Yuan Longping, China's leading agricultural scientist, holds a bunch of the third-generation hybrid rice in Changsha, Hunan province, on Oct 30, 2018. (PHOTO / XINHUA)
CHANGSHA – Chinese scientist Yuan Longping, renowned for developing the first hybrid rice strain that pulled countless people out of hunger, died of illness at 91 on Saturday.
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The top rice scientist in China passed away in a hospital in Changsha, capital of Hunan province, at about 1 pm, according to the hospital and other sources.
Yuan Longping succeeded in cultivating the world's first high-yielding hybrid rice strain in 1973, which was later grown on a large scale in China and other countries to substantially raise output
Family members hummed songs to Yuan in his final hours, reporters at the site said.
Having spent over five decades in hybrid rice research, the academician with the Chinese Academy of Engineering has helped China work a great wonder – feeding nearly one-fifth of the world's population with less than 9 percent of the world's total land.
Born in Beijing in 1930, Yuan succeeded in cultivating the world's first high-yielding hybrid rice strain in 1973, which was later grown on a large scale in China and other countries to substantially raise output.
For the next four decades, he continued to research and upgrade hybrid rice, which has reached its third generation. Until early this year, he had been conducting research in a seed breeding base in Hainan.
In China, where rice is the staple for the majority of the 1.4 billion population, the accumulated planting area of hybrid rice has exceeded 16 million hectares, or 57 percent of the total planting area of rice, helping feed an extra 80 million people a year.
Its growth area overseas has reached 8 million hectares.
In this file photo dated Sept 16, 2019, Yuan Longping (1st right) attends the opening ceremony for newly enrolled undergraduates at Hunan Agricultural University in Changsha, central China's Hunan province. (CHEN SIHAN/XINHUA)
From China to world
Yuan 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.
Since the 1980s, Yuan's team has offered training courses in dozens of countries in Africa, the Americas and Asia – providing a robust food source in areas with a high risk of famine.
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, said Yuan.
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Yuan's team has continued to make new breakthroughs. Yuan's team was invited to make a trial plantation of the saline-alkaline tolerant rice in experimental fields in Dubai in January 2018, achieving huge success. China's export of saline-alkaline tolerant rice and the technique has been eyed as a way to combat the world's food insecurity.
Agronomist Yuan Longping. (ZHU XINGXIN/CHINA DAILY)
From having enough to eat to eating well
Now the focus of Yuan's hybrid rice project has changed from increasing output to green and sustainable development.
In September 2017, a strain of low-cadmium indica rice developed by Yuan's team and the Hunan provincial academy of agricultural sciences was able to reduce the average amount of cadmium in rice by more than 90 percent in areas suffering from heavy metal pollution.
On China's Twitter-like Sina Weibo, the news has been viewed 950 million times so far, with netizens from all walks of life expressing grief at the death of a great man.
"Three times a day, when we enjoy the fragrance of rice, you will be dearly remembered," one user said. The comment has been "liked" by other users more than 600,000 times.