Hybrid Rice Technology

This symposium is a follow-up to one held in China in 1986. Since then considerable progress has been made in research and development of hybrid rice. This second international symposium was held under the umbrella of the International Rice Research Conference. Eighty scientists and seed production experts from 18 countries, IRRI and FAO attended. Contributions covered breeding, biotechnology, seed production, agronomy, plant physiology, plant pathology, entomology and economics.

Heterosis in rice; Rice cytoplasmic-genetic male sterility system; Procedures for breeding hybrid rice; Breeding for CMS lines and their maintainers; Breeding for restorer lines; Hybrid seed production and CMS line multiplication; Purifying parental lines and producing foundation seeds; hybrid rice cultivation practices; Breeding two-line system hybrid rice; Studies on one-line system hybrid rice development.

In 1964 a Chinese rice breeder, Yuan Longping, discovered a rice plant that was the genetic key to the successful development of high yielding hybrid rice. At that time, China was a secretive communist state where self pollinating varietal rice was grown on collective farms using highly labor intensive practices. Forty years later, by 2004, hybrid rice, based on Yuan's work, was being grown commercially in the United States using mechanized farming practices. This book describes the journey across those four decades and the chain of events and people which resulted in technical success in China by 1976 and in the United States by 2000. Extraordinary political and technological developments occurred during this time and the book describes these and the many serendipitous events and people of different backgrounds that were involved in the successful journey. It is estimated that hybrid rice is now (2017) saving the US rice industry as much as $100 million each year.