Chinese, African Rice Breeders Share World Food Prize

WASHINGTON, DC, March 30, 2004 (ENS) - Two ingenious rice specialists will share the 2004 World Food Prize, worth $250,000, for their contributions to filling the world's rice bowls.

Professor Yuan Longping of China is being honored for developing the world’s first successful and widely grown hybrid rice varieties, tripling Chinese production over a generation. His achievement led to the world’s first successful and widely grown high-yielding hybrid rice varieties with yields 20 percent above conventional varieties.

Dr. Monty Jones of Sierra Leone is being recognized for breeding a new rice for Africa. He recaptured the genetic potential of ancient African rices by combining African and Asian rice species, dramatically increasing yields, and offering hope to millions of poor farmers as a catalyst for agricultural transformation in West Africa.

World Food Prize President Ambassador Kenneth Quinn made the announcement Monday in Washington at a U.S. State Department ceremony with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman, and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization Director-General Jacques Diouf.

Quinn observed how fitting it is that these two pioneering rice breeders are being honored during the United Nations International Year of Rice, the crop identified as the staple diet of more than three billion people around the world.

Professor Yuan, known as China's most famous farmer, serves as director-general of the China National Hybrid Rice Research and Development Center in Changsha, Hunan, China.

Professor Yuan Longping examines a field of rice with a colleague. (Photo courtesy World Food Prize)

His altering of the self-pollinating characteristic of rice made large-scale farming of hybrid rice possible.

These achievements dramatically increased rice yields and grain output in China, providing food to feed an additional 60 million people each year. His approach is now being adapted to many other countries in Asia and around the world.

In 2001, Professor Yuan was awarded five million yuan Chinese Nobel Prize, the State Supreme Science and Technology Prize for his high yield hybrid rice species.

Born into a poor farmer's family in 1931 and a graduate from the Southwest Agriculture Institute in 1953, Yuan began his teaching career at an agriculture school in Anjiang, Hunan Province.

He came up with an idea for hybridizing rice in the 1960s, when a series of natural disasters and inappropriate policies had plunged China into an unprecedented famine that caused many deaths.

In 1964, he happened to find a natural hybrid rice plant that had obvious advantages over others. In 1973, in cooperation with others, he was able to cultivate a type of hybrid rice species which yielded 20 percent more per unit.

In 1974 Yuan and his colleagues developed technologies for producing indica - long-grained non-glutinous - rice, putting China in the lead worldwide in rice production. For this achievement, he was dubbed the Father of Hybrid Rice.

Philippines President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo praised Professor Yuan for “spurring the rapid development of hybrid rice in the Philippines and other Asian countries, such as Vietnam, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Indonesia.”

Dr. Jones is a graduate of the University of Sierra Leone and received both his M.Sc. in Plant Genetic Resources in 1979 and his PhD in Plant Biology in 1983 from the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. In 2002, he was appointed the executive secretary of the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa based in Ghana.

Dr. Monty Jones talks rice with one of the beneficiaries of his rice breeding talent. (Photo courtesy World Food Prize)

He successfully crossed the Asian O. sativa with the African O. glaberrima strains to produce drought and pest resistant, high yielding new rice varieties, a feat which had not been achieved before in the history of rice breeding.

His accomplishment is producing enhanced harvests for thousands of poor farmers, most of them women, with potential benefit for 20 million farmers in West Africa alone.

With the ability to resist weeds, survive droughts and thrive on poor soils gained from its African parent, and the trait of higher productivity from its Asian ancestor, NERICA is a crop capable of increasing farmers’ harvests by up to 50 percent.

Working in the most difficult environments, Dr. Jones led a pioneering effort at The Africa Rice Center (WARDA), an autonomous intergovernmental research association of African member states.

WARDA is also one of the 16 agricultural research centers worldwide supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). “Dr. Jones’s achievement in overcoming sterility barriers and the successful introgression of adaptation and tolerance genes from African rices into the high-yielding rices of Asia will have a major impact on rice production not only in Africa, but also in Asia and Latin America,” said CGIAR official Emil Javier.

The African Rice Initiative was launched in March 2002 to disseminate the New Rice for Africa throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Initially, the initiative is focussing on the upland ecology, for which the original new rice varieties were bred.

By 2006, the area under NERICA cultivation is expected to be over 200,000 hectares with a production close to 750,000 tons per year. Nearly US$90 million worth of rice imports will be saved.

The World Food Prize, created in 1986 by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Dr. Norman Borlaug, is the world’s foremost award inspiring and recognizing breakthrough contributions to improving human development by increasing the quality, quantity, and availability of food in the world.

Based in Des Moines, Iowa, the World Food Prize Foundation will join the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in hosting an International Symposium on Science & Technology in Agriculture: Current and Future July 10 to 12 in Beijing.