Yuan Longping, whose hybrid rice helped feed the world, dies at 90
IRRI News; May 26, 2021
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Figure: Rice researcher Yuan Longping, at center in 2017, in a field of hybrid rice in northern China. (Chinatopix/AP)
Yuan Longping, a Chinese scientist who developed strains of hybrid high-yield rice that helped alleviate famine and poverty around the world, enabling farmers to feed a growing planet with fewer resources, died May 22 at a hospital in Changsha, China. He was 90.
The cause was multiple organ failure, according to the state-run People’s Daily newspaper. Mr. Yuan had been hospitalized in March after falling at a rice-breeding center in southern China, and reportedly continued to track the weather and monitor crops from his bed.
Known in China as “the father of hybrid rice,” Mr. Yuan was one of his country’s most revered scientists, a self-described “intellectual peasant” who spent a few hours each day in the fields, sometimes taking a break from his research to play the violin among the stalks. Once targeted by Communist officials for daring to suggest a slight change to Mao Zedong’s agricultural program, he emerged as a national hero in recent decades, with thousands of mourners leaving chrysanthemums for him at a memorial service in Changsha.
In the early 1970s, Mr. Yuan and his team developed hybrid strains that typically yielded 20 percent more rice than conventional varieties, transforming Chinese agriculture after years of famine and scarcity. Some 10,000 years after Chinese farmers began cultivating rice near the Yangtze River, the country now produces more than 200 million tons of rice a year, more than any other nation.
Rather than limit his rice technology and growing techniques to China, Mr. Yuan pushed to share them with the world. He ultimately partnered with the United Nations and the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, in addition to teaching farmers in India, Vietnam and elsewhere how to grow hybrid rice. In 2004, he was awarded the World Food Prize with rice researcher Monty Jones of Sierra Leone, and credited with helping “create a more abundant food supply and more stable world.”
Mr. Yuan later directed a national hybrid rice research and development center and lent his name to a Chinese seed company. He carried the Olympic Torch in 2008 as it passed through Hunan province en route to Beijing, and in 2019 he was awarded the Medal of the Republic, the country’s highest official honor, by President Xi Jinping.
Survivors include his wife, Deng Zhe; three sons; and several grandchildren.
In recent years, Mr. Yuan and his team developed new varieties of salt-tolerant rice. Amid suggestions that he engineer rice with improved taste or texture, he said he remained focused on ensuring there was enough food to go around. He dreamed of creating “rice crops taller than men,” he said, in which “each ear of rice was as big as a broom and each grain as huge as a peanut.”
In his dream, he told state media, he “could hide in the shadow of the rice crops with a friend.”
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