The Arroyo administration is building a new natural-ingredients industry on the back of the farming and manufacturing sectors, in step with an ambitious, decade-long biotechnology road map for the Philippines to rise as a regional powerhouse inhte money-spinning global bioenterprise market.

For the Philippines to grab a foothold in this fast-rising - and highly profitable - world market, agriculture and fisheries executives are developing a cluster of new industries in the manufacturing and farming sectors devoted to the production of plants that yield medicinal, cosmetic and food ingredients as well as agri-bio inputs for organic fertilizer, bio-fertilizer and bio-pesticide.

Such plans make up the Philippine Agriculture and Fisheries Biotech Road-map for 2006-2016, which Department of Agriculture (DA) officials unveiled in last Friday's closing program for National Biotechnology Week at the Bureau of Soils and Water Management (BSWM) in Quezon City.

"The DA will intensify efforts to improve the competitiveness of traditional Philippine agri-fisheries products through private sector initiatives in extracting more high-value products from Philippine corps, [because] biotechnology has opened new opportunities to increase the value of traditional crops, said director Alicia Ilaga of the DA Biotechnology Program Implementation Unit (PIU) during a BSWM Stakeholder's Forum.

As part of this 10-year road map, DA will provide this would-be cluster of new industries "full support in terms of policy, credit, technology and market entry," she said.

Ilaga further said that over the next decade, her department is pursuing these twin initiatives: (1) creating a natural-ingredients cluster of industries meant to supply the biotech requirements of the world, and (2) sharpening the global competitiveness of traditional Philippine agri-fisheries products.

DA Secretary Domingo Panaganiban said earlier that the Philippines is to come up in the years ahead with its first cloned carabao or "Super Buffalo" along with a pest-resistant variety of eggplant, better-tasting and faster-growing bangus (milkfish) and tilapia (St. Peter's fist), vitamin-enriched rice, papaya varieties that either have delayed-ripening qualities or are resistant to the ring spot virus, virus-resistant coconut and tomato, and other genetically improved crops.