Chinese hybrid rice had taken root in all over the world, feeding a significant proportion of the world's population, said Dr. Yang Jubao, a prestigious rice expert.

Delivering his speech at the on-going new hybrid rice species exhibition at Sanya, south China's Hainan island province, Dr. Yang said under the support of the government, Chinese agronomists provided a great many countries with the advanced technologies of hybrid growth, together with the latest species.

"National boundaries never exist in the field of science, and it is the great aspiration of the Chinese scientists that the people of all races under the sun will be fed on our hybrid rice," Dr. Yang said. He was countering an accusation that China never shared its hybrid rice technologies with other countries.

A graduate from the University of the Philippines, Dr. Yang was the first Chinese conferred a PHD degree of rice.

Dr. Yang was recommended and sent by the Ministry of Agriculture to Vietnam in 1992, as the hybrid rice consultant of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

He was "the only UN official who went down to farms in Vietnam," according to local peasants, many of whom had received his advice.

With the help of the FAO, Vietnam became the world's third largest rice exporter, compared with its great shortage of food supplies several years before.

Dr. Yang was awarded a medal for boosting agriculture and rural development by the Vietnamese government in praise of his contributions.

Dr. Yang said the growth of hybrid rice was of great importance to increase farm production and guarantee the food supply, especially in needy countries where arable land was limited, populations rapidly expanded and labor was cheap.

During the past decade, countries of Asia have benefited from the sustainable supports in hybrid rice breeding given by FAO, International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), United Nations Development Program (UNDP), Asian Development Bank (ADB) and China.

In 2003, Dr. Yang noted, the hybrid rice acreage reached around one million hectares in south and southeast Asian countries, including Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines and Vietnam.

In Egypt the hybrid rice imported from China is doing very well in the saline-alkali soil and the production is even 35 percent higher than in normal soil.

The demand for rice kept growing, said Dr. Yang, not only in Asian countries where rice was the staple food but also in Africa, Latin America and Europe.

In 1974, superb Chinese agronomist Yuan Longping developed the world's first hybrid rice variety, which increased rice output by 15 to 20 percent over regular species.

After years' expansion, hybrid rice growth has taken half of China's rice paddies with the unit production of 6.2 tons per hectare.

A major world rice producer, China expects to see its acreage under rice expand by four percent to 28.23 million hectares this year, and turn out 177 million tons of rice, a growth of seven percent over the previous year.

(Xinhua News Agency April 17, 2004)