Yuan Longping, a Chinese scientist who developed higher-yield rice varieties that helped feed people around the world, died on Saturday at a hospital in the southern city of Changsha, the Xinhua News agency reported. He was 90.

His development of high-yield rice hybrids in the 1970s led to steeply rising harvests in Asia and Africa and made him a national hero in China, credited with saving countless lives.

Mr Yuan made two major discoveries in hybrid rice cultivation, said Jauhar Ali, the senior scientist for hybrid rice breeding at the International Rice Research Institute in Los Baños, the Philippines. Those discoveries, in the early 1970s – together with breakthroughs in wheat cultivation in the ’50s and ’60s by Norman Borlaug, an American plant scientist – helped create the Green Revolution of steeply rising harvests and an end to famine in most of the world.

Hybrid rice varieties typically produce 20 to 30 per cent more rice per acre than non-hybrid strains when cultivated with the same transplant techniques, fertilizer and water. But as Mr Yuan and his ever-growing teams of rice experts introduced hybrid strains across Asia and Africa, they also taught farmers a wide range of advanced rice-growing techniques that produced further gains.

Steeply rising yields helped to make famines a distant memory in most rice-growing countries. “He saved a lot, a lot of lives,” said Hu Yonghong, the director of the 500-acre Shanghai Chenshan Botanical Garden.

Mr 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 Mr Yuan’s breakthrough discoveries, according to the website of the World Food Prize, which he won in 2004.

Mr Yuan’s research made him a national hero and a symbol of dogged scientific pursuit in China. His death triggered messages of grief across the country, where Mr Yuan was a celebrity. Hundreds left flowers at the funeral home where his body was being kept.

An earlier report from an official news service in Hunan Province, of which Changsha is the capital, said Mr Yuan had been increasingly unwell since a fall in March during a visit to a rice-breeding research site. He died of multiple organ failure.

On Saturday afternoon, large crowds honoured the scientist by trooping out in the rain and lined the streets where his motorcade drove past chanting  “Grandpa Yuan, have a good journey!”

In 2019, he was honoured with the Order of the Republic, the People’s Republic of China’s highest order of honour.