Prof., Dr. Buu is one of the founders of the Cuu Long Delta Rice Research Institute. Recalling the initial period of the institute’s establishment, he said: “At that time the war had just ended and the institute was very poor. It was situated in an area of hundreds of hectares but its facility was only a row of flat-roofed houses (now serving as a warehouse). The staff of the institute did research while working and learned from practice and the reference material of other countries.”
Although there were a lot of difficulties, to meet urgent requirements for rice development in the Cuu Long River Delta, in 1987 Buu defended successfully a doctoral thesis titled “Researching the Characteristics of Deep-water Rice in the Cuu Long River Delta to Select Varieties”. In 1989, at the age of 36, Dr. Buu was promoted to the post of Deputy Director of the Cuu Long Delta Rice Research and became director in 2011.
In the late 1980s, to implement the programme of one million hectares of high-quality rice for export, Dr. Buu and his colleagues submitted to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development a programme of experimental cultivation of a new rice variety. This programme was implemented in an area accounting for about 2% of the total rice cultivation area in the Cuu Long River Delta. Only five years later it increased to over 30%. This success opened a breakthrough for the production of rice in the Cuu Long River Delta, making the delta become the largest rice producing area in the country and helping Vietnam become the second largest rice exporter in the world. Since then the Cuu Long River Delta has played the number one role in the strategy of national food security and export.
 

Talking about Prof. Dr. Buu’s contributions, agricultural experts often mention the premature rice variety. Thanks to this variety, people in the Cuu Long River Delta can not only carry out the plan of evading flooding the crop but also can increase the rice output from 2 tonnes/ha to 10 tonnes/ha.
After nearly 30 years of researching and working, he has built the Cuu Long Delta Rice Research Institute into one of the leading rice research centres in Vietnam and the region.
Witnessing the institute’s achievements during our revisit to the institute together with Prof. Buu we were able to understand his efforts and contributions to Vietnam’s rice sector over the past decades.
Prof. Buu and his colleagues have studied and produced successfully many high-quality rice varieties, including many key varieties, such as the OM4900 with long, white and fragrant grains that can compete with the most famous Pathum Thani variety of Thailand.
Prof. Buu said that the institute has built up a gene bank of over 1,000 new varieties and about 3,000 traditional varieties of rice. It is a very valuable resource for the rice science of Vietnam and the world.
With great contributions to the rice sector in particular and the agricultural science in general, in 2008 Prof. Buu was awarded the Senadhira prize by IRRI for his excellent contributions to the diversification of the popular rice varieties in Vietnam. In 2000, the project “Rice Variety and Improvement of Rice Cultivation Techniques in the Cuu Long River Delta” co-authored by him was awarded the Ho Chi Minh Prize for science and technology by the State. In 2010 the Vietnam Association for Promoting Education and the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology gave him the first prize of the Vietnamese Talent Award for his excellent contributions to the country’s science.