With his tireless contributions, Dr. Tran Tan Phuong is one of six outstanding individuals honored at the Vietnam Glory 2025 program. After more than two decades of tireless breeding, he and his colleagues have created the ST25 rice variety, which has won the title of the world's best rice, bringing pride to Vietnamese rice.
Journey from mango tree to the pinnacle of glory
In 2003, when the concept of “delicious rice” was still quite unfamiliar in Vietnam, and most of the agricultural sector was still pursuing the goal of “productivity”, a small group of scientists in Soc Trang began a thorny journey. That was the fragrant rice research group led by engineer Ho Quang Cua, and the young engineer Tran Tan Phuong, with his burning love for his homeland’s rice plant, quickly became a valuable collaborator.
Those early days were extremely difficult. The group consisted of only three people, no laboratory, no modern equipment. They had to rent farmers’ fields to conduct experiments. The workplace was sometimes just a hut filled with rice husks, or even under a shady mango tree. However, it was from those simple beginnings that great ideas were born.
Dr. Phuong shared that he started out as a farmer, and has been attached to the fields since childhood. He realized that Soc Trang province has many valuable native fragrant rice varieties but has a fatal weakness: low yield and can only be grown once a year. Meanwhile, high-yield rice varieties lack a distinctive flavor. The big question is how to create a rice variety that is both delicious, high-yielding, and can be grown 2-3 times a year to improve farmers' lives.
To find the answer, he and his colleagues chose the most difficult path: applying genetic methods in breeding. This is a process that requires extreme patience and can take decades to produce results. “To create rice varieties with differences in yield, quality, resistance to pests, drought, salinity... the only way is to apply genetic methods in breeding. Although this method is difficult and time-consuming, it still has to be done,” he asserted.
Persistence and the right direction paid off. In 2011, Mr. Tran Tan Phuong successfully defended his PhD thesis in Genetics and Breeding. Coincidentally and meaningfully, this is also the major that more than 60 years ago, Dr. Agronomist Luong Dinh Cua - another outstanding son of Soc Trang - studied and successfully defended in Japan. His scientific path is like a continuation of the legacy of his predecessors, lighting up the pride of this land.
Elevating Vietnamese rice: From “full” to “delicious”
The research process of Dr. Phuong's group can be divided into two distinct stages. Before 2012, the goal was to create fragrant rice lines with quality that could compete equally with famous Thai rice varieties. The group started with simple hybrid combinations, consisting of only 2-3 parent varieties, giving birth to the first ST varieties such as ST11, ST12.
From 2013 onwards, when people's living standards improved, the need for "delicious food" replaced "full food", the research team entered a new phase. The goal now was not only deliciousness, but also the integration of many other superior characteristics. Each hybrid combination became more complex, sometimes gathering genes from dozens of different parent varieties to meet all the factors: delicate aroma, softness of rice, resistance to pests (especially brown planthoppers), resistance to leaf blight, and the shape of the rice grains had to be long, shiny and beautiful "like a model", as Mr. Phuong likened.
The result of this complex hybridization process is the birth of ST24 and especially ST25. The ST25 rice variety is the crystallization of many generations of hybridization, inherited and developed from intermediate combinations such as ST19, ST20. Mr. Phuong said that this process was guided by sensitive signals from the market, through close cooperation with engineer Ho Quang Cua, who is not only knowledgeable about technology but also has a sharp business vision.
The success of ST25 in 2019 and 2023 at the World's Best Rice competitions was not a fluke, but the inevitable result of more than 20 years of tireless research, evaluation and continuous improvement. Vietnamese rice, once known only for its yield, is now positioned in the highest quality segment on the global rice map. The export price of ST rice at times exceeded the threshold of 1,000 USD/ton, bringing great economic value and opening a new chapter of pride for Vietnamese agricultural products.
Retire to continue writing rice dreams
In April 2024, at the age of 58, Dr. Tran Tan Phuong, then Deputy Director of the Department of Agriculture and Environment, decided to retire nearly 4 years early. This decision surprised many people, but for him, it was an inevitable choice. He wanted to devote all his remaining time and mind to his greatest passion in life: rice research.
Retirement does not mean rest. On the contrary, his work has become even more hectic. At the Soc Trang Rice Research Station, he and his colleagues are facing a huge “treasure”: a gene bank with more than 3,000 valuable rice varieties collected from all over the world and more than 20,000 hybrid combinations made in the past two decades. Each crop, the team has to survey and evaluate from several hundred to thousands of combinations, a job that requires extraordinary meticulousness and perseverance, and is expected to take several more years to complete.
His goal is not limited to the success of ST25. Consumer demands and the challenges of climate change are constantly changing. He is nurturing bigger plans. One of them is to successfully crossbreed a long-grain, blooming rice variety, modeled after the famous Basmati variety of India and Pakistan, but well adapted to the soil conditions of Soc Trang.
For him, the greatest success of an agricultural scientist is when farmers happily grow their rice varieties, and consumers enjoy their delicious food. “We dream of creating rice varieties that make farmers as happy as tending flowers. When you go into the fields and see the beauty, the fragrance, and the pride, that is the highest goal,” he confided.
With outstanding contributions to the career of rice breeding, Dr. Tran Tan Phuong has been honored to receive many noble awards:
First Class Labor Medal awarded by the President (2019).
Ho Chi Minh Prize for Science and Technology (2021, same group of authors).
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) Outstanding Achievement Award for the Application of Nuclear Techniques in Plant Breeding.
Vietnam Golden Rice Award.
Many Certificates of Merit from Ministries, branches and Soc Trang province.
Source: https://khoahocdoisong.vn/xin-nghi-huu-som-ve-ruong-tao-gao-ngon-nhat-hanh-tinh-post1550350.html
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