China has developed an easy-to-grow rice variety, which scientists say will eventually relieve millions of rice growers around the world from the backbreaking labor of planting rice seedlings by hand and alleviate farm water shortages in China.
Chen Dazhou, director of the Rice Institute of Jiangxi Province, said the rice, nicknamed "idiot rice", will grow for several consecutive years after harvesting, eliminating the most labor-intensive job of planting seedling by hand.
The per-unit yield of one of the varieties of the rice reached 7,500 kg per ha, and nine of its properties met some of the country's standards for first-class quality rice.
Rice has been the most important cereal for Asia, as about half of China's 1.3 billion population and many Asian countries depend on it.
The rice has shown its capability to pass on its better properties from crossbreeding, one of the two most difficult issues to which scientists in Japan, Thailand and some other countries have been striving hard to find a solution.
The other issue is the poor capacity of rice to withstand cold.
Chinese scientists have made marked progress in their search for rice genes capable of withstanding cold.
Pointing to a green rice field in Jiangxi, Chen told Xinhua therice grown in an experimental field in Nanchang, capital of the province, had survived low temperatures under zero degrees centigrade for three straight years, thanks to their decade-long research into the wild rice in Dongxiang County.
The wild rice, which was found on 0.3 hectares of the reserve in a State protected reserve, can stand cold weather of up to minus 12.8 degrees centigrade, far outstripping other varieties ofrice with strong cold and aridity resistance.
Chinese scientists had been able to achieve asexual reproduction of rice with powerful cold-resistant genes, and overcome the difficulty in retaining the advantage from crossbreeding.
The director described the rice as an unusually rare variety.
Compared with conventional methods of growing rice, the new variety saves a lot of seeds, fertilizer, water and labor, cutting losses of water and soil erosion.
The new variety saves 15 to 75 tons of water per ha, an attractive point for China, a country short of water and farm labor.
Many rural families are short of hands in rice-growing seasons as young and middle-aged farmers have left their patchy farmland for jobs in cities.
A total of 92 million farmers found jobs for at least half a year in urban areas, according to figures released by the Ministry of Agriculture.
About 20 million ha of farmland was not suitable for rice production simply due to a lack of sufficient water to grow the rice.
With huge economic, social and ecological benefits, the rice is not without shortcomings, including difficulty in pest and weed control. The soil grown with the rice is liable to hardening, said the experts.
Despite that, "our research has been smoother than we expected," said the scientist.
He predicted that in the near future the rice will bring "revolutionary changes" to the way rice has been grown for millennia.
Last century, China cultivated the world's first hybrid rice after wild rice was found on the island province of Hainan, south China.
The hybrid rice led to a worldwide boon for rice producers since the per-unit yield of hybrid rice is far higher than traditional rice.
(Xinhua News Agency June 28, 2003)
