YUAN LONGPING was born in 1930 in Beijing. When he was young, he saw with his own eyes that people were not getting enough to eat.

“I saw heartbreaking scenes of people starving to death on the road before 1949,” recalled Yuan.

Yuan graduated from Southwest Agricultural College in 1953 and then devoted himself to agricultural education and research.

Rice is one of the most important staple food for Chinese. Yuan’s pioneering research on hybrid rice began in 1964, and after nine years of painstaking research and intensive testing, his team successfully cultivated the world’s first high-yield hybrid-rice strain in 1973.

Hybrid rice was subsequently grown across the country and farmers reaped incredible output after switching to Yuan’s hybrid varieties. In the years that followed, his work set multiple world records for hybrid-rice yields.

Hybrid rice recorded a yield about 20 percent higher than that of conventional rice strains. Now its annual accumulated planting area in China has exceeded 16 million hectares, or 57 percent of the total planting area of rice, helping feed an extra 80 million people a year.

“In a country with a large population and little arable land, the only way to ensure national food security is to increase the yield. So raising productivity is a constant theme in my research,” Yuan once said in an interview.

His research not only helped end starvation in China, but has also transformed the world’s food situation, with new records constantly established. Since the 1980s, Yuan’s team has trained over 14,000 technicians in hybrid-rice plantation methods in over 80 developing countries, providing a robust food source in areas with a high risk of famine.

Now the annual plantation area of hybrid rice outside China has reached 8 million hectares, and the average yield per hectare is about 2 tons higher than that of local varieties.

Globally, more than 820 million people were hungry in 2018, according to a U.N. report. If hybrid rice were planted in half of the world’s 147 million hectares of paddy fields, the additional yield alone could feed another 500 million people, Yuan once said.

The focus of his research in recent years shifted to exploring sustainable methods for maintaining food security.

Yuan received dozens of national and international prizes and awards for his lifelong work and contribution to eradicating hunger. In 2019, the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Yuan was awarded the Medal of the Republic, the highest State honor, for his prominent contribution.

He was a diligent researcher even in his 80s, and maintained a habit of going to paddy fields almost every day. At the beginning of this year, he went to a base in Sanya in the southern province of Hainan to conduct research.

When Yuan was young, he enjoyed playing the violin and mahjong in the spare time, but what he loved most was riding a motorbike to paddy fields.

(Xinhua)