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AGRICULTURE: Racing to Construct the Perfect Rice Plant

Katherine Stapp

NEW YORK, Feb 28 2004 (IPS) - Rice, a crop that feeds half the world’s people and supplies income for a billion more, will have to keep pace with surging demand using far fewer resources, a goal for which many scientists believe biotechnology will be indispensable.

Even as public investments into the staple crop fall off, the cultural and economic importance of rice is gaining prominence. In its first-ever endorsement of a commodity, the United Nations declared 2004 “The Year of Rice”, in hopes of promoting research and addressing the problem of dwindling production growth.

Until 1960, the rate of production increase was four percent per year; today, it is stagnating at one percent, adds the United Nations.

With this in mind, scientists from around the world gathered in Rome earlier this month for a U.N.-sponsored rice conference to consider how to meet an estimated 40 percent jump in demand for the crop by 2025 – with less land, less water, less labour and fewer chemicals.

If they fail, desperate farmers will be forced to expand into fragile areas such as hillsides and wetlands, with dire consequences for wildlife and watersheds.

Many hopes are pinned on exploiting technological advancements like the decoding of the rice genome, announced simultaneously in January 2002 by Swiss agricultural giant Syngenta and a team of Chinese scientists from the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI), working independently of each other.

Having revealed the DNA sequence of every rice gene, scientists are now focusing on “marking” the traits that each gene expresses in the plant, such as whether the grain’s consistency is sticky or smooth.

“The most direct use of the sequence information for improvement of rice and other cereals is the genetic tagging of important phenotypes by DNA markers,” said Dr. Takuji Sasaki of the Japanese National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences.

“The next idea is to identify genes and their characteristics for physical roles,” he told IPS.

“These results must be transferred to the actual improvement of main staples,” Sasaki explained. “It will take time because the growth of plants takes time, (as does) investigating the target species.”

While many of the benefits lie years away, progress is already being made. In India, scientists have engineered a strain of samba masuri rice able to withstand bacterial leaf blight, which destroys about 15 percent of the local crop every year.

Using DNA markers greatly accelerated the process of developing the pest-resistant rice to less than three years, compared to conventional breeding techniques that can take up to six years.

The new strain will be tested in large-scale field trials beginning with the next growing season.

Other recent advances include rice varieties enriched with vitamins and minerals, others that grow with less water or in salty soil – key in light of Asia’s looming water crisis – and high-yield hybrids.

A key player in much of this research is the Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), which presides over a gene bank of more than 100,000 rice varieties that it distributes free to researchers with the understanding that the resulting products will not be patented for profit.

“At IRRI, we use (the genome) to pinpoint candidate genes for conferring disease resistance, tolerance for submergence and phosphorus deficiency and heightened micro-nutrient content,” Hei Leung, who leads the Institute’s functional genomics activities, told IPS.

“As our biological understanding of such complex traits as drought-tolerance improves, the sequence information will facilitate identifying the genes involved.”

But the advent of new strains of ”biotech” rice will inevitably bring controversy in the context of the highly polarised debate over genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Golden Rice, a variety enriched with vitamin A to help stave off blindness in poor countries, was hailed as a miracle food when it was first announced in 1999. But its safety and nutritional potency were quickly challenged by prominent environmental groups.

Once a supporter of Golden Rice, IRRI now says it will start field trials this year to test numerous uncertainties it has about the crop, such as yields, resistance to various pests and palatability, but it would be at least four to six years before the rice was market-ready.

“Use of the products of transformation breeding requires acceptance of GMOs in the food chain,” said N.M. Upadhyaya, principal research scientist of the Rice Functional Genomics Group of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia.

“Unless this occurs, full benefits of transformation breeding will not flow to the common farmer nor reduce hunger.”

“Alternatively, the knowledge can be effectively used in speeding up classical breeding,” he added.

“Quite often a subtle variation in the gene sequences can make a big difference in its effectiveness. Once we identify such variations and their effects on plant growth and productivity, they can be used as ‘molecular markers’ in classical breeding”, said Upadhyaya.

Prominent environmental group Greenpeace International disagrees that GMOs are necessary in the food chain but does not reject genetic research to improve crop yield.

“We are not opposed to biotechnology research and are certainly not opposed to scientific advances such as molecular-assisted selection/breeding, which use knowledge of plant genomes for plant breeding, without resorting to GE (genetic engineering) techniques,” said Steve Sawyer, head of the group’s political and business unit, in a Feb. 23 article in ‘The Age’ newspaper.

The data derived from rice research is a useful model for an array of other economically important grains, such as corn, wheat, sorghum and barley, because nearly all the genes present in these species are likely to have homologues, or similarities, in rice.

The rice genome is also shorter and thus easier to sequence – six times smaller than that of corn and 37 times smaller than that of wheat.

But with a recent surge in patents on gene products associated with rice, some scientists are wary that future research could end up dominated by a handful of private agri-business concerns.

“It is important to make these tools and resources publicly available,” Upadhyaya stressed.

“I sincerely hope that multinational companies will pour funds into rice research without excessive strings attached. A pledge from everyone concerned to make rice an ‘IP (intellectual property)-free zone’ will definitely accelerate progress and boost yields for small farmers without production cost blowouts.”