Remembering a Chinese icon
One year after his death, the legend of agri-scientist Yuan Longping continues to grow
The top rice scientist in China once said he had two dreams — to “enjoy the cool under the rice crops taller than men” and that hybrid rice could be grown all over the world to help solve the global food scarcity.
Even in his 80s, Yuan Longping, dubbed the “father of hybrid rice”, had maintained a habit of going to the paddy fields daily. Every day, he would reflect on how his super rice grows, whether the plants would suffer from insects or encounter arid weather.
“As long as my health is good, my mind is clear and I have the energy to work, I would not retire,” he said in 2018.
And even in early 2021, when he was past the age of 90, the diligent man was conducting research in an agricultural base in Sanya, Hainan. He continued his work despite suffering a fall and his health began to deteriorate.
During his long career, Yuan — who passed away in May last year — was also busy in the paddy fields of various countries including India, Pakistan and the Philippines.
In Madagascar, the rice grown by Yuan’s team of experts faced the challenge of constantly being damaged by severe weather conditions and cropdestroying local species of frogs and chameleons on the island. Also, the local farmers did not trust Yuan and his team in the beginning, when the team started work there more than 15 years ago.
The African island nation used to be vulnerable to starvation and hungerrelated deaths, with some having to live on insects and cactus leaves in difficult times. But with the Chinese experts’ help, the island country’s output of rice was raised from 3 tons to over 10 tons per hectare, more than tripling the yield. That helped improve people’s livelihoods and reduced the nation’s reliance on rice imports.
The more-than-40,000-hectares of rice grown by Yuan’s team gained traction in the island nation, and the hybrid rice’s image even appeared on Madagascar’s largest banknote of 20,000 ariary denomination issued in 2017.
Meanwhile, the Chinese hybrid rice has also been cultivated in fifteen other African countries including Egypt and Liberia.
On May 22, 2021, Yuan, renowned for developing the first hybrid rice strain that pulled countless people out of hunger, died of illness at age 91, breathing his last at a hospital in Changsha, capital of Hunan province.
On the popular microblogging site Sina Weibo, the news of the passing of the great man was met with an outpouring of grief.
“Three times a day, when we enjoy the fragrance of rice, you will be dearly remembered,” read a comment that garnered more than 700,000 likes quickly.
On Twitter, the United Nations
posted a message praising Yuan as “a true food hero”.
“Chinese scientist Yuan Longping saved millions of people from hunger by developing the first hybrid rice strains,” the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs tweeted.
UN Food and Agriculture Organization Director-General Qu Dongyu wrote in a tweet, “Deeply saddened by the death of Prof Yuan Longping, my dear Master. He devoted his life to the research of hybrid rice, helping billions achieve food security.”
Yuan was a co-winner of the 2004 World Food Prize. Barbara Stinson, president of the WFP Foundation, said Yuan was credited not only for hybrid rice, but also for the ability to shift land out of rice production and into other kinds of food production, including fisheries, fruits and vegetables, increasing the nutritional content of food in China and contributing to the reduction of hunger and poverty.
In particular, the generosity of the leading scientist in making his technology available to the world is profound, Stinson said.
Now, one year after the scientist left this world, his followers in both China and abroad are again mourning him, either online or at different sites where Yuan lived, worked or studied, presenting flowers and cards.
The focus of Yuan’s lifelong research had been on boosting the yield of rice, the most important staple food for the majority of 1.4 billion Chinese.
“In a country with a large population and little arable land, the only way to ensure national food security is to increase the yield. So, raising productivity is a constant theme in my research,” Yuan once told reporters.
Born in 1930 in Beijing, he was greatly inspired by his mother, an English teacher keen on philosophy books including those of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Later, despite being reminded by his mother that rural life would give him hardship, Yuan applied for Southwest Agricultural College in 1949, beginning a lifelong journey with rice. “I saw heartbreaking scenes of people starving to death on the road before 1949,” recalled Yuan.
After graduation in 1953, he devoted himself to education and research in the agricultural sector. Yuan enjoyed playing the violin and mahjong, however what he liked most of all was
riding a motorbike to the paddy fields.
Yuan’s pioneering research on hybrid rice began in 1964, when planting hybrid rice had become a national strategy.
His scientific journey was far from smooth. In the six years between 1964 and 1969, Yuan did over 3,000 experiments on more than a thousand varieties of hybrid rice, but the experiments failed and there was little progress.
In 1968, Yuan found that nearly all 700 sterile rice seedlings he had carefully cultivated were destroyed by someone overnight. “It was really a huge blow to me, and prolonged my experiment for three years,” he recalled.
Though some people mocked him, Yuan kept the faith.
Soon peculiar wild rice species were discovered by Yuan in the southern Hainan province in 1970. In 1973, after nine years of painstaking research and intensive testing, his team successfully cultivated the world’s first high-yield hybrid-rice strain with three genetic lines.
Hybrid rice recorded an annual yield about 20 percent higher than that of conventional rice strains. It was grown across China to significantly increase the output, and Yuan continued to set multiple world records for yields, upgrading the hybrid rice to its third generation.
Today, the accumulated planting area of hybrid rice in China has surpassed 16 million hectares, or more than 50 percent of the total rice planting area, helping feed an extra population of 80 million a year.
While food shortages have long been consigned to China’s past, Yuan, the famine fighter, had a much bigger ambition — to save the world from starvation.
Globally, more than 820 million people were hungry in 2018, according to a UN report. And if hybrid rice is planted in half of the world’s 147 million hectares of paddy fields, the additional yield alone can feed another 500 million people, Yuan once said.
In April 1979, the Chinese agricultural scientist presented a paper in English at an international academic conference, in Manila, on hybrid rice, sharing China’s experience in hybrid rice research with the rest of the world.
Since the 1980s, Yuan’s team offered training courses to over 14,000 technicians in hybrid-rice plantation methods in more than 80 developing countries in Africa, the Americas and Asia, providing a robust food source in areas with a high risk of famine.
So far, Yuan’s hybrid rice has been grown in more than 60 countries, with a total growing area of 8 million hectares outside China, according to the China National Hybrid Rice Research and Development Center where Yuan worked.
Song Chunfang, director of the industry division of Hunan Hybrid Rice Research Center, said Yuan liked to talk about the basic conditions of planting hybrid rice in different countries whenever he opened a map of the world.
“Yuan was so savvy to every detail, such as the local climate and soil conditions,” said Song.
Yuan’s team continuously made new breakthroughs. And the scientist’s research focus shifted to exploring sustainable methods for maintaining food security, which Yuan considers a major issue for national development and people’s well-being.
A team led by Yuan has worked on the research to yield more rice in saline-alkali environments that are difficult for crops to grow. The salinealkali-tolerant rice, better known as “seawater rice”, is highly rated and seen as a new way to combat global food insecurity.
In 2018, Yuan’s team was invited to make a trial plantation of the salinealkaline tolerant rice in experimental fields in Dubai, achieving huge success.
On Sept 29, 2019, days before the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, Yuan was awarded the Medal of the Republic, the highest state honor, by President Xi Jinping for the agricultural scientist’s contribution to the country.
After collecting the medal, many persuaded Yuan to stay for the National Day Parade. But Yuan hurried back to Hunan the same day, as he could not wait to check his paddy field, aiming to increase the rice yield to 1,200 kg per Chinese mu (equal to 0.067 hectare) one day.
“I had to see my seedlings first thing back,” he recalled later.
In 1999, an asteroid discovered by the national astronomical observatories was named after Yuan.