Yuan Longping, China's Father of Hybrid Rice, predicts his latest super-strain with augmented yields will be widely planted in 2006.

Yuan, in his seventies, made the remarks Monday at a celebration held in central China's Hunan in honor of the scientist's winning the World Food Prize in October for his outstanding work on hybrid rice.

With an experimental production capacity of 12 tons per hectare, the second-phase super-strain is expected to be promoted on a large scale in 2006, Yuan said.

If the strain is sown over 6.67 million hectares, with a conservative production of 9.75 tons per hectare, China will harvest 15 billion more kilograms of rice, enough to feed 30 million more people, Yuan said.

So far, hybrid rice covers 14 million hectares, nearly half of China's 27 million hectares of paddy fields.

The first-phase super-strain, with an experimental production capacity of 10.5 tons per hectare, was sown on just one million hectares this year.

A third-phase super-strain is also being developed with an experimental production capacity of 13.5 tons per hectare.

"We will try our best to work out the third-phase super strain by 2010," said Yuan.

"The cultivation of super hybrid rice is an effective way to provide enough food for Chinese, who make up one fifth of the world's population. However, it still takes time to turn experimental data into grain in peasants' barns," said Huang Peijin, a prominent Chinese agronomist.

Yuan developed the world's first hybrid rice variety in 1974, increasing rice output by 15 to 20 percent.