As the world's largest producer and consumer of rice, China's rice technology has gained international recognition, said a leading expert in the field.

Shen Guofang, vice president of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said "China makes up 20 percent of the world's total rice farmland, second only to India, and 35.26 percent of the world's total rice output, making it the globe's number one producer."

Shen said, "China's semi-dwarfed rice technology achieved a 30 percent increase in rice output between 1960 and 1970, accomplishing the first jump in per unit rice yield. Owing to the efforts of Chinese agronomists, led by Yuan Longping, hybrid rice began to be cultivated widely during the middle of the 1970s, accomplishing a second leap in per unit rice yield. In the middle of the 1990s, China agronomists started researching the notion of a "super rice" to achieve a third leap in per unit rice yield."

Hybrid rice accounts for 51 percent of nationwide rice cultivation and 57 to 59 percent of the total rice yield. The technology has since been introduced to other Asian countries.

China also leads the way in rice-biology research. Chinese scientists completed the first genome map of long-grained non-glutinous rice in 2001.

"When it comes to the development of rice technology in the future," Shen said "China should combine general rice technology with biological theory to produce new strains of rice, promote rice genome research by taking advantage of the finished genome map, develop intensive farming technology to improve environmental condition of farmland, and advance rice water-saving technology to achieve sustainable agricultural development."

(china.org.cn by Feng Yikun, October 4, 2002)