Hybrid rice helped feed China and the world
YUAN LONGPING 1930-2021 Helped prevent famine, export his know-how
Yuan Longping, a Chinese scientist who developed strains of hybrid high-yield rice that helped alleviate famine and poverty around the world, enabling farmers to feed a growing planet with fewer resources, died Saturday at a hospital in Changsha, China. He was 90.
The cause was multiple organ failure, according to the state-run People’s Daily newspaper. Yuan had been hospitalized in March after falling at a rice-breeding centre in southern China, and reportedly continued to monitor crops from his bed.
Known in China as “the father of hybrid rice,” Yuan was one of his country’s most revered scientists, a self-described “intellectual peasant” who spent a few hours each day in the fields, sometimes taking a break from his research to play the violin among the stalks.
Once targeted by Communist officials for daring to suggest a slight change to Mao Zedong’s agricultural program, he emerged as a national hero in recent decades, with thousands of mourners leaving chrysanthemums for him at a memorial service in Changsha.
In the early 1970s, Yuan and his team developed hybrid strains that typically yielded 20 per cent more rice than conventional varieties, transforming Chinese agriculture after years of famine and scarcity.
Some 10,000 years after Chinese farmers began cultivating rice near the Yangtze River, the country now produces more than 200 million tons of rice a year, more than any other nation.
Rather than limit his rice technology and growing techniques to China, Yuan pushed to share them with the world. He ultimately partnered with the United Nations and the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, in addition to teaching farmers in India, Vietnam and elsewhere.
In 2004, he was awarded the World Food Prize with rice researcher Monty Jones of Sierra Leone, and credited with helping “create a more abundant food supply and more stable world.”
Yuan was frequently cited as a leader of the Green Revolution, in which mid-century agricultural advances helped feed a growing planet. “He wanted to reach as many people as possible, so the problem of food could be solved globally,” said Jauhar Ali, a senior scientist at the International Rice Research Institute.