Vietnam Recognizes its First-Ever Rice Variety Derived from Crop Wild Relatives

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Rice is a cultural staple in Vietnam, but also a source of income. The Southeast Asian country is among the world’s largest exporters of the crop, alongside India and Thailand. To maintain that status requires constant innovation. 

The new rice variety that has been granted legal protection is named Nông Dân, which means “farmer” in English. Its story begins in 2011 under the Crop Trust’s Crop Wild Relatives Project.

Crossbreeding with wild relatives requires time and patience. Using traditional crop breeding methods, a team led by Dr. Susan McCouch at Cornell University selected and crossed wild rice from Bangladesh, China, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea with a modern elite variety. The new, advanced types of rice that the team developed were then shared with the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines.

In December 2018, Huynh Quang Tin, a senior lecturer at Can Tho University’s Mekong Delta Development Research Institute, and his team acquired 200 of these rice types from the IRRI genebank. He then distributed them to 13 seed clubs across eight provinces in the Mekong Delta for evaluation. They identified a few promising, well-adapted plants that were collectively called Nông Dân.  

“We actively involved farmers in the testing and decision-making process for selecting the best rice plants,” Tin says. “The on-farm selection process will really help in the quick, large-scale adoption by farmers.”

Narrowing Down the Field

The farmers in the seed clubs liked what they grew in their fields, particularly Nông Dân 1 and 2. So, Tin and his team advanced those to the next chapter of the story.

Under the rice pre-breeding component of the BOLD Project – which launched in 2021 and is led by the Crop Trust – the team further evaluated them under diverse growing conditions in the Mekong Delta and in North and Central Vietnam.

The two farmer-preferred rices have now been given legal protection. Both varieties showed salt tolerance, good grain appearance, great yield potential, and excellent cooking quality. They also tasted good. 

Nông Dân 1 is liked for its high productivity, light scent and blast resistance, while Nông Dân 2 ranked highly because of its good eating quality and desirable soft and sticky texture, along with high yield. Both varieties have wide adaptation, with excellent acceptance among farmers across different regions of Vietnam. Due to the varieties’ short duration – ranging from 95 to 99 days in the Mekong Delta and about 110 days in Central and North Vietnam – farmers can grow them up to three times in a year.

From PNG to Vietnam

Scientists say Nông Dân 1 may be getting some of those interesting qualities from a wild ancestor in its pedigree. It is derived from a cross between an elite rice variety and a wild rice called Oryza rufipogon, which was collected in Papua New Guinea and conserved in IRRI’s genebank. 

O. rufipogon is a primary ancestor of our modern rice. The wild rice collected in Papua New Guinea showed salt tolerance, which interested the Vietnamese breeders. O. rufipogon isn’t cultivated. It sheds its seed before harvest and the grains are unpalatable anyway. In some parts of the United States, it is considered an invasive weed. But it’s that hidden toughness – those survival mechanisms in its genes– that rice breeders wanted to capture. The Nông Dân seeds will be evaluated soon for salt tolerance in Mekong Delta coastal areas.

“Many breeders are reluctant to use crop wild relatives in breeding programs,” Sharma says. “They fear that the wild relatives will cause their products to get worse, not better, at least initially. It may be difficult – and will take many years – to develop a new variety if wild relatives are involved in the crossing program. But it can be worth it.”

After a decade in development, the Nông Dân varieties show the great potential of crop wild relatives to advance climate-smart agriculture and farmer resilience. Though these varieties are not yet officially released, there is already demand for their seeds among farmers. To support this demand and early adoption, six promising elite lines of Nông Dân are now being multiplied by farmers at 30 sites in Vietnam. 

“Our work in Vietnam clearly shows that crop wild relatives can be used to develop new varieties with traits farmers like, if we follow a systematic and focused breeding approach, and involve them throughout,” Sharma says.