DAVAO CITY—Three modified crops, including rice, resistant to common pests will hit the domestic market in the next three years.

Other biotech crops are being tested in the Mindanao campus of the University of the Philippines (UP).

“These are the things that we can expect in the field of biotechnology in the Philippines,” said Dr. Eufemio Rasco, a Cornell University-schooled plant breeder, in a presentation before agriculture scientists and experts and students at UP Mindanao here.

Rasco foresees the Philippines in a leading role in the application of traditional biotechnology using new materials. He said the domestic market would see the commercial production of a variety of Khak Nuan papaya, genetically modified (GM) to resist the common pest ringspot, as well as an eggplant variety modified to resist fruit and shoot borers, and the GM rice called Golden Rice.

He said the modified crops would add to the four already in the market, the controversial Bt corn, soybeans, cotton and canola.

“We can expect these three modified products to be commercially produced in the next three years,” said Rasco, a professor of plant breeding at UP Mindanao.

He said the private sector is “also talking about its own multiple stacked genes in corn, about eight of them,” despite the controversy generated by its well-publicized experiments in Tampakan, South Cotabato, in 2002.

In UP here, Rasco has led the field experiments in sago, which has multiple uses in food production, and the pitcher plant, eyed mainly for its ornamental use. He said the experiments have been done in the last 12 years.

From sago, a kind of palm, starch could be derived as flour substitute in baking and other industrial uses, and lactic acid. The pitcher plant, growing well in the northern hinterland of this city, has its leaves forming like a pitcher.

He said he is also experimenting on a plant called nepenthes, which exhibits the unique characteristic of being a cross between a plant and an animal. “It grows like other plants would but it also feeds on other plants, a different kind of ‘plant-animal’ hybrid,” he said.

The plant could become a new platform for genetic engineering. “We may hijack its own sap to determine why it eats on other plants, while growing as a plant,” Rasco explained.

Nepenthes is an ornamental plant, “and biotechnology could help save this plant—endemic in the Philippines—from extinction.”

“Yes, this is an endangered species,” he said.

“These are our achievements in plant biotechnology: seed propagation media, hydropriming biology of flowering and seed production, in-vitro cutting propagation, callus and regeneration, plant growing media, acclimatization, selling of in-vitro seedlings and selling of clones,” he added.

Contrary to common perceptions, however, “what we are using here in the Philippines is still the traditional kind of biotechnology, but we are using new materials,” Rasco added.

“It’s an impression that we are using modern biotechnology,” he said.

In developed economies, scientists use gene-splicing, or genetic engineering and protoplast fusion, or, “in general, any technique that forces unnatural or horizontal DNA transfer.”

Although modern technology also “uses DNA markers to establish paternity, solve crimes and diagnose diseases, plant breeding and studying evolution still [are a] part of traditional biotechnology,” according to Rasco.

“Currently, traditional biotechnology dominates, contrary to what is being impressed on the public,” Rasco explained. “Application of modern biotechnology is still limited; in a crop agriculture, for instance, out of about 250,000 plant species, only four major crops were subject to genetic modification: corn, cotton, soybeans and canola.”

He said current uses of traditional biotechnology are in food processing and production, biomedical applications such as drugs and vaccines, and in industrial applications such as cleaning agents.

“The oldest is food processing and food production, and, would you believe, wine is the first product and the microorganisms are the first workhorses,” he added.

“Mind you, but we can be leaders in the world of traditional biotechnology using new materials,” he said. “We can only be followers in modern biotechnology.”