Why didn’t the rest of Asia get a taste for Chinese hero Yuan Longping’s hybrid rice?

The ‘father of hybrid rice’ took China from famine to feast with his 1970s breakthrough that boosted yields by 20 to 30 per cent, yet today much of Asia remains wedded to local forms of inbred rice

Funding problems, limited research, low genetic diversity and good old fashioned taste buds all help to explain why. But experts say there’s no reason we all can’t learn to love the hybrid variety

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Yuan Longping inspects a trial plantation of hybrid rice. Photo: Xinhua

Published: 12:00pm, 13 Jun 2021Updated: 12:00pm, 13 Jun 2021

As a guest professor at the Institute of Food and Nutrition Development in Beijing, Suresh Babu often finds himself eating out at Chinese restaurants after his lectures. Fortunately for him, Babu is a “rice lover”.

“Whenever I go to China, I find hybrid rice in the restaurants, grocery shops, everywhere,” said Babu, who is also a senior fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington.

Less fortunately for Babu, while modern China may have what seems like an endless supply of rice, little of it appeals to what he calls his “South Indian taste buds”.

It is an irony not lost on Babu, whose lectures sometimes recount the achievements of Yuan Longping, the Chinese agronomist who became a national hero by developing the first hybrid rice varieties in the 1970s, thereby boosting harvests by 20 to 30 per cent and helping to feed the world’s most populous country as it was recovering from its Cultural Revolution-era famine.

Like many other agriculturalists, Babu remains in awe of Yuan’s achievements and how he “made a worldwide impact in understanding hybridisation technology in crops like rice”. Not only was Yuan’s new rice able to produce a greater yield, it could survive in tougher, drier conditions – of great importance to a country that had a shortage of arable land. As Babu pointed out, Yuan – who died in May at the age of 90 – had continued to contribute to China’s food security up until his death, improving yields on a near yearly basis. Today, the third generation hybrid rice developed by Yuan yields an average of more than 15 tonnes per hectare, compared to a yield of about three tonnes per hectare before the development of hybrid rice.

People bid farewell to deceased scientist Yuan Longping at the Mingyangshan funeral parlour in Changsha, central China’s Hunan province. Photo: Xinhua

But while Yuan’s achievements transformed China’s rice industry – at present more than 50 per cent of China’s rice is grown using hybrid technology – outside China his methods have made far less of an impact. Other rice-dependent nations, such as India, Bangladesh, Indonesia and the Philippines, remain largely dependent on inbred rice varieties. In these countries, less than 15 per cent of rice supplies come from hybrids – ie, varieties that are the product of a cross between two genetically distinct parents.