The Museum of "Long Ping" Corporation in Changsha City

      As previously reported, several specialists working in the system of the Ministry of Agriculture are currently in the People's Republic of China. The next destination of the delegation was the museum of the "Long Ping" Corporation, located in Changsha, in collaboration with "1-Agrobereke" LLC, which imports cotton seeds into our country. A memorial exhibition has been organized here in honor of the founder of the corporation, Yuan Longping.

     Mr. Yuan Longping was born in 1930 in Beijing. In 1953, he graduated from the Southwestern Agricultural College (now part of Southwestern University). After completing his studies, he began his pedagogical career at an agricultural school in Anjiang, Hunan Province.

     In the 1960s, when an unprecedented famine, which claimed the lives of millions, swept through China, Mr. Yuan Longping began working on hybridizing rice and devoted his life to improving the high-yielding varieties of rice. In 1964, he succeeded in finding a rice sample with more advantages than other known varieties. However, the first experimental hybrid rice varieties did not show significant advantages over traditionally grown varieties, so he proposed crossbreeding rice with wild rice. In 1970, he found an important species of wild rice, which became the basis for creating high-yield hybrid rice varieties. In 1973, in collaboration with other scientists, he successfully researched the complete process of creating and multiplying high-yield hybrid rice varieties.

     Currently, hybrid rice developed by Yuan Longping is grown on 50% of all rice fields in China and makes up 60% of the total rice produced in the country. The annual harvest feeds 60 million people. For his many years of selfless work, Mr. Yuan Longping has been awarded the highest honors of China, such as the Republic's Order, the China National Prize for Science and Technology (2000), the Ramon Magsaysay Award (2001), the Confucius Peace Prize (2012), the World Food Prize (2004), the Wolf Prize in Agriculture (2004), honorary doctorate from the University of Hong Kong, the Reform Pioneer Award (2018), and was elected as a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering (1995).