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Yuan Longping (; September 7, 1930May 22, 2021) was a Chinese agronomist and inventor. He was a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering known for developing the first hybrid rice varieties in the 1970s, part of the Green Revolution in agriculture. For his contributions, Yuan is known as the "Father of Hybrid Rice". Yuan was bestowed the Medal of the Republic, the highest honorary medal of the People's Republic of China, in September 2019.
Hybrid rice has since been grown in dozens of countries in Africa, America, and Asia—boosting food security and providing a robust food source in areas with a high risk of famine. The technology allowed China to sustain 20% of the global population on 9% of global arable land, an achievement in food security for which he was awarded the 2004 World Food Prize and the 2004 Wolf Prize in Agriculture respectively.
He graduated from Southwest Agricultural College (now part of Southwest University) in 1953.
For the rest of his life Yuan devoted himself to the research and development of better rice varieties.
The biggest problem was that rice is a self-pollinating plant. Hybridization requires separate male and female plants as parents. The small rice flowers contain both male and female parts. Although the male parts can be removed, carefully, by hand (to produce female-only flowers), this is not practical on a large scale. It was thus difficult to produce hybrid rice in large quantities. In 1961 he spotted a seed-head of wild hybrid rice. By 1964, Yuan hypothesized that naturally-mutated male-sterile rice could exist and could be used for the creation of new hybrid rice varieties. He and a student spent the summer searching for male sterile rice plants. Two years later he reported in a scientific publication that he had found a few individuals of male-sterile rice with potential for production of hybrid rice. Subsequent experiments proved his original hypothesis feasible, which proved to be his most important contribution to hybrid rice.
Yuan went on to solve more problems over the next decades to achieve higher yielding hybrid rice. This took more than a decade. The first experimental hybrid rice did not show any significant advantage over commonly grown varieties, so Yuan suggested crossbreeding cultivated rice varieties with ones growing wild in the countryside. In 1970, beside a railway line in Hainan, he and his team found a particularly important wild variety. Using this one within a breeding programme resulted in varieties with yields improved by 20 - 30% in the late 1970s. For this achievement, Yuan Longping was dubbed the "Father of Hybrid Rice."
At present, as much as 50 percent of China's total number of Paddy field grow Yuan Longping's hybrid rice and these hybrid rice paddies yield 60 percent of the total rice production in China. China's total rice output rose from 56.9 million tons in 1950 to 194.7 million tons in 2017. The annual yield increase is enough to feed 70 million additional people.
The "Super Rice" Yuan worked on improving showed a 30 percent higher yield, compared to common rice, with a record yield of 17,055 kilograms per hectare being registered in Yongsheng County in Yunnan Province in 1999.
In January 2014, Yuan said in an interview that genetically modified food would be the future direction of food and that he had been working on genetic modification of rice.
Yuan was taught and mentored by some biologists who followed the ideas of Gregor Mendel and Thomas Hunt Morgan. These included Guan Xianghuan at Southwest Agricultural College and, later, Bao Wenkui at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing. Both were persecuted. Guan took his own life in the 1960s while Bao was imprisoned. In 1962, Yuan visited Bao to discuss Mendelian genetics, and Bao gave him access to up-to-date foreign scientific literature. In 1966 Yuan himself was named as a counter-revolutionary and there were plans to imprison him. However, a letter of support for Yuan and his work was received based on his publication about male-sterile rice, sent from Nie Rongzhen, director of the National Science and Technology Commission. As a result, Yuan was allowed to continue his research and provided with both research assistants and financial support by the Hunan Provincial Party Committee leader Hua Guofeng and others. Yuan did not join the Communist Party during the Cultural Revolution or later.
Yuan's first experiments, before he became focused on rice, were on the sweet potato ( Ipomoea batatas) and watermelons. Following Michurin's theory, he Grafting Ipomoea alba (a plant with high photosynthesis rate and high efficiency in starch production) onto sweet potatoes. These plants grew substantially larger tubers than those of plants without I. alba grafts. However, when he planted seeds from these grafted sweet potatoes for a second generation, the tubers were normal sized from seeds of the sweet potato part of the plant, while seeds from the I. alba part did not grow sweet potatoes. He continued with similar grafting experiments on other plants, but none of the plants produced offspring with any mixtures of the beneficial traits grafted into their parents. This was in contradiction to the expectations of Michurin's theory. Yuan concluded, "I had learned some background of Mendel and Morgan's theory, and I knew from journal papers that it was proven by experiments and real agricultural applications, such as seedless watermelon. I desired to read more and learn more, but I can only do it secretly."
In 1979, his technique for hybrid rice was introduced into the United States, making it the first case of intellectual property rights transfer in the history of the People's Republic of China.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization 1991 statistics show that 20 percent of the world's rice output came from 10 percent of the world's rice fields that grow hybrid rice.
Yuan advocated for sharing the success of his breakthroughs with other nations. He and his team donated crucial rice strains to the International Rice Research Institute in 1980. These donated strains were used to create hybrid rice strains that could sustain and grow in tropical countries to help their food supply chains. In addition to donating important rice strains, Yuan and his team taught farmers in other countries to grow and cultivate hybrid rice.
At present, the annual planting area of hybrid rice in China is about 230 million acres, accounting for 50% of the total rice planting area, and the output accounts for 57% of the total rice production. This increases the country's grain production by more than 20 billion kilograms every year, which is equivalent to the annual total grain production of a medium-sized province. Due to the great success of hybrid rice, he has won eight international awards, including the only National Special Invention Award and the UNESCO "Science Award", and is known as the "Father of Hybrid Rice" internationally.
In 2017, he became a laureate of the Asian Scientist 100 by the Asian Scientist.
For his achievements, Yuan was awarded the 2011 Mahathir Science Award. The award was presented by Malaysian former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.
Yuan won the State Preeminent Science and Technology Award of China in 2000, the Wolf Prize in Agriculture and the World Food Prize in 2004.
He was the Director-General of the China National Hybrid Rice R&D Center and appointed Professor at Hunan Agricultural University, Changsha. He was a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2006) and the 2006 CPPCC.
Yuan worked as the chief consultant for the FAO in 1991.
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