He Went After Quantity Of Rice – We Go After Quality Of Life For All!


Chinese scientist Yuan Longping is dead! Long live the hybrid rice scientist who showed the world Man could change Mother Nature if he followed her dictates!

Mr Yuan is the Father of Hybrid Rice, and for this scientific breakthrough, he won the World Food Prize in 2004. Huizhong Wu says, “China's Yuan Longping Dies; Rice Research Helped Feed World[1]” (23 May 2021, Phys.org):

It was in the 1970s when Yuan achieved the breakthroughs that would make him a household name. He developed a hybrid strain of rice that recorded an annual yield 20% higher than existing varieties – meaning it could feed an extra 70 million people a year, according to Xinhua.

(Images above: “Third-Generation Hybrid Rice Achieves High Yields In China[2],” ANN, 22 October 2019, Global Times;“Quality of Life for All” image[3] from Epr.eu)

Mr Huizhong says:
Yuan spent his life researching rice and was a household name in China, known by the nickname “Father of Hybrid Rice.” Worldwide, a fifth of all rice now comes from species created by hybrid rice following Yuan’s breakthrough discoveries, according to the website of the World Food Prize, which he won in 2004.

Mr Yuan’s hybrid rice yielding 20% more than the best rice varieties then in China – and this helped transform China from “food deficiency to food security” within 3 decades. After his World Food Prize, “Yuan and his team worked with dozens of countries around the world to address issues of food security as well as malnutrition.”

Actually, more than food security, hybrid rice has not caused farmer poverty to go away. A double increase in yield of rice does not bring about a double increase in the income of the farmer. The problem of farmer poverty goes beyond any increase in yield.

Now then, I shall now compare Hybrid Rice with Press Freedom as to what good both can be pursued further: Quality of life for all.

“World Press Freedom Day Forum, 'Is Journalism A Public Good[4]?’" was the title of the World Press Freedom Day Forum on 03 May 2021 sponsored by the Asian Center for Journalism of the Ateneo De Manila University. Thank you, Ateneo, for asking a private question aloud and making it public!

“Is journalism a public good?”
Today, I ask a parallel question:
“Is hybrid rice a public good?”
And my response to both questions is one and the same:
“Only if we make it!”

We cultivate rice; we gather news.

“Public good hybrid rice” means it is all of the below:

Technically feasible
Economically viable
Environmentally sound
Socially acceptable.

“Public good journalism” means all of the below:

True?
Helpful?
Inspiring?
Necessary?
Kind?

For hybrid rice to be a public good, we have to make it.
For journalism to be a public good, we have to make it.
There are no two ways about it! (Either.)

So, why not the United Nations sponsoring a World’s Good Prize? For individual or group, for any and all the good in the world!@517


[1]https://phys.org/news/2021-05-china-yuan-longping-dies-rice.html#:~:text=Yuan%20spent%20his%20life%20researching,which%20he%20won%20in%202004.

[2]https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1167653.shtml

[3]https://www.epr.eu/quality-of-life-for-all-erasmus/

[4]http://ateneo.edu/ls/soss/acfj/events/world-press-freedom-day-forum-journalism-public-good

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