Business Potential for Agricultural Biotechnology - Asian Productivity ...

– 17 –
Summary of Findings
Status of Public Rice Biotechnology Research and Development and Commercialization in
the Philippines
The Philippine government has signed international treaties concerning agricultural biotechnology.
Among these are the Convention on Biological Diversity, signed on June 12, 1992,
and ratified on October 8, 1993 (recently the Philippine Congress passed into law the Wildlife
Conservation Act, which, in effect, puts into law the provisions of the Convention), and the
Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, signed in May 2000 (not ratified to date). In anticipation of the
advent of modern biotechnology, the government issued Executive Order No. 430 creating the
National Committee on Biosafety, tasking it with evaluating applications for testing biotechnology
products. In December 1994, the Philippines ratified the General Agreements on Tariffs
and Trade (GATT), including the provision on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property
Rights (TRIPS). The Congress also ratified the country’s World Trade Organization (WTO)
membership. Subsequently, the Congress enacted the Intellectual Property Code of the Philippines
pursuant to the TRIPS Agreement. The code took effect on January 1, 1998.
To demonstrate the government’s resolve to modernize agriculture utilizing biotechnology,
the Agriculture and Fisheries Modernization Act was enacted in 1997 mandating the use of
biotechnology as a tool in modernizing agriculture and increasing productivity. Administrative
Order No. 8 of the Department of Agriculture was issued in 2002, setting up the rules on laboratory
testing up to commercialization and even importation of products of modern agricultural
biotechnology (http://www.da.gov.ph). In the same year, Congress enacted the Plant Variety
Protection Act, which provides protection to newly developed transgenic plant varieties. These
and other laws, legislation, and rules provide the legal and institutional framework for commercialization
of agricultural biotechnology in the Philippines.
Few public or private research institutions conduct modern agricultural biotechnology research.
Most modern agricultural biotechnology R&D is conducted by the public sector. The private
sector, mostly multinational companies, imports agricultural biotechnologies. The major
public institutions engaged in modern agricultural biotechnology R&D are the Institute of Plant
Breeding (IPB) and the National Institute of Microbiology and Molecular Biology (BIOTECH)
at the University of the Philippines Los Baños (UPLB), the National Institute of Molecular
Biology (NIMB) of UP-Diliman, the Philippine Coconut Authority (PCA), and the Philippine
Rice Research Institute (PhilRice). The Bureau of Agricultural Research (BAR) of the Department
of Agriculture and the Philippine Council for Agriculture, Forestry and Fishery Research
and Development (PCARRD) of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) coordinate
and fund R&D in modern agricultural biotechnology conducted by these and other institutions.
The private sector, however, also dynamically takes part in the promotion of biotechnology. The
International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA), which has its
Southeast Asia Center based in the country, is a nonprofit international organization that works
for the delivery of biotechnology benefits to developing countries through the promotion of technology
transfer. One of the leading private companies conducting field trials and commercializing
agricultural biotechnology is Monsanto Philippines, through its Bt corn.
Rice biotechnology research is undertaken in the genetics and tissue culture laboratories of
PhilRice. Equipment in these two laboratories has been provided through an initial JICA grant,
JICA Technical Assistance, ARBN, RF, and funds from the Philippine government. The present
biotechnology facilities include laboratory areas for transgenic work, anther culture, and molecular
marker analyses. Specifically, the biotechnology R&D currently being pursued includes
utilization of molecular marker technology for assessing the diversity of germplasm resources,
for fingerprinting or establishing genetic identity of specific genotypes, for identification of appropriate
parental materials for breeding purposes, for tagging agronomically important genes,
and for pyramiding different bacterial blight resistance genes; in vitro culture to facilitate line
purification, production of stable lines adapted to adverse environments, and induction of useful
mutants/variants; genetic transformation for introducing genes such as Xa21 for bacterial blight