Visionary inventors like Henry Ford and Rudolf Diesel expected that their new machines would run on fuels derived from plants, but cheap petroleum proved more popular. A century later, with oil prices rising, biofuels are finally getting their due and becoming popular as sources of power for cars, trucks and aircraft.

Similarly, commercialisation is bringing in what was due for GM crops. Developing nations can benefit a lot from the much-needed bio-engineered food products - plant materials that have been modified through genetic engineering - since it is the ultimate in research.

Due to hue and cry over some poorly-developed technologies by a couple of research institutes, here is a call for engineering the existing varieties or hybrids along with increased understanding by scientists, policy makers, regulatory environments and commercialisation requirements of bio-engineered crops.

With a cluster of research partners and an investment of close to $4 million by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and led by Cornell University, and few other partners, the Agricultural Biotechnology Support Project II (ABSP-II) focuses on the effective development and commercialisation of bio-engineered crops as a complement to other traditional approaches. The consortium partners propose to boost food security, nutrition and environmental quality in Africa, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh and Philippines.

So what does the project aims to do? It aims to develop 'product commercialisation packages' for each crop by geographical site that integrate activities like technology development, IPRs and marketing .

The long-term impact of ABSP-II will be for increased agricultural output, improved farm income in the geographical areas; and increase public acceptability in these crops. The consortium partners include about nine public institutions of the US such as Michigan State University, Virginia Polytechnic and State University, etc; the regional partners in different countries (in India, department of biotechnology is joining this consortium) along with private sector entities like Mahyco, Nunhems Seeds, Sathguru Management and other CGIAR centers.

According to Sathguru officials, ABSP-II will support other USAID initiatives to promote safe agricultural biotechnology following the norms of biosafety regulation with a special system called the USAID's Program for Biosafety Systems. In India, four projects have been identified for taking the technology for commercialisation. These include: fruit-borer in egg plant; drought and salinity resistance in rice; tobacco-streak virus in groundnut and sunflower and leaf-blight resistance in potato. All the projects are expected to be commercialised by 2007.

The University of Agriculture Sciences, Dharwad, Karnataka, has already backcrossed seeds of fruit and shoot borer resistant eggplant from Mahyco which was the technology partner. Although India and China are the major producers of nearly 84% of the world production, about 54-70% of the crop loss is due to fruit shoot borer.