CHANGSHA (XINHUA) – Over the past five decades, China’s self-developed hybrid rice has been promoted in an accumulative cultivated area of 600 million hectares (ha) across the country, helping increase a total rice yield of 800 billion kilogrammes (kg).
The latest hybrid rice cultivation data was released during an international seminar in central China’s Hunan Province yesterday, in memory of the 50th anniversary of Yuan’s successful hybrid rice strain research.
China has seen its average yield per mu (about 0.067 ha) of rice per season soar from 170kg during the 1950s and 1960s to today’s 470kg, said official from the Hunan Provincial Academy of Agricultural Sciences Bai Lianyang.
Currently, more than 17 million hectares of hybrid rice are planted in China each year, helping boost rice output by about 2.5 million tonnes and feed 80 million more people annually, Bai added.
So far, dozens of countries have carried out research and trial planting of hybrid rice, while the overseas annual cultivated area of hybrid rice has reached nearly eight million hectares in total.
Since the 1980s, China has trained more than 14,000 technical and management personnel for foreign countries in hybrid rice studies and planting.
