China’s hybrid rice is transforming agriculture with record-breaking yields and giant plants. The attached video looks at how these innovations enhance food security and sustainable farming. https://youtu.be/B4yCp72MI3Q
As of October 2024 , more than 17 million hectares of hybrid rice are planted in China each year, helping boost rice output by about 2.5 million tonnes and feed 80 million more people annually
Over the past five decades, China’s self-developed hybrid rice has been promoted in an accumulative cultivated area of 600 million hectares across the country, helping increase a total rice yield of 800 billion kg.
Rice is one of the most important staple foods for Chinese. The late Chinese scientist Yuan Longping, widely known as the “father of hybrid rice,” and his research team successfully cultivated the world’s first high-yield hybrid rice strain in 1973.
The latest hybrid rice cultivation data was released in October 2024 during an international seminar held in Central China’s Hunan province on Wednesday, in memory of the 50th anniversary of Yuan’s successful hybrid rice strain research.
China has seen its average yield per mu (about 0.067 hectares) of rice per season soar from 170 kg during the 1950s and 1960s to today’s 470 kg, said Bai Lianyang, an official from the Hunan Provincial Academy of Agricultural Sciences.
So far, dozens of countries around the globe have carried out relevant research and trial planting of hybrid rice, while the overseas annual cultivated area of hybrid rice has reached nearly 8 million hectares in total.
Since the 1980s, China has trained more than 14,000 technical and management personnel for foreign countries in the fields of hybrid rice studies and planting.
WATCH THE VIDEO.
Sources:
- Richard Aguilar Channel, Mar 26, 2025. https://youtu.be/B4yCp72MI3Q?t=39
- Xinhua, Oct 11, 2023. https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/…/WS65266b1ca31090682a…
China Environment News 