China, the world's top rice producer and consumer, aims to improve its super-hybrid rice yield by a further 11 percent by 2015 as part of its efforts to maintain food self-sufficiency, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Tuesday. The yield for super-hybrid rice in China is likely to reach 15 tonnes per hectare by 2015, Xinhua cited China's leading agricultural scientist, Yuan Longping, known as "the father of hybrid rice", as saying.

China's average rice yield stood at 6.68 tonnes per hectare last year, with total output reaching 201 million tonnes. Yuan said large-scale plantings of the super-hybrid rice were likely to take place between 2015 to 2020. Last year, China became a net rice importer for the first time in 15 years and imports in the first ten months of 2012 rose nearly three-fold to 1.98 million tonnes, the majority of which was from Vietnam.

Copyright Reuters, 2012