s most influential people. In 2013, Jones was appointed Special Adviser to the President and Ambassador at Large for the Republic of Sierra Leone.
According to the Africa Rice Center’s Director-General, Papa Abdoulaye Seck, “Dr. Monty Jones has demonstrated by his remarkable contribution that is it possible to reshape the agricultural map of our continent through the African creative genius.”
Born in Beijing in 1930, Yuan Longping graduated from Southwest Agricultural College in Chongqing, China, in 1953 with a major in agronomy. Upon graduation, he accepted a teaching job at the Hunan Agricultural University in Anjiang, China.
In the 1950s and ‘60s, classical genetics concluded that heterosis - a phenomenon in which the progeny of two distinctly different parents grow faster, yield more, and resist stress better than either parent – was not possible in self-pollinated crops such as rice. Thus it did not seem possible to produce high-yielding hybrid seeds in rice as had been done in other crops.
Nevertheless, Yuan believed that heterosis is a universal phenomenon and rice is no exception. In his off hours, he conducted scientific experiments involving asexual crosses between crops; he concluded that there were faults in the accepted breeding approach.
After nine years of research, Yuan published his findings in 1964, outlining unique genetic tools, which were essential for developing the first-ever hybrid rice. Yuan continued his research, moving in 1971 to Hunan Academy of Agricultural Sciences, where he served as a research professor.
In 1973, Yuan successfully developed the first hybrid rice combination called Nan-you No. 2 which, due to heterosis, boasted yields 20 percent higher than previous varieties. By 1975, Yuan and his colleagues had summarized a complete set of seed production technologies, and the large-scale production of hybrid rice began. The following year, in 1976, Nan-you No. 2 was put into commercial production. With this new rice variety and improved techniques, food availability in China began to improve.
In the following three decades, planting of hybrid rice spread so widely that by the early 21st century, almost half of China’s rice production area was planted in hybrid rice. This higher-yielding crop produced food to nourish approximately 70 million more people per year in China alone, helping China solve food shortage challenges successfully and providing additional income to numerous farmers.
Yuan and his colleagues continued their work and developed numerous new strains of “super hybrid rice” that produce almost 10 tons per hectare. With higher yields, farmers increased rice production while simultaneously shifting millions of hectares out of rice and into alternatives such as fishponds, vegetables, fruits and other food and fiber crops to provide a more balanced diet and higher standard of living to rural Chinese families. China was able to establish its own hybrid seed industry, which today provides additional revenue and training opportunities to thousands of farmers.
The impact of Yuan’s ingenuity has been felt beyond China’s rice industry. Researchers and producers of other crops in China successfully used the two-line breeding system for rice to explore similar systems for hybrid sorghum and rapeseed with increased yields.
Yuan’s new hybrid rice technology not only benefited China, but was also enthusiastically adopted in other countries. Yuan introduced Chinese hybrid rice to the world in 1979 at an international conference sponsored by the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines (IRRI). The following year, IRRI restored its own hybrid rice research. In light of Chinese success, many countries, institutions and commercial companies started their own hybrid rice research. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) made hybrid rice the first choice of its program to increase grain production outside China, and appointed Professor Yuan as the chief consultant.
In 1984, Yuan became the Director-General of China’s National Hybrid Rice Research and Developmen