This Day, That Year: Sept 16

Editor's note: This year marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of New China.

On Sept 16, 2002, the first International Rice Congress kicked off in Beijing, attracting more than 1,000 scientists and officials worldwide to discuss issues concerning the development of the rice industry, as seen in this item from China Daily.

Dubbed the "Olympics of Rice Science", it has been held every four years. The fifth congress was held in Singapore last year.

China has become a world leader in hybrid rice, which can yield 15-20 percent more than unmodified rice.

Developed by Chinese scientists led by Yuan Longping, who is known as "the father of hybrid rice", China was the first country to successfully produce hybrid rice for temperate climates in the 1970s.

In 1979, techniques for making hybrid rice were introduced into the United States, the first case of intellectual property rights transfer in the China's modern history.

The crop is now grown in more than 30 countries and regions, with the total area under cultivation surpassing 7 million hectares.

By 2003, half of China's rice production was hybrid strains.

Yuan set world records in hybrid rice yield - in 1999, 2005, 2011 and 2017.

Covering 16 million hectares, or about 53 percent of China's rice acreage, rice output has grown from 6 metric tons per hectare in the 1970s to 15 metric tons now.

The new variety has made a solid contribution to helping feed the Chinese people - who account for 21 percent of the global population, while the country has only 7 percent of the world's arable land.

Yuan, now 90, continues his research. At Qingdao's Saline-Alkali Tolerant Rice Research and Development Center in Shandong province, which he leads, a successful experiment has been carried out in planting rice in the Dubai desert.

It is the first time that rice has been grown in a desert, and is seen as a major contribution to food self-sufficiency, global food security and improving the environment of desert regions.

Yuan said one of his dreams is to transform about 667,000 hectares of saline-alkaline land and produce at least 30 million metric tons of rice every year enough to feed an additional 80 million people.