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Pradeep Kumar

23/05/21 12:15 PM IST

China’s ‘father of hybrid rice’ is no more

In news

Yuan Longping, a Chinese agricultural scientist whose breakthroughs in hybrid rice brought food security to China and transformed agriculture worldwide, died at the age of 91.

Works of Yuan Longping
  • In 2004, he was honoured with the World Food Prize “for his breakthrough achievement in developing the genetic materials and technologies essential for breeding high-yielding hybrid rice varieties”.
  • His “new hybrid rice technology not only benefited China, but was also enthusiastically adopted in other countries.
  • His desire to experiment with rice was borne out of hardship.
  • In 1960, when he was 30 years old, China was in the midst of a famine unleashed by Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” policy in 1958 that devastated the agriculture sector and led to mass starvation and the deaths of millions.
  • In 1986, Yuan brought up the hybrid rice breeding strategy from the three-line hybrid rice strain to a two-line, and later on to a one-line variety. The two-line technique means that the hybrid rice seeds are cultivated with the male sterile and restorer lines only, which will call for less complicated techniques, save labor and cut costs.
  • His more recent achievements included developing varieties of saline-alkali tolerant rice with his team.
Source: The Hindu

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