By Joel C. Paredes, Business Mirror via SEAMEO SEARCA

"Yes, we're nearing a breakthrough," says Dr. Josefina Narciso, a plant breeder at the University of the Philippines - Los Baños (UPLB), a major institutional partner in the Cornell University-led consortium trying to develop in Asia the first bio-engineered eggplant that resists the voracious pest, the fruit and shoot borer (FSB).

Asian scientists believe that once it is safely and effectively developed and genetically modified seeds are released to both rich and poor farmers in the Philippines, India and Bangladesh, this could trigger the propagation of edible agriculture crops in the region using biotechnology.

Eggplant grown year-round is one of the most important vegetables consumed in the sub-tropics and tropics, making it one of Asia's top edible crops. In the Philippines, 20,000 hectares are devoted to its production, generating 179 metric tons in annual yield at the low-elevation areas of Cagayan Valley, the Ilocos region, Central Luzon, Southern Tagalog, Central Visayas and Western Visayas.

Eggplant is also considered next to rice as a staple food, providing much-needed potassium and phosphorous in the Filipino family's diet. It is low in calories, and is known to have anti-stress and anti-oxidant features.

In India, where eggplant is cultivated on 510,000 hectares, the popular vegetable crop is the main source of cash income for many resource-poor farmers. It supplies 25 percent calories, and has virtually no fat. Its "meaty texture" makes eggplant a staple in vegetable diets in South Asia.

But chemical spraying accounts for about 25 percent of the eggplant production cost, and losses are generally more than 50 percent in the Philippines, says Narciso, a senior university researcher at UPLB's Institute of Plant Breeding (IPB). As a result, farmers use many toxic chemicals and their prolonged and frequent spraying makes the pests resista nt to the chemicals, which, in turn, leads the farmers to use of a cocktail of chemicals.

This practice has immediate, as well as long-term, harmful effects on the environment and on the health of the farmers, apart from the considerable increase in production costs.

Under the Agricultural Biotechnology Support Project II (ABSPII) program, which aims to bring down the cost of high-yielding seeds to the rural poor in the region, the UPLB will manage the partnership in Southeast Asia on bioengineered eggplant research, while the Sathguru Management Consultants is in charge of South Asia.

By the end of next year, Indian farmers are expected to start harvesting more brinjal, as the eggplant is popularly known in South Asia, and cut down on pesticides through the efforts of the USAID-funded consortium.

According to K. Vijayaraghavan, ABSPII South Asia regional coordinator, the public-private partnership is an alliance of 10 global partners, which aims to enh ance yield and the quality of farm products.

The transgenic plant is expected to help both farmers, who are short of resources, as well as those who were affluent through two different routes of commercial distribution.

First in the region Before leaving for India last week, Narciso says they have already asked the Philippine government permission for Bt eggplant-seed importation so that the UPLB can start its efficacy trial and backcrossing of the FSB-resistant eggplant for over a year.

Backcrossing is a process where a trait (such as insect resistance) is integrated into an existing variety by repeatedly crossing the progeny expressing the trait back to the recurrent parent variety. After four to six such backcrosses, the outcome is essentially the original variety containing just the genes of the wanted trait.

Filipino scientists won't be starting from zero. Narciso says that the FSB-resistant or Bt eggplant has been genetically engineered to contai n Bacillus thuringensis, or Bt, gene, a species of bacteria producing proteins, some of which are toxic to a narrow range of insects, but is not harmful to animals or humans. In the last few years, several crops have been genetically engineered to produce their own Bt proteins.

In the genetic engineering of the eggplant, Narciso explains that all they have to do is transfer the Bt gene known as Cry 1Ac, which was a result of the transformation event in India, by conventional hybridization pollination.

If finally approved for commercial use, the transgenic FSB-resistant eggplant will be the first case of Bt technology in food crops in the region. The first commercialized bio-engineered seed that was approved for commercial distribution was the Bt corn. It is popularly used only as feed, although underPhilippine biosafety regulations it also had to pass testing for human consumption. Narciso says she is actually privy to the back-crossing work in India, having unde rgone extensive training on the Bt eggplant in November 2004. That was a year after IPB's head Dr. Desiree Hautea prepared the proposal that finally included the Philippines in the ABSPII project. India has been involved in eggplant bio-engineering research as early as 2000, but a high level ofinterest in developing the FSB-resistant eggplant materialized only at the ABSPII priority-setting workshop in 2003 with an aim of commercializing a high-quality, consistent product for every segment of society and optimizing socio-economic gains from the project.

ABSPII evaluated available technologies and concluded that the efforts carried out by Maharastra Hybrid Seed Co. (Mahyco) in incorporating Bacillus thuringiensis genes to produce fruit and shoot borer-resistant eggplant provided opportunity for global technology through public-private partnership. The outcome of the effort was the development of FSB-resistant eggplant in India, Bangladesh and the Philippines.

Research in isolation has actually restricted the use of such technologies and significantly marginalized the seed access to farm communities. As a result, in India alone, farmers have no access to GM products since they are still in the development stage. To mitigate these limitations, the public-private partnership mode was successfully adopted for genetically modified-crop development and product delivery through the ABSPII initiative. Now, the partnerships address the need to mitigate yield loses due to pest and diseases, such as that of the eggplant and environmental factors such as drought and salt.

Technologies were also shared, such as in the research of the eggplant, shortening the product development and delivery time. Scientists are confident that cross-country technology access will enhance manifold the gains accruing there source-constrained farmers across the regions.

Economic gains

Dr. Raju Barwale, Mahyco's managing director, says they will provide technology access to public institutions free of royalty stipulation. The public-sector partners can deliver high-quality GM seeds that are resistant to fruit and shoot borer through their own public distribution system on a nonprofit basis, he says. This will also provide opportunity to resource-constrained farmers to access benefits of the technology. "We actually need more food and we need to reduce cost of production. That is why many companies are now investing in biotechnology," says Barwale, whose company has been involved in private research and development of hybrid seeds for the past 35 years. Barwale says that they began research in bio-engineered crops in 1993 when it forged a tie up with Monsanto, the US-based company that helped pioneer biotechnology work in agriculture.

Before private companies can access the seeds, Barwale says all they need is a licensing arrangement with Mahyco, which is in the forefront of providing commercial hybrids to farmers in the region. Mahyco is now carrying out field trials in several regions in India. 

Representative seeds from UPLB, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (TNAU), University of Agriculture and Science Dharwal, Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute have been backcrossed with the Mahyco seeds. The successfully backcrossed seeds are now undergoing further advancement through breeding process at partner sites in TNAU, Dharwal and at Mahyco for the seeds from Bangladesh and the Philippines.

To prove the damage being wrought by fruit and shot borer, Dr. Usha B. Zehr, joint director for research of Mahyco, showed sample yields of the ordinary eggplant during our visit in one of their field-testing sites in the outskirts of Coimbatore. "Caught in the act," says Zehr, as she opened a few rounded violet eggplant varieties and found them swarming with the FSB larvae. She also compared theinfested eggplants with the transgenic plants which have managed to resist any pest infestation in the field.

Narciso, meanwhile, says that the ordinary eggplants could actually look vigorous, but once they are damaged by the shoot borers, the tendency is to produce side shoots but they don't produce many fruits unlike the bio-engineered plants. Based on initial field experiments, when the crop-protection costs for eggplants could be cut by 50 percent and yield is increased by a modest 10 percent, the incremental gains could be in the range of US$450 per hectare, providing economic gains of over US$600 million to the region.

Narciso says that India is already finalizing commercial testing of the bio-engineered eggplant seeds, and could deliver it to the market by the last quarter of 2006 or early 2007. UPLB can only start backcrossing in 2006 and may make it commercially available to the Philippines two years later. While private firms are taking the lead in biotechnology, she says that public sector-led researches are now also making headway in the Philippines.

Narciso says that besides the Bt eggplant, they have already also started developing at the IPB edible crops like papaya, tomato, sweet potato and coconut. Narciso, who has been involved in plant-breeding work for IPB since the 1980s, says there won't be much of a difference in the process. "Except that we're using also molecular techniques to screen the presence of the gene," she says.