Super rice, a high-yielding strain, is expected to
play a "super" role in feeding China, contributing at least one-third of the
total amount of the cereal the country needs by 2010, the Ministry of
Agriculture has said.
Rice is the staple food for at least 65 per cent of the residents on the
mainland which is projected to produce 190 million tons in 2010 15 million tons
more than the annual average in the past five years, Vice-Minister Wei Chao'an
said.
In China, food grain includes rice, wheat, corn and others.
As its farmland is expected to continue shrinking in the years ahead, China
has been seeking to improve per-unit output to provide adequate food for its
growing population.
The government initiated a "national super rice hybridization project" in
1996. Yuan Longping, the world renowned "father of hybrid rice," is one of the
scientists behind the project.
The resulting per-hectare yield in the first two phases of the project has
reached nine tons in large areas of farmland and 12 tons in pilot farms,
compared with national average of 6.7 tons, Wei said.
"We must popularize super rice varieties that show stellar performance in
large-scale production, ... striving to spread them to 8 million hectares by
2010, with each hectare producing 900 kilograms more grain (compared with the
yield from conventional seed)," Wei said in a document made available to China
Daily last week.
The ministry did not provide a forecast of an average output for each hectare
of super rice-sown farmland in 2010.
If the less optimistic level of nine tons per hectare is used to calculate
the yields in the first phase of research, the 8-million-hectare super paddies
are expected to produce 72 million tons in 2010, representing more than
one-third of the 190 million tons of anticipated rice production that year,
ministry sources say.
In the past 10 years, China's arable land has shrunk by 800,000 hectares a
year. The shrinking momentum sees no signs of tailing off as urbanization
continues, Wei said.
The central government's incentives offered to farmers in 2004 and 2005 had
helped recover 2.33 million hectares of paddies each year, meaning it's
difficult to further expand the acreage for rice, he added.
In 2010, the country will need at least 500 million tons of grain, Yang Jian,
director of the ministry's Development Planning Department, said earlier.
"To realize the production goal, we must mainly rely on science and
technology to improve per-unit output," Wei said.
Twenty leading super rice strains will be cultivated by 2010, he said.
Despite 10 years of research and development, most of China's 40-odd
varieties of super rice are strains for only a single-season harvest and could
thrive only in high-yield farmlands where natural conditions are relatively
good, according to Chen Yanbin, another ministry official.
The country lacks strains that grow super in farmland under other conditions,
Wei said.
Furthermore, inadequate auxiliary planting and management expertise have
threatened to erode the production capacity of the super rice, he added.
So instead of focusing merely on the per-unit output on small patches of test
farms, where production conditions are different from real farmland, the
ministry has called on researchers to pay more attention to developing super
rice seed that best meets production needs and giving technical guidance to
farmers, Wei said.
Between 1999 and 2005, super rice had been planted on 13.3 million hectares,
increasing rice output by 12 million tons, according to ministry statistics.
Super rice strains are mainly sown in 17 provinces, autonomous regions and
municipalities in South and Northeast China.
