A Chinese scientist announced a major development in the research on super rice in Beijing recently, saying they planned to apply the technology to breed new, high-yielding hybrid rice across the country in two years, according to today's China Daily.

The breeding of super rice is one of major programmes under Project 863, a national high-technology project.

This will be a new generation of hybrid rice, and Chinese scientists hope it will be better than the present ones both in quality and production. "We believe we can realize the goal of growing super rice on a large scale across the country two years earlier than we expected," said Yuan Longping, director of the Hybrid Rice Research Centre in Hunan Province. "The average yield of super rice will be over 800 kilograms a mu.£¨12,000 kilograms per hectare £©"

This will be a world record high, according to Yuan, who revealed the progress at a briefing at the Ministry of Agriculture.

Trial growth of the rice in some regions of China have recorded a production of over 10,500 kilograms per hectare and new trials being conducted right now are likely to see an increase of 7 to 10 per cent over this record, said Yuan.

Yuan is known worldwide as the "father of hybrid rice" for his contribution to considerably alleviating world food shortages. He and his fellow researchers bred the high-yielding hybrid rice in the 1970s, which was later spread across the world and initiated a green revolution, especially in countries suffering from food shortages.

They initiated their super rice project in 1996, based on technologies they developed in the breeding of hybrid rice. The project has been granted special funds by the central government and has involved more than 1,000 researchers since its initiation.

The project consists of two phases, the first of which was successfully completed last year.

The achievement of the 10,500-kilogram-per-hectare goal for the first phase was announced by the Ministry of Agriculture, after it was verified by trial growth in Jiangsu and Hunan provinces.

A trial field in Hunan province has generated a yield of 12,105 kilograms per hectare.

Yuan said they have just completed a new breeding technology that will increase the production by about 10 per cent.

They will soon apply it in the second phase of the project, according to Yuan.

Completion of the second phase was originally set for the year 2005.

"Probably we will not have to wait until then," Yuan said.