BUTUAN CITY—Agriculture Undersecretary Joel Rudinas assured critics that the Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) eggplant, modified to increase resistance to fruit and shoot borers and other pests, has not been released yet for commercial production and consumption, and is still undergoing greenhouse and field testing under controlled conditions.

“Opposition to it is unfounded. Criticisms are wrong,” Rudinas told reporters here at the side of the Seventh Mindanao Vegetable Congress.

He said the genetically modified eggplant only recently finished its first greenhouse, or nursery, phase of testing intended to determine the consistency in the appearance of the desired genetic traits and characteristic in the eggplant.

So far, the Bt eggplant exhibited the desired results, and these would be tested in demonstration farms under “strictly controlled conditions to avoid any feared contamination of the surrounding farms.”

The field demonstration aimed to determine how the eggplant would fare under exposure “to the vagaries of abiotic stresses of actual environmental conditions” in the Philippines.

“Similar tests were also being conducted in other countries [in India], but we want to know how the Bt eggplant would fare in the Philippines,” he said.

The tested seeds and plants would be burned after the greenhouse testing. After the field tests, “nothing would be released to the environment.” The plant would undergo another round of tests and the process would likely end next year yet, he said.

“We have already talked with the environmental and food-security groups this week and assured them that what they have been arguing about has not been happening yet in the country. We are still testing the Bt eggplant under controlled and monitored conditions to ensure that none of the gene pool would migrate to the adjacent farm,” he said.

He said he has appealed to critics “to look at basic sciences, because what we are doing is simply to generate Philippine data on the plant.”

The testing was being conducted by the Institute of Plant Breeding of the Department of Agriculture and funded by foreign seed companies. Tests were being done in Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao.

A similar broadside by environmentalists was mounted previously over the testing of Bt corn in farms in South Cotabato.