institutions shape breeding objectives, which in turn shape the crop itself. American hybrids achieved their highest documented genetic gain of 81 kilograms per hectare per year under high planting densities, reflecting decades of private investment in plant architecture suited to mechanized, intensive agriculture. Chinese varieties recorded a higher figure of 94.7 kilograms per hectare per year, but the review is emphatic that the two numbers are not directly comparable, having been drawn from different studies, periods, germplasm, and planting densities. The contrast reflects divergent breeding goals rather than superior Chinese progress: China has historically prioritized yield stability for smallholders farming scattered, variable land, while the U.S. pursues density tolerance, which delivers resilience and stable yields at equal or lower input levels. China is now raising planting densities and shifting toward intensive production, where optimizing density has been shown to lift grain yield under Chinese field conditions.

Nitrogen use efficiency tells a similar institutional story. Measured as grain produced per unit of applied nitrogen, American maize reached 49.0 kilograms per kilogram of nitrogen in 2017, nearly double the Chinese figure of 25.8. The gap, the authors argue, is not primarily technical. In the profit-driven American cycle, companies invest heavily in high-efficiency varieties because fertilizer savings translate directly into margins, and embedding nitrogen efficiency as an explicit breeding goal has improved it without sacrificing yield. In China’s output-maximizing model, fertilizer subsidies historically pushed nitrogen efficiency into a secondary role behind total production. That calculus is changing as China embraces green development, and nitrogen use efficiency has now become a key criterion in variety approval, a revision of past priorities under the government-led system. Meanwhile, R&D spending patterns are converging: China’s top seed companies have sharply increased investment, and enterprise-led innovation consortia signal a shift from a dispersed structure toward a consolidated, research-centered model.

The global implications extend well beyond the two superpowers. Brazil offers the template the review finds most instructive: after establishing the public research corporation EMBRAPA in the 1970s, the country passed plant variety protection and biosafety laws in the 1990s and early 2000s, attracting multinational firms while building local champions into an efficient public-private division of labor, with EMBRAPA supplying germplasm and pre-breeding support and private companies handling commercialization. India presents the cautionary mirror image. Despite a vast public research network under ICAR, weak intellectual property protection, a fragmented seed market, and wavering biotechnology regulation outside cotton have deterred private investment, leaving maize yields below the world average. For developing economies, the authors conclude, public funding alone is insufficient; even resource-constrained breeding programs can raise genetic gain per unit cost by optimizing scheme design, but breaking technology lock-in requires moderate government intervention paired with credible IP frameworks.

The review’s ultimate message is that neither pure market forces nor pure state planning suffices. The ideal system pairs public funding of high-risk basic research and guardianship of germplasm diversity with a competitive private sector that translates technology into farmers’ fields, the balance China is now attempting through systematic reform. And even institutional repair will not be enough on its own: converting new germplasm into faster, more predictable genetic gain will require data-driven breeding platforms that integrate genomic selection, high-throughput phenotyping, and shared databases within the smart-breeding frameworks now emerging worldwide. For a crop that underpins food security for billions, the yield gap between Beijing and Washington is ultimately a measure of institutional design, and the race to close it will be won in lawbooks and boardrooms as much as in the field.

Subject of Research: Comparative analysis of maize breeding innovation systems and their systemic drivers of breeding efficiency in China and the United States

Article Title: Systemic drivers of maize breeding efficiency in China and the U.S.

Article References: Bi, Y., Guo, R., & Fan, X. (2026). Systemic drivers of maize breeding efficiency in China and the U.S.. Journal of Agriculture and Food Research, 31, Article 103301. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jafr.2026.103301

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.jafr.2026.103301

Keywords: maize, breeding efficiency, China, United States, intellectual property, gene editing, seed industry, genetic gain, nitrogen use efficiency, innovation systems, food security, EDV system