For today’s special report of ‘The China Impact’, we focus on Yuan Longping, who is known as the ‘father of hybrid rice’ in China. Yuan is now leading his team to another breakthrough of raising rice output to 15 tons per hectare. CCTV America’s Ning Hong reports from the Hybrid Research Center in the central province of Hunan.

The new target for rice production is an output of 15 tons per hectare. To achieve this goal, Yuan Longping and his team chose 28 test fields this year across China’s rice production areas.

“We have just received output calculations for the test field in Hunan province’s Longhui County, and it’s 15.1 tons per hectare. We’ve hit our output target.” – Yuan Longping, Chinese Academy of Science

As a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and in his eighties, Yuan Longping is the leader of Hunan’s hybrid rice research. He helped raise the output of hybrid rice from 10 tons in 2000 to over 14 tons.

For half a century, Yuan Longping and his team have been pushing the boundaries of hybrid rice output. They achieved every target that has been set, no matter how unlikely it may have seemed in the beginning. Now this inspiring achievement they made recently, is just a new starting line. He is ready to push the output to another height of 16 tons per hectare by 2020.

“We mainly use two measures to improve hybrid rice. One is morphological improvement and the other is heterosis utilization of intermediate hybrids. We also use molecular technologies.” – Yuan Longping, Chinese Academy of Science

As the natural conditions vary in different areas, the average output of hybrid rice may only be 70 to 80 percent of what it is in test fields. As Yuan pointed out, it may take at least another two years to promote these new varieties for mass cultivation.