Rice Again: The Story of Yuan Longping

Once upon a time there was a hungry village.

Yes, this is a story that could have happened many times.

There grew up a young man who was fortunate enough to be educated enough to be sent to university. At that time, not many could do it.

He was the son of poor farmers, as were 90% of his countrymen. He liked to ride motorcycles, play the violin, and play mahjong, a very popular board game.

The young man moved to study agronomy. His parents did not want him to do it, it seemed too sacrificial. He told them that the matter was his passion. That having enough food should be people’s top priority and that no one should live on an empty stomach. In the end, his parents had to give in.

Finally, he graduated in 1953 and was assigned to teach in remote areas. Some issues troubled him. He saw his people hungry, but his academic training could not really propose a solution to that cyclical evil.

This young man had a dream. He said he had seen rice plants as tall as Chinese sorghum, with each of the rice spikes as big as a broom and each grain of rice as big as a peanut. In the dream, he hid in the shade of the crops with his friend. That is to say, a premonition.

What he wanted to create is a hybrid of rice. This plant constitutes the staple food of his people. But to obtain heterosis, an intrinsic quality of a hybrid (which gives it characteristics of greater productivity), there must be crossing. In the case of a plant like rice, which pollinates itself, the thing was difficult.

The years passed and the young man managed to deepen his training. Under experimental conditions, rice yields did not exceed 5 tons per hectare. He was determined to change that.

Many of his compatriots still died of hunger. Some rebelled against that fate that seemed inexorable and achieved a revolution. They called it the “end of the century of humiliation”. He had suffered a lot for what his people had endured those years.

Times of change came to his country. Leaders promised to take the always marginalized to the top, inspired by foreign experiences that were said to be successful. They instituted a cultural revolution to get rid of past evils. Classical music was no longer so well seen, it was something bourgeois. So he had to get rid of his violin.

Those supermen swore and swore that everything had changed; forever and for the better. But the truth is that, soon after, a bad harvest came and millions of his compatriots died of hunger again. Again.

Another famine in the history of humanity. This one, which occurred in 1959, was fierce. To this day it is known by the name of its ruler at that time. As often happens, those of the opposite sign to the ideology of those who were in power at the time of this famine still take it as a kind of proof that that model of society was not possible, nor will it ever be. But the truth is that they have always happened.

However, that time was the last for that people, who learned from their mistakes. By 1964, that young man had found a solution, which they managed to bring to the decision-makers and the decision-makers listened. By 1974, the process was already consolidated into a powerful rice hybrid. Again, science was the engine of a people’s ideals towards progress. The leading men did not hesitate to adopt it for the good of their people.

Although this story of great inventions happened many times, no one gave it a twist like this young man did. No one, never, ever. We owe much of what we are to that twist. Perhaps more than to the green revolution. More than to urea, John Deere, and pyrethroids.

Agronomists are not usually experts in history. What little we know (most of us), happened in America or Europe. But it’s good to know that our history, as vocal in the technique of alleviating famines, is linked to a small man who was born ninety-three years ago in a village in China. That village today is a colossal megalopolis and the capital of a thriving power. A power that was forged, nothing more and nothing less, on the firm soil of his experimental plot.

That man was named Yuan Longping. He invented hybrid rice, a variety of this crop that was essential to feed the workforce of what was, until recently, the most populous country on Earth.

He managed to boost crop yields. That rice, which in a trial yielded 5 tons, went on to yield 8. By the end of the century, those 8 tons were also what it yielded in field conditions, much more difficult to achieve. At that time that was crazy.

I remember a year ago thinking about him, as dawn broke in the rice lands of our country. I sat down to listen to the most prominent researchers in the field give fascinating lectures on the feats of our national research. Here we work intensively with the private sector to continue competing in the big leagues of the industry.

Uruguay has a lot to thank for rice. It has high productivity per hectare, development of varieties that adapt to multiple conditions and markets, an integrated value chain that employs many people every year, and powerful basic research in genetic improvement, whose potential applications extend the uses to this crop. Not to mention the development of irrigation systems, aspects of industrial processing, etc.

Rice is, for Uruguayans, a true workhorse. But the story might not have been the same without that discovery, neither here nor anywhere else on the globe. Yes, without a doubt also without Mendel, who came before him. But of the latter, they did talk in high school and at the university. I couldn’t stop thinking about it a year ago and started writing about it, but I left it halfway through. It turned out that a year later, coincidentally, the anniversary of Yuan Longping made me resume it.

Our hero died at 90 years old, on May 22, 2021, in a hospital in the province of Hunan, in his native country. He was sent off with honors, as if a top leader of the CCP had died. He is a hero to his people and to humanity as well, as the UN and FAO recognized at the time.

At that time, the journalist Fernando Duclos published: “Still today, in 2021, more than a billion people in the world are starving. Most in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. If it weren’t for him, the number would be even higher.” Nothing has changed for the better since then.

Without him, there would have been more hungry people. 300,000 tons less rice in the last twenty years. Millions of people without food. Small farmers without sustenance. Ships without cargo. Children who do not reach adulthood. Patents and knowledge transfers that would never have occurred. That’s why millions mourned him.

In the eternal consideration of developing better product quality vs. developing higher yields, Yuan knew what his duty was. He said, “First we must have enough food, then comes eating well.” For a country like Uruguay, access to better-paying markets is key. But some horizons should not be lost, even with our own needy.

To tell the truth, today hybrid rice has been largely replaced by other options for developing genetic material. Many years have passed, many inventors and researchers, and the options have diversified. But Yuan Longping was not just another one. He was the right idea at the right time. It was an idea that saved lives almost immediately and interrupted an inflexible cycle that depended on nature and not on ideologies or wills.

This researcher saved lives very, very far from where he was born, where other rules, other economic models, other cultures prevailed. He allowed the flourishing of an industry that is still key to the challenges that run behind and beside us.

Yuan returned to his passion for the violin, until his arthritis prevented him. He used to ride a motorcycle in the field to go to work. He liked to swim and continued to enjoy mahjong in his free time. He was honored in many ways. They founded an agrotechnological solutions company where he was a shareholder, but he said his fortune was “a burden that took away his freedom.”

He never left research, where he was truly happy. When he got sick, he asked the hospital nurse every day about the weather outside. One day, she told him it was 28 degrees. Even convalescent, he was very concerned about what that temperature could cause on the maturity of his crop.

Not to talk about him and his successors in our lands is something that should change.

Hopefully there are more inventions to come that benefit the large majorities. Hopefully the people do not overlook the men who transform history with their creative force.

Once upon a time there was a hungry world. A story that happened over and over again. We do not know if it is precisely another invention that will change what sometimes seems an inexorable fate. But it’s worth a try.

Article in Spanish here