 Good afternoon again. Good afternoon to all of you. My name is Tony Lamino. I just joined Erie recently, three weeks ago as head of communication. I was away from the country for 11 years. But primarily the mission of the organization is what convinced me and my family to come back. As mentioned earlier, and the chairman of the convener, Dr. Iro Nisila, picked up on something that president Pinoy in his message delivered by Secretary Alcala said about rice sciences for improving food products for the betterment of society. And that means nutrition, that means food security, that means broader impacts that Dr. Akim Dogerman spoke about earlier in his keynote. Economic development, sustainable development, such issues as inclusive inclusivity in social and economic areas. Anyway, I also would like to quote another president from a foreign country who said these new rice trains, the technical training you are giving which do more to escalate the war against hunger than anything that I know of that is being done today. Because if we are to win our war and the only important war that really counts if we are to win our war against poverty, against disease, against ignorance, against illiteracy and against hungry stomachs then we have to go to succeed in projects like this. Dundun B. Johnson in 1966 at the International Rice Research Institute just wanted to share that because that vision and that mission continues until today at IRI and with our partner organizations. So, with that sabi ko nga po bago lang po ako sa IRI when they ask if I would be willing to MC a session during this symposium I said that would be fantastic when they said it was GM Rice with some of the sharpest journalists in the country I said uh oh when they said don't worry these are very well informed articulate reporters and journalists I said thank you and in my mind they said that makes my life even more difficult but actually not really because I'm just here to moderate the session and please know that we are on a tight timeline so thank you very much again for joining us and we'll start without further ado. On our panel we have five individuals very well respected in their own fields and in the field of rice science and if I may just introduce them quickly the first to speak will be Clayton who is Public Relations Manager at IRI and the lead with her team who organized this particular session so thank you Tofi and your colleagues for making this possible So we manages a team who promotes and communicates IRI's rice research and its impact and benefits we also have Dr. Heil Young who is Principal Scientist and Program Leader, Genetic Diversity He is a Plant Pathologist and Geneticist with a primary interest in disease resistance and genetic diversity research Mr. Tam Navasaro is Senior Executive in leading start-up and publicly listed firms in the United States and Asia with a focus in turning around distressed assets and seeding growth He is the founding trustee of the Genomics Institute of Asia at the lab industries Dr. Akim Doberman is Deputy Director General for Research at IRI and he is a Soil Scientist and Agronomist with 25 years of experience working in Asia, North America and Europe and Dr. Antonio Alfonso who is the Coordinator of the Biotechnology Program at the Department of Agriculture is the current Coordinator at the Biotechnology Program and his research includes rice nutritional enhancement and improvement of resistance to drought and insect pests and diseases through conventional and non-conventional breeding methods So to start us off the Lead Organizer of this session PR Manager at IRI Ms. Sophie Clayton Thank you very much Tony Welcome everybody to Let's Talk GM Rice the media event of the 7th International Rice Genetics Symposium Rice genetics for those of you that don't know is a science behind understanding rice genes and is critical to developing new varieties of rice both GM and non-GM Since farmers first started cultivating rice and selecting their best performing rice to grow they have been changing the genetic composition of rice Today's rice breeders have much more sophisticated knowledge about rice genes and use that knowledge and modern ways to breed rice even better types of rice with a whole range of useful and beneficial characteristics The International Rice Genetics Symposium is all about understanding rice genes sharing that knowledge and using it to improve rice There is lots of fascinating rice genetic research that you can learn about across the symposium this week and I hope you all take the opportunity to go to the different sessions and talk to the scientists who are here to learn about their research The experts that's introduced already by Tony who can hopefully answer your questions specifically about GM rice and GM rice research at IRI and the Philippine Rice Research Institute I am not one of the experts on GM rice but part of my role is to help communicate what we are doing at IRI and why and we get lots of questions about GM rice At IRI we are committed to sharing all the wonderful science the institute does and communicating the impact rice research and the breeding of new rice varieties can have on reducing poverty and improving food security and rice consumers ourselves although maybe not at lunch today we know that the price of rice can directly impact our own lives If rice prices go up there's less money to buy other things But it's worse for those people who have the least When rice prices go up they can wreak havoc on these people's lives It may mean they can't afford other basics like a diversity of nutritious food and health care While we don't have farmers joining us today I would certainly encourage you to take the time to talk to a rice farmer sometime and you can talk to me or my team if you want to arrange that You will learn pretty quickly how much they value rice varieties that produce more rice and the impact producing more rice has on their lives and the lives of their families and communities To give you an idea of how rice genetics and rice breeding can help an assessment of IRI's work to develop new rice varieties showed that it was responsible for a rise in rice yields of 13% across nearly 25 years in three southeast Asian countries including the Philippines For farmers in the Philippines this means they now earn an extra 2300 pesos about 52 US dollars per hectare from using improved rice varieties to derive from the breeding work of IRI This kind of direct impact on the incomes of farmers goes a long way to lifting people out of poverty and more productive rice fields can lead to more rice in the market to sell which in turn can help rice prices to stay stable and affordable for rice consumers Therefore helping rice consumers out of poverty as well But what does all this have to do with GM rice? Well GM is one of the ways that we can breed new types of rice At IRI we are using GM to help us understand rice genes and to see if we can develop a new and vastly more productive type of rice known as C4 rice such as golden rice GM is also one of the topics we often get asked about even though it is a very small part of our overall research To set the scene it is important to start by stating that there are currently no commercially available GM rice varieties grown anywhere in the world yet However many organizations including IRI are researching GM rice because we believe GM rice has the potential to offer unique benefits that we can't achieve through other breeding methods But GM crops and GM food are not new Across the planet other GM crops have been grown since the 1990s and are currently planted by millions of farmers in around 30 countries on more than 170 million hectares Here in the Philippines GM corn is already grown by farmers and the number of other GM foods such as soybean and canola are approved for consumption and eaten here So while GM rice would be new it wouldn't be the first GM crop or food for the world, for Asia or even for the Philippines Nevertheless, we know people are curious about GM rice and have questions and concerns about it So we're looking forward to talking to you about our GM rice research today Thank you Thank you Sophie And we also in the interest of transparency and reaching as many interested members of the public as possible are webcasting this session through live.ere.org live.irri.org So for those of you who are blogging in the room would really appreciate the send out to your readers Also, there's live tweeting going on at hashtag Rice Genetics 7 Rice Genetics 7 one word Without further ado let's continue with Dr. Heilion who is the principal scientist and program leader of the genetic diversity and gene discovery group at IRI He will be talking about the value of rice genes Thank you Since we're talking about gene a lot in the next number of sessions So I'd like you to just get us on the same page Exactly 1955 that's when they discovered that DNA sequence actually DNA is a molecule is a chemical entity actually a cold gene that gives us our inheritance and characteristics So gene basically is a piece of DNA sequence on our chromosome like human, you and me have 23 pairs and in rice there are 12 pairs So just to visualize it a gene is sitting on the chromosome Now over the years of evolution gene accumulates differences and that's what constitutes genetic variation So the breeding program in IRI for years is relying on this enormous amount of genetic variation So rice as a crop is unusual in the sense that it's a very deep huge amount of variation and those of you may have attended this morning we talk about genetic variation for whole morning Rice is very well endowed and IRI particularly well endowed in the sense that FAO entrusted us to keep a gene band which holds about 117,000 accession So that is almost a goal mark for us to to find out genetic variation and try to understand and so for all the most of IRI activity I would say 95% of genetic work is surrounding these natural variation I came to talk about it GMO work is a relatively small proportion of what we do So I just want to explain a little bit how we exploring the gene band So the gene band as I said is 100,000 accession and yet we estimated plant breeding over the years or many years only use about 5% of the genetic variation and maybe we look at about 25% of the accession and so we really thinking only the tip of the iceberg in terms of using diversity So as I said most of the activity is surrounding about understanding the diversity and the meaning of it and try to use it and sometimes over the years we have a lot of assessors like stress tolerance like disease and insect resistance are coming from the natural variation and our more recent success including flood tolerance salinity salt tolerance and as well as drug tolerance So these are success that we can derive from the genetic variation and yet at times we want to look for something but it's not there so we have to look for additional means to enhance our breeding code and then today's topic about the golden rice finding pro vitamin A rice is one of that example that is we try our best in the past past few years to look for yellow rice because we think that vitamin A rice would be yellow so in such cases we have to look for other means that's the basis why we talk about the golden rice and there are other cases nutritional trade like iron maybe we don't have enough iron in the rice grain so we also explore other genetic engineering approaches so that lead to my point that in order to understand rice diversity and make good use of it so we are launching an ambitious program last started a few years ago is to using technology to sequence all the sessions or majority of sessions to reveal I would say the mystery or the coding the unknown about these rice sessions so by knowing just imagine knowing the fingerprint detail fingerprint DNA fingerprint of these sessions will allow us to make good use of it so I think it is timely for me to pass the microphone to Tom who will talk about how is his organization helping theory in working on this sequencing project Thank you Dr. Leon I'm Tom Nevesero I'm probably the non-geneticist here I learned most of my genetics from YouTube but as an engineer I understand semicon and the solution to sequencing 117,000 varieties in a good time or in a good economic way is to do it cheaply and fast as you know 10 years ago it took over what several years and 3 billion dollars to sequence the human genome I'd like to make an announcement today that GINA which stands for Genomic Insulin of Asia which we seated as a not-for-profit entity sequence the first Filipino reference for black rice so this will be announced on Friday and you're all welcome to join the launching of GINA at Erie this Friday for lunch so there we will hand off or hand over the first initial reference of the first Filipino rice reference black rice GINA as I said is not-for-profit quick food technology that can basically hopefully sequence one day the key varieties in that gene bank of Dr. Pichichang and those varieties can then be used by our researchers this machine uses a chip can you imagine we can do 20 rice genomes in one chip under 4 to 6 hours so there is possibility that we one day can at least do more than 5% of those 117,000 varieties and hopefully do all so that the researchers can find out specific phenotypes or specific characteristics that they can use for breeding rice for the future GINA does not stand for the Genetic Information Non-Discriminatory Act this is one thing we need in this country because genetics is growing very fast GINA stands for the Institute that will help Erie and we don't build institutions or facilities so we entered into a collaboration other not-for-profit program with Erie so we can help Erie's research with rice and we felt that this is important to us especially to another Sarah family because we've lived in Los Pines for the last 50 years and Erie was one of our first clients the key thing though is we are not just doing it for rice we are also going to start the Filipino reference for the Filipino human for medical purposes so one day we will complete the reference for the Filipinos and also improve the sequencing for our medical traits medical issues, cancer problems and so forth so GINA is here not just for ag vial but also for medical reasons thank you thank you Tom do we have any directly relevant questions to what Dr. Hay or Mr. Navasaro talks about we will have an opportunity to have a discussion at toward the end of the session okay so let's continue thank you and having discussed the richness of rice genetic diversity and the importance of using technology for genetic sequencing we now move to trying to answer the question why GM rice and to help us explore that we have Dr. Akim Doberman who is deputy director general for research at IRI I'll try to do this in relatively simple terms which is easy for me because I'm not a geneticist anyway so I can't really speak in very complicated terms that nobody understands the expectation is that with all the evolutionary progress that you've just heard about in terms of gene sequencing and the discovery of the functions of many of the genes that exist and many of the traditional as well as cultivated varieties of rice the expectation is that with all of that we are going to make tremendous progress in conventional breeding because if we have those genes or if we understand their function we can more specifically breed new rice varieties by choosing the right ones to cross with each other using molecular markers to look for the presence of the genes we want and basically achieve what I mentioned in my plenary talk this morning to use better rice varieties in half the time that in the past so that is the new big opportunity and it's conventional breeding enhanced with molecular biotechnology to it and so it is also a normal form of genetic modification but there is this other form of genetic modification that often is mentioned under the term of GM or GMO or transgenic that basically requires the transfer of one or more genes from another organism which could be another plant or microorganism or it could be even an animal of some kind into rice so that's the distinguishing factor coming from something else other than rice and the technology for that is such that it allows us to do this fairly precisely so we are able to really say if we wanted to change rice in a way that naturally achieved because it doesn't have enough variation in the available genetic gene pool of rice if we wanted to change it by engineering a certain biochemical pathway differently we need this or this gene from another organism to achieve that change so it's basically technology if you wish that achieves one or more genes that otherwise could be difficult to achieve or in some cases might evolutionary take millions of years to achieve if you wish so that's the background and I think it's very important to distinguish this has nothing to do with molecular breeding or hybrids so it's basically distinguishing technology in which we precisely try to change rice and so we always have to therefore make a strategic decision when does this make sense and when does it not make sense or default position for this is always it is much easier not to do it that way if we can so the majority of rice breeding is that way and why is that because if we can achieve the plant in a conventional sense we can release this variety quickly whereas if we go the transgenic route or the GMO route we have to follow a very long process into its many stages of evaluation and deregulation we have to go through biosafety approval we have to go through we have to do any kind of environmental or nutritional health impact studies and we have to do consumer acceptance studies so you can see the list of these things is long and therefore the development cost and time to do this would also be very long and expensive that is the fundamental reason or one of the fundamental reasons why until now no GM rise has been released and it has taken a long time and particularly public sector institutions often simply do not have the resources to do this the GM crops that have been commercialized worldwide have primarily been developed by large private companies including the BT the brand up ready corn that is now dominating the corn market in the Philippines so once under five years of gender and delights and they have a commercial interest to do this because they patented gene and put it into the background of a hybrid therefore you have a product to sell each year to your farmers when we do GM rise we have a very different philosophy number one is we only do it for traits that have potentially large humanitarian impact so when we talk about golden rice it is because there are millions of people particularly children and women who are vitamin A deficient in all attempts to get rid of this vitamin A deficiency have failed so far