To feed the world
Yuan Longping died on May
22nd
He was wandering in a ricefield of dreams. Theplants were tall as sorghum, taller than a man. Their panicles hung full asbrooms, and each grain was as big as a peanut. After walking a while he laydown in the leaf-shade with a friend, quite hidden. A rest was a good idea,because the wonder-plants went on and on. In fact, they covered the world.
Then Yuan Longping woke up, laughing. The rice plantshe had tended for decades at Anjiang and then Changsha in Hunan province,sowing and nurturing them, visiting daily on his motorbike to inspect them,were not quite there yet. But they still deserved their name of super rice. Theleaves were straighter and taller than ordinary, and the grains plumper. They had all the vigour of the wild strain（野生品种） that he and his team had found, aftermuch searching, beside a railway line in Hainan in 1970 and had cross-bred（使杂交）,over careful years, with the domesticated variety. Sceptics（怀疑派） told him he was wasting his time, since rice was a self-pollinator（自发授粉）. He believed that cross-breeding （杂交）was universal and, besides, that it always made the offspringstronger.
The figures spoke for themselves. With his new hybridrice（杂交水稻） the annual yield was 20-30% higher. This meant that at least 60m more people could be fed every year. In Yunnan province more than 17,000 kilograms had been produced per hectare（公顷）. China’s rice crop（收成） had risen from 57m tonnes in1950 to 195m in 2017; from food deficiency（缺乏）, to food security（粮食安全）. Higherrice-yields allowed farmers to turn more land to other uses—fruit, vegetables,fishponds—so that people not only ate more, but ate well. And this message wasfor the world, as well as China. Once his rice grew well, he sent seeds to the International Rice Research Institute（国际水稻研究所） in the Philippines. Then he travelled widely, all across Asia and to Africa and America, as well as inviting foreign students to the Hunan Hybrid Rice Research Centre in Changsha to instruct them.A fifth of all rice grown globally now comes from hybrids that were his.
For this he won the Medal of the Republic, China’s highest, and the World Food Prize. An asteroid（小行星） was named after him. There wastalk of the Nobel, too. All that seemed just smoke to him. Though he was rich,from his shares in a seed company that used his name, he looked like a peasant（农民）,wiry as a twig（瘦得像细枝）, with his face leathered by sun and his big hands rough from“playing in the mud” all day. He was far happier in his short-sleeved work-shirts, out in his rice, or stripped off（脱掉） swimming in any wild river hecould find, than in a tang suit in some conference hall.
Why he had become an agronomist was tricky to explain.He was a city boy anyway, born in Beijing, though he enjoyed the countryside and the thought of growing luscious things（美味的食物）, like the grapes Charlie Chaplin（查理 · 卓别林） could pick at his kitchen door in “Modern Times（摩登时代）”. As he made his way to the Anjiang agricultural school, in a charcoal-fuelled（燃烧木炭的） bus struggling through themountains, he had doubts himself. What settled his vocation（职业） was famine（饥荒）.
He loved it in any case. As a boy he was enraptured（欣喜若狂） by the deliciousness o fxiaozhan rice from Tianjin, said to bethe best in China. Around Anjiang, what the peasants wanted was quantity:miracle-yields from their fields. They would cross the mountains to get better seeds, so he did the same, traipsing（ 疲惫地走） round China to find the strong wildmale-sterile plants he needed. Once he found them, in that unlikely spot in Hainan, it took three years to perfect the hybridising and another three to gethis super rice into commercial production. Then, in a steep curve（产量的曲线）, yields soared away.
Outside the funeral home in Changsha on the day afterhis death, crowds came to lay a mountain of yellow and white chrysanthemums.（菊花）Several of the mourners（哀悼者(mourner的名词复数)） said that whenever they sat down to a meal, or merely smelled the fragrance of rice, they would remember “Grandfather Yuan”. Among theflowers were the traditional bowls of boiled rice, super-food for his journey.
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