China's hybrid rice touted for feeding millions globally

China's self-developed hybrid rice has been planted in an area of 9 billion mu (600 million hectares) across the country accumulatively, leading to an increased rice yield of more than 800 billion kilograms, according to a seminar held in Hunan province on Wednesday.

The seminar was held to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the successful research of hybrid rice conducted by a team led by Chinese scientist Yuan Longping, known as the "father of hybrid rice".

Bai Lianyang, a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Engineering and an official from the Hunan provincial Academy of Agricultural Sciences, said the average yield of the super hybrid rice increased steadily from 700 kg per mu (about 0.067 hectares) to 1,100 kg per mu from 2000 to 2017.

Currently, more than 17 million hectares of hybrid rice are planted in China each year, helping boost rice output by about 2.5 million metric tons and feeding 80 million more people in the country, Bai added.

Meanwhile, hybrid rice technology has been introduced to dozens of countries around the world, and played an active role in promoting world food safety, he said.

With annual cultivated area of hybrid rice overseas farms reaching nearly 8 million hectares in total, the rice has fed an additional 40 to 50 million more people abroad, he said.

Since the 1980s, China has trained more than 14,000 technical and management personnel for foreign countries in the fields of hybrid rice studies and planting, he added.