Yuan Longping：Father of Hybrid Rice

Chinese agricultural expert Yuan Longping walks in an agricultural production base in Hongxing village, Hunan province on Oct. 10, 2014. [Photo:VCG]

The Medal of the Republic is the country's highest honor given to prominent figures who have made great contributions to the construction and the development of the People's Republic of China.CRI's Guo Yan brings you the story of one of the recipients of the medal, Chinese agricultural expert Yuan Longping who is revered as the "father of hybrid rice."

Yuan Longping is renowned for his tireless work in the fight against starvation and helped to meet the world's demand for rice by promoting technologies of hybrid rice.

"How to feed the world is a serious challenge facing us because the population grows every year. The only way is to enhance yields of crops through the advances of science and technology in many ways."

Professor Yuan Longping is widely acknowledged as the first person to discover how to achieve heterosis in rice. Rice is a self-pollinating plant. Because of this trait, it was long assumed that developing a hybrid variety was not possible. But Yuan's work proved differently.

"I have published an article of my theory. I was confident that heterosis is a universal phenomenon and rice is no exception. "

After decades of painstaking researches and intensive testing, Yuan and his team developed the world's first hybrid rice in 1974. In years that followed, his work set multiple world records in hybrid rice yield.

The latest variety in some pilot rice fields has reported a record of nearly 18 tons per hectare.

Yuan's research has helped increase food supply for China where 60 percent of the population depend on rice as a staple food. China has been facing a daunting challenge to feed over 20 percent of the world's population with only seven percent of the world's arable land. Increasing the output of rice has been the country's major concern since the 1960s when many Chinese suffered from starvation.

"A grain of rice can save a country or knock down a country. Food supply is critically important for a country. In the 1960s, I experienced a hard time when many people starved to death during a famine. Now we are no longer faced with such a severe situation, we still have 1.4 billion people to feed, which makes food supply a critical concern."

Sad memories of starvation from his childhood have set him on an odyssey to increase high-yield rice. But this has been an arduous journey for professor Yuan and his team.

"I officially kicked off my research in 1964 and there was hardly any real progress until 1973. There were numerous failures in the first eight years. In the 1960s, during the cultural revolution, the conditions for experiments were awful. Many only survived on little food. We eked out a living by doing farm work on our own in Hainan island."

Yuan relentlessly tested new breeding approaches even when his experiments seemed not to be yielding positive results for years. His colleagues and students say Yuan has helped them steer through difficulties and doubts.

"Some traits of the sample rice just couldn't sustain in reproduction."

"The experiments should be conducted under the law of natural science and undergo failures. The road to success is not smooth at all. We have to face failures again and again."

"Thanks to Yuan's persistence, we finally managed to stick to our experiments and researches."

Yuan continued his scientific work as Director-General of the China National Hybrid Rice Research and Development Center in Changsha, Hunan Province.Together with his team, the rice breeder has been dedicated to developing super hybrid rice, boasting remarkably high yields and better quality.

Yuan has received numerous national and international prizes and awards for his lifelong work to eradicate hunger. In 2004, Yuan Longping received the World Food Prize for his breakthrough achievement in developing technologies essential for breeding high-yielding hybrid rice varieties. In 2017, he was elected academician of the US national Academy of Sciences.

His pioneering research has not only helped enhance food security in China, but has helped transform the world. Rice farmers from various countries have benefited from his work.Yuan and his team have planted their hybrid rice in Africa, helping countries such as Liberia develop productive and resilient rice crops.

"It's my great pleasure to help other developing countries develop hybrid rice to solve, to overcome their food shortage problems. I am confident that through our joint efforts the purpose will be realized in the near future."

A Liberian deputy agricultural minister says she hopes the hybrid techniques will help resolve their food problems.

"Liberians' daily consumption is rice. We import 60 percent of the rice we consume, about a hundred million dollars a year. So being introduced to the research and development of hybrid rice in Liberia is so promising and we look forward to solving our food insecurity problem."

With years of efforts and the hybrid techniques, the yields have been more than tripled, rising from 3 tonnes per hectare to nearly 11 tonnes in multiple African countries such as Madagascar.

Yuan Longping hopes the techniques of planting hybrid rice can not only help lift people out of the threat of famine, but also help local farmers get higher incomes. The 89-year-old Chinese scientist has not yet retired from his dream to pursue higher yields of rice. Now Yuan and his team have worked on the research to yield more rice in saline environments, so as to further increase food supply for the country.

They have set up the country's first cold region breeding station for sea rice in the northeast Province of Heilongjiang.

The breeding station was established in Tieli, a city located at high altitude with one of the world's three major tracts of soda saline-alkali land.

The program will help meet the needs of rice-growing areas in the northeastern provinces and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, said scientists from the Qingdao Saline-Alkali Tolerant Rice Research and Development Center, who built the breeding station.