About Agricultural Product Processing Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences

Agricultural Product Processing Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences

The Agricultural Product Processing Research Institute, known by the abbreviation APPRI, is a national research institute of the Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences (CATAS) based in Zhanjiang, Guangdong Province. Founded in 1964, it is, in the academy's own description, China's only national scientific and technological research institute devoted to processing technology and applied basic research for tropical agricultural products, with natural rubber at the centre of its work. That specialisation reflects the economics of China's tropical south: the rubber, fruit, oil crops, spices and medicinal plants grown in Hainan, Guangdong and Yunnan are perishable or semi-processed commodities whose value depends on what happens after harvest. APPRI is the institute that works on that stage — how natural rubber latex becomes a specified industrial raw material, how tropical fruit is preserved and processed, how new materials are made from rubber and tropical fibres, and how the quality and safety of tropical products are tested. It has 125 staff and ten national, ministerial or provincial research and development platforms, and its recorded output includes about 170 research achievements and fifty awards at national, ministerial and provincial level.

Foundation in 1964 and place within CATAS

APPRI was founded in 1964 in Zhanjiang, the port city in western Guangdong that serves as one of the three campus centres of the Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences alongside Haikou and Danzhou in Hainan. CATAS itself is China's only national institution for tropical agricultural research, administered and financed by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, with origins in the South China Special Forestry Research Institute established in Guangzhou in 1954 and renamed the Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences in 1994. Within that academy, institutes divide the tropical production chain among them: breeding and cultivation institutes work on the growing crop, plant protection institutes on pests and diseases, machinery institutes on equipment, and APPRI on processing — the conversion of harvested produce into storable, transportable and industrially usable products. Its address is 48 Renmin Avenue South, Zhanjiang, Guangdong 524001. The institute's six decades in the same city have made it the standing national reference point for tropical product processing, a role formalised in its status as the only national institute in the field.

Natural rubber processing and application

The largest of APPRI's four research areas is natural rubber processing and application. Natural rubber is a strategic material for China — the country is the world's largest consumer of it, while its domestic production in Hainan and Yunnan supplies only part of demand — and the quality of domestically produced rubber is determined largely at the processing stage, where latex or cup lump from smallholder tappers is preserved, coagulated, dried and graded. APPRI's work in this area covers new processing technology and equipment for rubber preservation, coagulation and drying, together with the treatment of the wastewater and exhaust gases that rubber factories produce. During the Twelfth Five-Year Plan period (2011-2015), the institute concentrated on what it calls the third generation of natural rubber processing technology: low-carbon processing, aimed at reducing the energy use and environmental burden of an industry whose traditional methods are water- and fuel-intensive. The institute's rubber work extends beyond primary processing to application research on how processed rubber performs in products, linking the plantation sector to the tyre and rubber-goods industries that consume its output.

Organic macromolecule materials

The second research area, organic macromolecule materials, takes the institute from commodity processing into materials science. Its subjects are new methods and technologies for the molecular modification of natural rubber, nano-reinforcement and polymer blends aimed at high-performance rubber materials, together with homogeneous nanotechnology and its application to tropical crop fibres. In practical terms this means altering rubber at the molecular level or reinforcing it with nanoscale fillers so that a renewable, plantation-grown material can meet specifications otherwise served by synthetic polymers, and extracting and engineering fibres from tropical plants — such as pineapple leaf and other crop residues studied elsewhere in CATAS — to material standards. This strand of work positions APPRI within China's broader effort to raise the value of its tropical agriculture beyond bulk commodities: a tonne of rubber sold as a specified high-performance material earns more, and depends less on imported synthetics, than a tonne sold as an undifferentiated grade.

Food processing of tropical products

The third research area is food processing. APPRI works on the preservation and storage of tropical crop products, their preliminary ("rough") processing and deep processing, and the basic theory of product quality control and its application. The emphasis falls on the preservation, storage and processing of tropical fruits and vegetables, tropical oil crops, tropical spice products and tropical medicinal plants. These are crops whose commercial problem is time: mango, banana, pineapple and similar produce deteriorates within days in tropical heat, and the difference between a glut destroyed at the farm gate and a product that reaches distant urban markets is processing and cold-chain technology. By combining preservation research with deep-processing work — turning fruit into juices, dried products and ingredients, and oil crops and spices into refined products — the institute addresses the post-harvest losses that are the tropical sector's largest source of waste. Its food-processing research is deliberately paired with the theory of quality control, so that processed products meet the standards of the markets they are sold into.

Quality and safety of agricultural products

The fourth research area is the quality and safety of agricultural products. APPRI develops new detection technologies for quality control and carries out risk assessment of agricultural products. Beyond its own research, this part of the institute performs standing public functions: quality and safety monitoring tasks assigned by national and local government authorities are a regular activity every year, and the institute undertakes testing of products for certification, environmental supervision testing, the provision of third-party notarised test data to society, and the preparation and revision of standards. This testing-and-standards role is what connects a research institute to the regulatory system: the methods APPRI develops and the standards it drafts determine how the quality of tropical products is judged in the market, and its laboratory provides the impartial measurements on which certification decisions rest. In natural rubber especially, grading standards are commercially decisive, because the grade assigned at testing sets the price the producer receives.

Research platforms, projects and funding

APPRI possesses ten research and development platforms at national, ministerial or provincial level, the infrastructure through which its 125 staff organise their work. Since the beginning of the Eleventh Five-Year Plan period (2006-2010), the institute has undertaken more than one hundred key projects. Its funders and programmes, as recorded in its official profile, include the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the National Key Basic Research Program, the Special Fund for the Industrial Technology System Construction of Modern Agriculture — the national commodity-industry research system that assigns each major agricultural product a standing research network — agro-research projects in the public interest, the Agricultural Technology Transfer Programme and the programme for introducing foreign advanced agricultural science and technology. That portfolio shows the institute working simultaneously at the basic end of research, through the Natural Science Foundation and the Key Basic Research Program, and at the applied and extension end, through technology transfer and the modern agriculture industry system, which is the channel by which its processing technologies are expected to reach factories and farms.

Achievements, awards and publications

The institute's cumulative record, as stated in its official profile, is about 170 research achievements, with fifty awards at national and ministerial or provincial levels, including two China National Science and Technology Progress Awards — elsewhere specified as two second prizes of that award. Counting from the Eleventh Five-Year Plan period, it has been granted forty patents, has proposed or amended sixty-three national and ministerial standards, and has published over three hundred academic papers, of which more than one hundred were indexed by SCI, EI or ISTP. For a staff of 125, that is the output of an institute whose work is weighted toward the applied end of research, where results are counted in standards and patents as much as in papers. The standards figure is particularly significant in its field: sixty-three national or ministerial standards proposed or amended means the institute has written a substantial share of the rulebook by which tropical agricultural products — above all natural rubber — are processed, graded and traded in China.

The Rubber Processing Innovation Research Center

A documented example of the institute's industry linkage is the Rubber Processing Innovation Research Center built jointly with Guangken Rubber Group Co., Ltd., the rubber arm of the Guangdong state farms system. The agreement was signed and the centre's plaque unveiled on 6 May 2017 at the institute in Zhanjiang, by APPRI's director Dr Peng Zheng and Guangken Rubber's general manager Yang Fuyun, at a ceremony attended by CATAS board chairman Li Shanglan and Guangken chairman Lei Yongjian. The centre was positioned as the core technology-support institution of the Guangken group, focusing on natural rubber processing technology and equipment, new product research and development, transformation of technical achievements, product quality testing and control, and personnel training. Its stated goal was to upgrade the processing technology of the state-farm rubber sector and improve product quality and economic efficiency, developing into an R&D centre for rubber end products with large market potential, a product testing centre and a training base for rubber technology personnel. Peng Zheng's report to the ceremony highlighted the institute's recent progress on special engineering rubber and white carbon black masterbatch — a rubber compound in which silica filler is pre-dispersed, used to reduce rolling resistance in tyres.

Significance for China's tropical product industries

APPRI's importance is best measured against the structure of China's tropical agriculture. The country grows rubber, tropical fruit, spices and oil crops on a large scale but remains dependent on imports for much of its natural rubber supply, so the competitiveness of domestic production depends disproportionately on processing quality: imported rubber arrives in standardised grades, and domestic rubber must match them. As the only national institute for tropical product processing, APPRI carries that benchmarking function for the whole sector, from latex coagulation in a Hainan or Guangdong primary factory to the standards by which the finished material is graded and the detection methods by which food products from the tropics are certified safe. Its combination of processing engineering, materials research, food technology and regulatory testing in a single 125-person institute in Zhanjiang is the institutional form that function takes. The institute's official English profile, maintained on the CATAS website, remains the primary public record of its work, and its research office in Zhanjiang is the contact point for the collaborations its mandates envisage.