Business World

Market Forces; Rice And Shine

While People Power euphoria was sweeping the nation late in January, a different kind of celebration was taking place in a small corner of Los Banos in Laguna. During that same week Filipinos were converging at EDSA Shrine to collectively express indignation - and eventually topple - a corrupt government, scientists at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) were taking receipt of samples of a newly developed type of rice.

It is no ordinary rice. The people who were involved in the experiments that led to its development say the rice is genetically engineered to contain beta-carotene, an element that produces vitamin A. This vitamin helps people gain healthy vision and resistance to disease.

The human body, scientists explain, breaks beta-carotene molecules into two vitamin A molecules, also known as retinol. People get beta-carotene from fresh vegetables, like carrots, and get vitamin A from milk, butter, cheese, liver and cod liver oil.

The beta-carotene gives the grain a yellow color, thus it is now widely called the "golden rice." Not only does the "golden rice" hold promise of helping make people healthier, it reportedly also has twice the usual iron content. Described as the world's worst nutrition disorder, iron deficiency-anemia is said to affect up to two billion people worldwide.

Indeed, World Health Organization (WHO) data show vitamin A deficiencies in about 124 million children living in developing countries where rice is the main staple. A WHO report noted that vitamin A deficiency leads to blindness in about 500,000 children every year. It also makes children vulnerable to diseases that cause diarrhea. Anywhere between one million and two million vitamin A-deficient children, WHO says, die each year. The Philippines is one of these areas, and therefore should benefit from this new crop.

That is why there was considerable glee at the IRRI when the "golden rice" samples finally arrived. Dr. Ronald P. Cantrell, IRRI director-general, was reported as saying, "The arrival of these initial samples at IRRI is a very significant step and allows us to finally start on the required testing processes using local rice varieties."

The Los Banos-based IRRI expects to "play a major role in the ongoing 'golden rice' research effort and its eventual introduction to the world's millions of poor rice farmers and consumers," Dr. Cantrell said. The rice research institute will now seek to put the technology into the production of commercially useful rice strains.

Actually, the idea for "golden rice" came from the field in developing nations. Eight years ago, professor Ingo Potrykus, a German scientist based at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, asked plant breeders at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines what they would choose if they could have genetic engineers insert any gene in rice, an account in The New York Times recently said.

The answer, the report continued, was "a gene to make rice seeds produce the yellow pigment beta-carotene, a trait they had not found in any rice variety and therefore could not propagate by traditional cross breeding."

Although beta-carotene has no taste, researchers are concerned that consumers in Asia might not like the yellow color because whiteness is highly valued in rice. Still, they hope people will feed it to their children, the report said.

At IRRI, researchers can now either breed the lab strain into a commercial variety through traditional techniques, a process that will take four to eight years, or try to insert the new genes directly into commercial varieties and track them for two years to see if the beta-carotene trait will move to a third generation.

IRRI has also noted in a statement acknowledging the delivery of "golden rice" from the inventors' laboratories in Europe, that the new rice was made possible as a result of the donation of intellectual property licenses from Syngenta Seeds AG, Syngenta Ltd., Bayer AG, Monsanto Co., Inc., Orynova BV and Zeneca Mogen BV. Each company has licensed free-of-charge technology used in the research which led to the "golden rice" invention.

Subject to further research, initially in the developing countries of Asia, as well as local regulatory clearances, "golden rice" can then be made available free of charge for humanitarian uses in any developing nation.

The scientists, based at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, inserted three genes into rice that make the plant produce beta-carotene. Commentators say the science represents a "technical tour de force" as it is the first time a plant has been engineered with a complete biochemical pathway - meaning, all the different steps an organism must complete to make a particular product.

Dr. Potrykus, who led the rice researchers, recalled in a recent BBC interview that many scientists did not believe it would be possible when work began on the project eight years ago.

He said: "When we started the project, and throughout the progress of this project, the scientific community was convinced that it could not work because nobody previously had been able to engineer a complete biochemical pathway." The technology is being given to a number of rice institutes around the world, where traditional breeding methods will be used to integrate the beta-carotene genes into local varieties, he explained.

Dr. Potrykus envisions three years to breed commercial strains and conduct field tests. Then the "golden rice," which will provide food as well as future seed, will be made available free to the farmers in developing economies. What the companies involved in the "golden rice" experiments are looking at for future profits are the markets for the product in the advanced economies where the consumers will bear the premium.

There was a complex arrangement worked out among several biotechnology companies in the western world that made possible the development and the distribution of the seeds. The deal was worked out over the past couple of years and, according to one report, it was finally wrapped up just as Dr. Portykus was taking his forced retirement from the Zurich institute that hosted his work.

The deal, according to a New York Times article, was brokered by Greenovation, a small German company that specializes in licensing academic discoveries in biotechnology. Greenovation licensed "golden rice" from Dr. Potrykus and Dr. Peter Beyer of the University of Freiburg in Germany, who collaborated on the invention.

Greenovation then licensed "golden rice" to Zeneca Agrichemicals, which late last year merged with the agricultural divisions of Novartis to form a new company called Syngenta, now the largest agricultural biotechnology company in the world.

Syngenta plans to market golden rice in developed countries like the United States as an enriched crop containing antioxidants, which are believed to reduce the risk of cancer, heart disease and muscular degeneration, an eye disease that leads to blindness.

In return, Zeneca Agrichemicals agreed to secure rights to other patents covering golden rice and grant the inventors a license to give "golden rice" away to international research institutes that are working on developing new varieties of rice in places like India and the Philippines, the Times report said.

The genetically engineered rice will be crossed with local varieties using traditional breeding methods, and health and safety tests will be conducted. If everything goes well, within two to three years, "golden rice" varieties will be made available free to farmers earning less than $10,000 a year from the crop, a figure far exceeding the average income of poor farmers. Farmers will also be able to save seeds from their crop for future plantings because rice is a self-pollinating plant that breeds true year after year, the Times reported.

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