China’s Honglian hybrid rice harvested in eight demonstrative plots in Pakistan achieved remarkable results and the two countries’ professionals are confident in its future performance when sowed at a large scale. The yield of the hybrid rice reached 12.9 tons per hectare, achieving a better result than the main local rice varieties.
Honglian hybrid rice is one of the three major types of cytoplasmic male sterility (CMS) of rice that has been commercially used in hybrid rice seed production.
On Tuesday, China Economic Net (CEN) reported that as a well-known hybrid rice type developed by Wuhan University for over 40 years, the global acreage of the hybrid rice has surpassed about 26.67 million hectares so far.
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This September, the project of Wuhan University and University of the Punjab-Honglian Type Hybrid Rice Joint Research Center officially kicked off. Eight demonstrative plots have been arranged across Pakistan in 2020, Lahore, Gujranwala, Vehari, Pakpattan in Punjab, Shikar Pur, and Larkana in Sindh, basically covering the main rice planting regions in Pakistan.
Zhu Renshan, professor-level senior engineer of Wuhan University in charge of the international cooperation on Honglian hybrid rice said, “Experimental data shows that the comprehensive characters of Honglian hybrid rice are generally superior to main local varieties LP18 and LP403, among which Honglian WR1901 has a high seed setting rate of 95% and a yield of 12.9 tons/ha, higher than that of the control group by 12.17%, which has aroused great interest from local farmers and dealers.”
Zhu disclosed, “Based on the promising results, we two universities jointly submitted three excellent varieties to participate in Pakistan’s regional trials for seed certification and registration, and now the first-year field trial has been basically completed.”
Moreover, China Association for Science and Technology granted a plaque on 19th November in order to establish the Sino-Pak joint research center on the hybrid rice type.
