China plans to feed 80 million people with ‘seawater rice’

Name: Floating farms, salt-resistant rice among ways Bangladeshis adapt to survive violent floods
Uploaded: 2022-02-20T00:27:07.000Z
Duration: 2 min 29 s
Description: Floating farms, salt-resistant rice among ways Bangladeshis adapt to survive violent floods

New salt-tolerant rice strains have been developed by Chinese scientists in the hope of ensuring food security that’s been threatened by rising sea levels

Test fields in Tianjin recorded a yield of 4.6 metric tons per acre last year, higher than the national average for production of standard rice varieties

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Rice that can survive salinity is being grown in northern China. Photo: Imagine China

Bloomberg

Published: 8:27am, 20 Feb 2022

Jinghai district in northern China is hardly a rice-growing paradise. Located along the coast of the Bohai Sea, over half of the region’s land is made of salty, alkaline soil where crops can’t survive. Yet, last autumn, Jinghai produced 100 hectares of rice.

The secret to the bountiful harvest is new salt-tolerant rice strains developed by Chinese scientists in the hope of ensuring food security that’s been threatened by rising sea levels, increasing grain demand and supply chain disruptions.

Known as “seawater rice” because it’s grown in salty soil near the sea, the strains were created by over-expressing a gene from selected wild rice that’s more resistant to saline and alkali. Test fields in Tianjin – the municipality that encompasses Jinghai – recorded a yield of 4.6 metric tons per acre last year, higher than the national average for production of standard rice varieties.

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Floating farms, salt-resistant rice among ways Bangladeshis adapt to survive violent floods

The breakthrough comes as China searches for ways to secure domestic food and energy supplies as global warming and geopolitical tensions make imports less reliable. The nation has one-fifth of the world’s population, and that many mouths to feed, with less than 10 per cent of the Earth’s arable land. Meanwhile, grain consumption is rising quickly as the country grows more wealthy.

“Seeds are the ‘chips’ of agriculture,” said Wan Jili, a manager at Qingdao Saline-Alkali Tolerant Rice Research and Development Centre, drawing a parallel between the crucial role semiconductors play in the development of new technologies and their role in the ongoing trade war between the US and China. Seawater rice could help improve China’s grain production in the face of an “extremely complicated situation regarding climate change and global food security,” she said.

China has been studying salt-tolerant rice since at least the 1950s. But the term “seawater rice” only started to gain mainstream attention in recent years after the late Yuan Longping, once the nation’s top agricultural scientist, began researching the idea in 2012.

Yuan Longping, China’s ‘father of hybrid rice, passed away on May 22, 2021. Photo: Xinhua

Yuan, known as the “father of hybrid rice,” is considered a national hero for boosting grain harvests and saving millions from hunger thanks to his work on high-yielding hybrid rice varieties in the 1970s. In 2016, he selected six locations across the country with different soil conditions that were turned into testing fields for salt-tolerant rice. The following year, China established the research centre in Qingdao where Wan works. The institute’s goal is to harvest 30 million tons of rice using 6.7 million hectares of barren land.