Official says high-yield crops key to ensuring food security

China's endeavors to safeguard food security must place more emphasis on promoting high-yield crop varieties and better planting techniques, an agricultural official said Tuesday.

Food supply will remain tight in the long term due to increasing demand and limited arable land resources, said Yang Haisheng, deputy director of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs' planting administration bureau.

"It has already become difficult to bolster food production by expanding growing areas, so the focus must be turned to promoting the yield of a given plot of land," he said at a news conference held in Beijing to discuss a catalog of selected crop varieties for promotion that was released in February.

As part of the effort, it must be fast-tracked to promote high-yield species. Efforts will also be made to raise the output of the species widely grown by methods such as popularizing better planting techniques and machinery, in hopes of narrowing the gap between actual output and crops being grown under experiential conditions, Yang said.

The breeding effort has notably accelerated in recent years, and a number of quality food varieties has been promoted with a greater speed, but having more options has created problems for farmers, he added.

"Because of that, many have called for the release of a catalog to guide the breeding effort and help farmers choose the right species," he said.

The catalog, the first of its kind in China, features 10 crop varieties including rice, wheat and corn, and a total of 241 sub-varieties.