Dreaming of rice

Born in 1930 in Beijing, and raised in an era of wars and famine, Yuan witnessed the despair of people displaced from their hometowns and losing the land they lived on.

When he applied for university, he decided to study agriculture, although his mother thought such work would be tough and exhausting.

In an article published in People's Daily in 2019, Yuan wrote, "I was fond of agriculture and insisted on studying it at the time, telling my parents that having enough food was people's upmost priority and that they couldn't live without filling their stomach. Eventually, my parents were persuaded."

After graduation, Yuan was assigned to teach at an agriculture school in a remote town in Huaihua, Hunan province. He was prepared to make contributions to the development of the country by spreading agricultural knowledge and techniques.

However, a few years later, from 1959-61, the nation experienced food shortages.

"That made me start to think that the development of our country relied greatly on food security and that I needed to work to let Chinese people have enough food," he wrote.

Yuan's research results have been used throughout the country since the mid-1970s, and have greatly increased national rice yields.

In the decades that followed, he led his team to conduct research on super hybrid rice, achieving goals of harvesting 10.5 tons, 12 tons, 13.5 tons and 15 tons of rice per hectare in 2000, 2004, 2011 and 2014.

In 2017, the average output of hybrid rice per hectare in China reached 7.5 tons, while globally it was 4.61 tons.

Yuan appears in the movie Yuan Longping, which premiered in 2009, talking with a foreign reporter about a dream he had.

"Several years ago, I had a dream. I saw my super hybrid rice plant as high as sorghum, the panicle (clump) as large as a broom, and the grain as big as peanuts. I was very happy to rest under the panicle with my assistant," Yuan said in English.

"As long as I live, I'll never stop pursuing and dreaming about super hybrid rice."

In recent years, Yuan and his team started to research a salt-tolerant crop, known as "sea rice", with a research and development center being set up in Qingdao, Shandong province, in 2016.

Public data show that China has about 100 million hectares of saline-alkali soil and about one-fifth of this land can be developed and cultivated. Yuan believed if the land was covered with high-yielding sea rice, output prospects would be bright.