Agricultural scientists in southwest China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region have developed a new strain of drought-resistant high-yield hybrid rice after more than ten years of research.

The new strain, "Peiza Guihan No.1", has been part of a regional experiment for two years running and attained the highest yield in all the ten strains involved in the experiment, said Li Daoyuan, leader of the research team.

"If it can pass another year of examination, it will be expanded in large scale in the country," said Li, researcher of the Rice Research Institute of the Guangxi Academy of Agriculture.

Li said that the strain has been planted experimentally in the dry areas of Guangxi for years. The results show that it has high resistance to drought, diseases, and cold weather. More importantly, the per hectare yield of the new strain could reach 6,000 kilograms, double that of the normal strains which are widely planted in Guangxi.

Besides, Li said that the new strain is of high quality. A quality analysis made by the Ministry of Agriculture shows that the overall quality of the new strain is up to the national second-class high-quality standard, while its seven indexes measure up to the first-class standard.

China plants 33 million hectares of rice every year, mainly in the areas to the south of the Yangtze River. The normal rice strains need 6,000 cubic meters for each hectare and could not be planted in the southwestern part of the country, like Yunnan and Guizhou provinces and the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

(Xinhua News Agency May 29, 2004)