DALIAN, China -- Yuan Longping, China's leading rice researcher and an agronomist who dedicated his life to food security after living through the Great Leap Forward, died on Saturday at age 90, according to media reports in China.

Yuan, who was called the "father of hybrid rice," worked on rice breeding to increase yields for more than half a century, making great contributions to solve China's food problems.

"A few words will suffice to summarize Yuan's achievements: he helped the world fend off hunger," Hu Peisong, director general of the China National Rice Research Institute, told state-run Xinhua News Agency.

Born in Beijing in 1930, he graduated from Southwest Agricultural University in Chongqing and began researching rice. In 1973, he successfully developed a hybrid rice that can generate a stable high yield by crossing wild rice from China's Hainan Province with another variety from the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines. He was able to mass-produce the rice in the following year.

China faced the need to increase its food self-sufficiency as its economy grew. In 1996, Yuan started work on a "super hybrid rice," which enabled even higher yields, as a national project. The yield per hectare was about 15 tons, which was three times higher than when he started the research.

The rice developed by Yuan was also grown in Southeast Asia and elsewhere beyond China.

Yuan decided to study hybrid rice when he witnessed deaths from starvation resulting from China's Great Leap Forward that began in the late 1950s, which is regarded as the deadliest famine in history. After his success in developing rice, he worked on educating younger generations.

In 1996 he received the Nikkei Asia Prize, which honored those who have contributed to the development and prosperity of Asia.