According to Yuan's team, they plan to grow about 67,000 hectares of saline-alkali tolerant rice across the country this year, including over 666 hectares in Shandong and more than 333 hectares in the Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang Uygur autonomous regions.

Yuan said last year the team developed a rice strain in Shandong's Dongying city that can yield 9 metric tons per hectare on saline-alkaline land.

"Our team plans to grow the strain on over 666 hectares of experimental land this year for further research," said Yuan in a written congratulatory letter to the reclamation in Qingdao.

Zhang Guodong, executive deputy director of the Qingdao Saline-Alkali Tolerant Rice Research and Development Center, said in an earlier interview that the team plans to transform 6.7 million hectares of saline-alkaline land into arable paddy in five to eight years, which is expected to feed 500 million more people if planted as crops.