Super hybrid rice crop failure raises questions; Longping High-Tech responds: historic low temperatures triggered rice blast

On July 30, 2013, Academician Yuan Longping inspects the growth of super hybrid rice in Shucheng County, Anhui Province. Photo/CFP

Recently, Longping High-Tech's super rice “Liangyou 0293”, affected by rice blast, suffered large-scale total crop failure in Anhui, a major agricultural province, and affected farmers questioned whether the seed producer Longping High-Tech was involved in false advertising and concealing variety defects.

1 Why did one super rice variety suffer large-scale total crop failure?

Response: The lowest temperature for the same period in history triggered rice blast; farmers are numerous and scattered, and after-sales service was not ideal.

On April 10, Longping High-Tech responded that the “Liangyou 0293” variety passed review by the National Crop Variety Approval Committee in 2006 and has characteristics such as lodging resistance and high yield. Since it began to be promoted in Anhui in 2008, over the 7 years to date, because it was deeply trusted by farmers, cumulative sales in the Bengbu area of Anhui alone reached 140,000 jin, and during that period there had never been a large-scale die-off from rice blast infection.

Longping High-Tech responded that from July to August 2014, the average temperature across Anhui Province was 26.2 degrees Celsius, the lowest since 1994, among which the temperature in Bengbu was the lowest for the same period in half a century, thereby triggering rice blast. Because the disease is greatly affected by climate, this caused local varieties in Anhui that are susceptible to rice blast, including “Liangyou 0293”, to suffer reduced yields or total crop failure, and also led to a sharp decline in that year's national hybrid rice seed production.

In response to questions of suspected false advertising, Longping High-Tech said the company marked on both the inner and outer packaging that this variety is susceptible to rice blast, and also provided certain technical services for field production, including text message alerts about abnormal weather and APP pushes of planting knowledge, but because rice blast is extremely dangerous, these measures cannot completely prevent its occurrence. At the same time, because the number of farmers is large and scattered, the relevant after-sales service provided by the company was not ideal in effect. After the incident, Longping High-Tech sent dedicated personnel to inspect the affected areas, verify the affected area, coordinate with the local government for insurance compensation, and also took measures such as providing free seeds to help affected farmers resume production, and negotiated compensation plans with the affected farmers.

2 Why is there a large yield gap between fields and experimental plots?

Response: Constrained by planting levels and conditions, the gap is unavoidable.

Regarding the large gap between super hybrid rice yields in farmers' fields and in experimental plots, Cheng Shihua, director of the China National Rice Research Institute, said in an interview that, first, breeding a high-yield variety does not mean one can sit back and enjoy high yields once and for all; moving from experimental plots into ordinary farmers' fields involves not only a lag in time but also a difference in yield. Constrained by different planting levels and planting conditions, this gap objectively exists and is unavoidable. Second, current domestic research on super hybrid rice has been committed to narrowing the gap between the two. Third, an important significance of experimental plot yields is that they raise the ceiling of related technical research and provide technical reserves for market-oriented promotion. “At present, our country's research on super hybrid rice has already developed in the direction of ‘high yield, high quality, multi-resistance and wide adaptability’, and the phenomenon of ‘uneven development’ will become less and less.” Cheng Shihua said.

“As early as 2008, research units and enterprises led by experts including Yuan Longping, Xie Huaan and Zhu Yingguo were actively advancing research on ‘widely adaptable hybrid rice’.” Deng Qiyun, breeder of our country's third-phase and fourth-phase super hybrid rice research varieties and an expert at the State Key Laboratory of Hybrid Rice, told reporters that so-called wide adaptability is the “commoner version” of super rice, with broad adaptability to soil fertility, temperature, pests and diseases, and so on. This means that even ordinary farmers in medium- and low-yield fields can obtain yields about 10% higher than conventional varieties. At present, a group of widely adaptable super hybrid rice varieties bred in our country has already been comprehensively promoted in the Yangtze River Basin and South China.

⟦NL> 3 How is the quality of super hybrid rice after all?

Response: Super hybrid rice includes hundreds of varieties, and speaking generally is unscientific.

As for issues such as the quality of super hybrid rice not being high, Fu Xiangjin, director of the National Engineering Laboratory for Deep Processing of Rice and Byproducts, told reporters that super hybrid rice is a very broad concept including hundreds of varieties, and saying generally that super rice has low grain quality and poor taste is unscientific. “Each variety has different characteristics and different uses; there are both high-yield ones and good-tasting ones. There are both those suitable for eating and those suitable for feed and brewing.” Fu Xiangjin told reporters that among super hybrid rice, some varieties including Y Liangyou 1 and Y Liangyou 2 have grain quality reaching the national third-grade or even first-grade standard.

Ding Xincai, chairman of Hunan Hope Seed Technology Co., Ltd., believes that high yield and high quality are not contradictory; they are merely two among the many characteristics of rice. In fact, most of the super rice currently used for large-scale production in our country does not have poorer taste than conventional rice.

The difficulty of promotion does not lie in the variety itself, but in the fact that, under the current premise that decentralized management still predominates, the comparative benefit of agriculture is too low, causing farmers to be unwilling to invest too much money and energy.

During interviews, reporters learned that because “Liangyou 0293” has been on the market for seven or eight years, it has long been replaced in the Hunan area by continuously updated and better varieties, and basically no one plants it anymore. Yang Yueqiu, a large grain grower in Quyuan Management District, Yueyang City, Hunan Province, transferred 8,000 mu of rice land and planted 4 varieties of super rice in total, including the early rice varieties Ling Liangyou 211, Ling Liangyou 674 and Zhu Liangyou 819, as well as the late rice variety H You 518. “I have planted these several varieties for three to five years, and the average yield per mu in the fields is above 1,000 jin; their performance is still fairly satisfactory.” Yang Yueqiu said.

According to Xinhua News Agency