Saturday marked this year's World Food Day, an annual occasion marked by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations in 1981 to improve public awareness on worldwide malnutrition.

China recognized World Food Day with exhibitions and public education activities.

But two prizes won by Chinese scientists recently added extra color to the anniversary.

On October 6, a paper presented by Zhu Youyong, a professor from Yunnan Agricultural University, and his team won first prize in the rice agronomy category -- study of the soil rice is grown in -- in the International Year of Rice Global Scientific Contest.

On October 14, Yuan Longping, China's "father of hybrid rice," shared this year's World Food Prize with Ghanaian biologist Monty Jones for their work in producing high-yield rice.

The two prizes demonstrated the ability of Chinese scientists in the international arena and the achievements of numerous Chinese researchers in their work to improve the quality and availability of food for the world.

The accomplishment of Chinese scientists is actually a result of heavy pressure to ensure the country's own food security.

Feeding China - which has the world's largest population - was once a huge headache for the government.

China is hard-pushed to do so, having to feed 20 percent of the world's people with less than 10 percent of the global total cultivated farmland.

While the Chinese Government makes all necessary efforts to feed its people, mistaken beliefs and doubts from the international community are never really silenced, despite over-blown concerns in Lester R. Brown's book "Who will feed China" long having been proved wrong by the solid figures in China's grain output.

Since the late 1990s, China has been able to feed its people with the grain it produced. And in 2003, the total output of grain in China was 430.7 million tons, allowing China to become a net exporter of corn and rice as well as satisfying its own demands.

Chinese agro-scientists, with Yuan Longping as their best representative, and efforts to promote their work have meant China has successfully found the way to feed its people.

At the same time, the country is sharing its own technology of cultivating high-yield hybrid rice with other rice-growing countries, like Viet Nam and India.

Chinese people can thus mark World Food Day with pride in contributing in this way to easing hunger across the world.

However, China still has a bit to do in protection of biodiversity, a theme of World Food Day 2004.

As the FAO has advocated, we depend on biodiversity for food supply.

Were it not for biodiversity, the high-yield hybrid rice would not have had the power to lift the output per hectare by more than 30 percent.

The biodiversity of plants, whether used or not in agricultural production, is the basis of sustainable growth for agriculture, which has to cater to the needs of the growing population.

China has not done as much as it should to preserve biodiversity.

Neither has it become widely perceived among the public or officials that certain life forms with unique traits have incalculable values so biodiversity should be protected for the country's strategic interests both at present and in the future.

So biodiversity protection has come just in time to remind the authorities, scientists and the public of the direction they should work towards.

(China Daily October 18, 2004)