The Managing Director of Mylnefield Research Services (MRS), Dr Nigel Kerby, met the Chinese Minister of Agriculture, Mr Sun Zhengcai, at the official launch conference of the UK China Sustainable Agriculture Innovation Network (SAIN).

MRS – the commercial arm of SCRI – is part of the SAIN initiative which will help address the link between agriculture and climate change. This new network, which met in Beijing, will provide a clear plan for the development and implementation of China-UK collaboration on environmentally sustainable agriculture.

Dr Kerby said: “I told the Chinese Minister about the work we were doing in the SCRI Group to foster greater collaboration in potato research and development. We are introducing new high value crops in China to help develop the rural economy. We also discussed our existing environmental collaborations.

“One key point I made at the meeting was that if the policies developed by SAIN are going to have impact the initiative needs to be connected to business.”

Chinese Minister of Agriculture Sun Zhengcai said: “With the accelerated development of the economic globalisation process, a series of important issues such as food security, climate change, food safety, environmental pollution, invasive alien species and biodiversity, have become the common global issues of concern.

“It is my hope that our two countries will make good use of this platform of SAIN so that we can follow the sustainable development concept, create new cooperative models and carry out cooperation in the areas of food security, environmental protection, climate change and the use of renewable energy in order to make our contribution to sustainable development in our two countries and elsewhere in the world.”

SCRI Group has built extensive links with China over the last two years, culminating in a UN Year of the Potato conference held in Dundee in August that was addressed by a senior Chinese agriculture official.