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6 BIO LIFE January – March 2005 Dr. Merle Palacpac (right) and her team in the <strong>Biotechnology</strong> Core team. By JOEL C. PAREDES ON a Friday morning Dr. Aurora Legaspi was unusually busy at tending to her small farm. It’s actually a mini- green house inside the Bureau of Plant Industry’s National Seeds Quality Control Services (NSQCS) offices near Diliman in Quezon City. As NSQCS’ chief, Dr. Legaspi, who describes herself as a seeds technologist, was overseeing the planting of their agency’s first experimental hybrid GMO rice seeds, which they acquired from Philippine Rice Research Institute (Philrice). Her enthusiastic agriculturist, Jane Bartolini, was busy attending to the tiny seeds. She was the experiment’s mother hen, although the agency also tapped a Philrice expert consultant for the seed testing. After over 44 years in service, Dr. Legaspi could have just looked forward to a quiet retirement. Yet soft-spoken Dr. Legaspi still looks eager to be part of a crucial project – that of institutionalizing biotechnology in seed testing. By January, the NSQCS would have fully operationalized their high-tech biotechnology laboratory. Dr. Legaspi managed to give us a good tour of her modest office-cum-laboratory, which was granted late last year with the necessary equipments to venture in GMO seeds, starting with hybrid rice. She is convinced that the trend in biotechnology is a key in pursuing modern methods in seed testing to ensure that government can maintain the quality of seeds to improve agricultural production in the country. DR. LEGASPI
January – March 2005 BIO LIFE 7 Senior Agriculturist Jane Bartolini isolates DNA from individual plant samples for purity testing. This will also give the government an opportunity to use advanced testing based on reliable and efficient molecular techniques for variety verification, pathogen identification in relation to seed health testing and seed quality control program, she says. The NSQCS is actually the agency that is mandated to continuously provide services such as seed certification, seed testing and training needed in assuring and maintaining the quality of seeds used to improve agricultural production in the country. Maribel Querijero, a senior agriculturist who is stationed at the biotech laboratory, says that as a member of the International Seed Testing Association, they have to cope with the challenges triggered by the globalization for the Philippines to regain competitiveness in the seed market. As government’s regulatory body, the NSQCS is tasked to assure planters a steady supply of high quality seeds and planting materials with distinctness, uniformity and stability. “If seed growers or seed companies want to prove their seed is not contaminated by any GM we can test. But since some producers are promoting GMOs, we can also prove that in testing their products,” says Querijero, who has been into seed testing since 1990 when she joined the BPI after a brief stint with the International Rice Research Institute in Los Banos. With her experience in biotech products, Querijero says she can assure that GMOs that are being tested here do no create allergens, contrary to critics claim. “I’ve seen it. The genes that they insert in feed do not really harm humans,” she says. THE year 2002 was actually the time when the Corn MON810, or popularly known as Bt corn, was finally approved by government for propagation as well as direct use for food or feed and processing. It was widely acknowledged as a major breakthrough in the agriculture and science communities. It opened the country to the propagation of modern biotechnology. It also took the challenge needed to help ensure the success of government’s food security agenda. The Bacillus thuringiensis or Bt corn, is resistant to corn borer, an insect that destroys corn crops. Bt corn is produced by transferring bacterial genes to the corn to make it resistant to corn borer. The product was already commercially available in the United States, Canada, Japan, European Union, South Africa and Argentina but the BT corn still had to pass through the Department of Agriculture’s stringent—and rigid — evaluation process. The Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI) tapped 16 personnel for feed safety, the Bureau of Agriculture and Fisheries Product Standards (BFARS) and two technical experts from the Fertilizer and Pesticides Authority (FPA ) the safety in handling of BT corn in food and feed. Finally, experts concluded that Bt corn was safe to humans, animals, non-target organisms. It was also as nutritious as any ordinary corn, safer than chemical insecticides and very effective in controlling Asiatic corn borer. Despite its discovered wonders, it’s not surprising that cynics would simply find BT corn a killer. It has a smack of multinational control, tracing its roots to the US multinational giant Monsanto, which was a target of a worldwide campaign by anti-biotech activists.
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