EIGHT entrepreneurs have joined the sea-rice farming project of Zhongnong Sea Rice (Shenzhen) Bio-tech Co. Ltd.

The entrepreneurs include Chen Hongtian, chairman of Cheung Kei Group, Chen Hua, chairman of Kingkey Group, Xu Hang, co-founder of Mindray Medical International Co. Ltd., and Huang Guangmiao, founder of Centralcon Group.

They vowed to contribute their efforts to jointly build an enterprise in the food industry through a partnership with Zhongnong Sea Rice (Shenzhen) Bio-tech Co. Ltd., a subsidiary enterprise of the Shenzhen Genomic Research Base under the Chinese Academy of Agriculture Sciences.

“I have been engaging in undertakings for the public good since retirement, and I think the food industry involves the biggest public interest,” Ma Weihua, former president with China Merchants Bank and one of the partners of the farming project, said at a ceremony celebrating the 40th World Food Day on Friday.

Established in 2018,

Zhongnong Sea Rice engaged in the research and development of rice species that would grow on saline-alkali soil. So far it has developed from breeding species and applied for six patents in utility models as well as for three copyrights. Its new species had been grown at 33 bases in 12 provinces across the country. “The farming of sea rice not only ensures food safety, but also is helpful for ecological restoration. The company will try to restore 666,000 hectares of Saline-alkali soil within 10 years and produce 25 billion kilograms of rice a year,” according to Yang Jigun, the chairman of Zhongnong Sea Rice. The program had already been set up in Kashi in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and is being imitated in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and Jilin Province.

The sea rice, or rice on saline-alkali soil, was first discovered accidentally by Chen Risheng, dubbed as the father of sea rice, at a tidal flat in Zhanjiang in Guangdong 34 years ago.

Yuan Longping, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and Xie Hua’an with the Chinese Academy of Sciences started research on the new species.

Recently, Yuan, dubbed as the father of hybrid rice, has set a record in rice output grown on saline-alkali soil in Jiangsu Province. The rice breed, developed by Yuan’s team, achieved a yield of 802.9 kilograms per mu on average, or 12.04 tons per hectare, in three plots of saline soil in Rudong County in Jiangsu Province.

China has about 100 million hectares of saline-alkali soil, of which about one-third could be ameliorated to become arable soil. (Han Ximin)