Los Banos, The Philippines
February  2001

IRRI scientists have expressed excitement about the recent mapping of the rice genome, predicting that this could have a significant impact on a range of previously intractable problems in the developing world.

"We accept that people may have different opinions about this exciting new breakthrough," said IRRI Director General Ronald P. Cantrell. "But as scientists focused on the objective development of freely available, safe, and sustainable technologies that will help rice farmers and consumers in the developing world, we see the recent rice genome announcement as highly significant for two key reasons."

"First, it will make a very big difference in much of the work we do at IRRI, not only in areas such as biotechnology but also by greatly improving the efficiency of research, such as our traditional plant breeding work. Second, we see efforts by the company involved, Syngenta, to make its research available at no cost to subsistence farmers as continuing a promising trend by the corporate sector."

In October 2000, Dr. Cantrell, along with several senior scientists at IRRI, published an article in the respected U.S. journal Science that called for a new system that would better serve the poor and encourage greater investment and innovation in the rice industry by both the private and public sectors. "We consider Syngenta’s offer to make its rice genome research available to subsistence farmers without royalties or technology fees an important step down this road," Dr. Cantrell said.

"Syngenta’s offer may be considered by some as less than perfect, but the fact that you now have large multinationals at least acknowledging the need to share new technologies with the poor and neglected in the developing world must be viewed, at the very least, as an important step in the right direction," he explained. 

Dr. Cantrell added that he was especially pleased that rice, as the grain that feeds most of the world’s desperately poor, was at the forefront of this trend. "We hope that the Syngenta announcement will just be the first of many by private companies that will allow much greater freedom in the transfer of technologies to the developing world. But, if this is to happen, we must allow these companies some way to recover their development costs."

In the Science article, the IRRI scientists warned that, despite being arguably the single most important economic activity on the planet, rice production has largely been ignored by the private sector because of the poverty of most rice farmers. As a result, rice research, when compared with research on crops such as wheat or maize, has not received significant attention and support from the private sector and so remains relatively underdeveloped.

"The challenge is to develop a shared vision for rice research that will provide the public sector with access to modern scientific tools while at the same time giving sufficient incentives for the private sector to innovate, develop, and deliver new rice technologies," the scientists said. "The human genome project has already developed a pattern for such collaboration in genomics whereby ten pharmaceutical companies and the Wellcome Trust have agreed to fund and create a publicly available archive of human genetic variation. A similar pattern of collaboration is needed in rice."

Dr. Cantrell said that poor rice farmers need and deserve the best science has to offer and that includes technologies developed by the private sector. "However, while we want to encourage the private sector to invest in research that will help rice farmers and consumers, patent protection should not be allowed to deny poor people access to such much-needed modern technologies," he added.

The most recent example of this challenge was the development of pro-vitamin A or "golden" rice. After months of negotiations with many parties, the two German inventors, along with Syngenta representatives, recently handed over to IRRI the first golden rice genetic material for further development. Once completed, golden rice will be made freely available to resource poor farmers in the developing world indefinitely.

"All this is completely new territory to a public research institute such as IRRI, and to an industry such as rice, but with thousands suffering blindness and around a million deaths a year attributed to vitamin A deficiency, it would seem that we have a moral responsibility to at least investigate whether such strategies could work," Dr. Cantrell said.

Company news release
N3305