Rice research in Korea during the past 100 years has gone through tremendous changes and improvements as the country underwent a turbulent history of transformation. Full-scale R&D modernization began in the 1970s, when the government focused policy on achieving self-sufficiency in rice in order to establish the foundation for national economic growth. A major landmark was reached by the development of the rice variety “Tongil” and its cultivation technology, which was at the core of the unprecedented Korean “Green Revolution”. Since achieving self-sufficiency in rice, the breeding goal of Korea moved from increasing yield to improving grain quality as more consumers began to seek high quality food products in the 1980s. This change led to the establishment of the high quality rice breeding platform for enhancing the global competitiveness of Korean rice to cope with the opening of domestic rice market in the 2000s. Currently, the major breeding goals in rice are developing premium quality cultivars for table rice and specialized cultivars for boosting processed food industry. To date, the National Institute of Crop Science has released a total of 300 rice cultivars, including 202 table rice and 98 specialized usage cultivars. Diverse technologies have been developed and utilized for breeding new rice cultivars to meet changing needs. In the next 100 years of rice breeding, the convergence of traditional crop improvement technologies and the new breeding technologies utilizing recent advances in biotechnology will play a crucial role in enhancing breeding efficiency.
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