The Pursuit Of Perfect Rice Knows No End | The Reporter Ethiopia

Former pupil of ‘father of hybrid rice’ leads charge in planting seeds of success

By LI MUYUN and HE CHUN

On a desk in Li Li’s office, two meticulously preserved rice ears stand as symbols of a mission that spans generations.

One specimen is labelled Xizi 3, China’s first nationally approved low-cadmium rice variety. The other is a third-generation hybrid, representing the unfinished mission of the late Yuan Longping, the legendary “father of hybrid rice”.

For Li, 44, the specimens represent decades of commitment. She is a former student of Yuan and is now vice-president of the Hunan Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and has devoted the past 20 years to advancing rice varieties for consumers across China and beyond.

“As Yuan always said, people are like seeds, and one must strive to be a good seed. Being a good seed means rooting oneself in the soil, persevering through hardship and bearing fruit that serves others. As agricultural researchers, our mission is to safeguard food security and serve the people.”

One of the most significant challenges in Li’s career was in 2013, when her team embarked on a mission to solve a problem that had baffled scientists everywhere: preventing rice from absorbing cadmium, a toxic heavy metal that contaminates the soil.

Starting from scratch, Li and her colleagues collected thousands of parent materials worldwide and planted them in cadmium-contaminated fields.

In 2018 the team finally discovered what it had been searching for: a mother plant with a natural genetic mutation that prevented cadmium absorption. Through repeated experiments, this low-cadmium germplasm was developed into Xizi 3.

In 2023 Xizi 3 became the first low-cadmium rice variety to receive national approval for commercial cultivation. It was planted on more than 30,000 hectares by last year, the Hunan Provincial Department of Agriculture says.

Another major challenge arose in 2021 with the death of Yuan, which sent shock waves through the research world he had nurtured.

“For a period after his passing the team felt lost,” she said.

At that time it was grappling with funding shortages and difficulties in promoting and industrialising the third-generation hybrid rice, which Yuan considered the most promising for harnessing the full potential of hybrid technology.

Yuan’s words continued to inspire Li and her colleagues in their moments of despair. “We always remembered how he faced every challenging moment, and how he would say, ‘So what if you fail 99 times? One success will be worth everything’,” Li said.

The team persevered with carrying on Yuan’s unfinished mission, including establishing a seed production technological standard for the third-generation hybrid rice, which is crucial for its industrialisation. After two failed attempts, the document was approved by the Hunan Provincial Standardisation Committee last November.

For Li, a good seed knows no borders. Yuan’s ambition to bring hybrid rice to the world has also become her own. In recent years Li has been increasingly engaged in promoting Chinese hybrid rice technology in countries across Africa through the Belt and Road agricultural co-operation initiative.

The Hunan Hybrid Rice Research Centre in Changsha was designated as a reference centre by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in 2014, opening its doors to the world for research and training related to hybrid rice technologies.

Since then the centre has trained more than 10,000 professionals from developing countries, said Li, a key member of the centre. Many of those trainees have returned home and become the backbone of their countries’ rice research efforts.

For Li and her team, the story of one seed changing the world is still unfolding. In the long run, they aim to help more countries in Africa and Southeast Asia build their own research and industrialisation systems for hybrid rice.