 substitute to normal vegetables. So that's one question that we received from Twitter. And sir, can you add your question, please? Yes. Good afternoon. I'm Elo, Oune, from China Rated International. My question is, have you ever made a study as far as possible, average yields of various countries in Asia in relation to their average annual birth rates? Thank you. Vegetables and a question on average yields and birth rates. Projection. Maybe I, on the vegetables, I like vegetables, like many others, because they're rich enough to afford them. So the question, so the ultimate solution, obviously, also for people who are currently vitamin A deficient is that someday they should also be able to have and see a more diverse food intake including vegetables and other sources of vitamin A after the lifestyle product life. The question is, how do we get there? There are many who say, well, why don't you just teach people how to have home gardens? Well, that's a nice idea if you have a garden, if you have land, time to grow something. If you live as a squatter in Manila, you don't have a home garden. So then there are others who say, well, why don't you fortify food with micro-nutrients and vitamin A, or vitamin D? You have pills, pills, supplementation programs, which also have been running for a long time here in the Philippines. The partners that we work with from the health community into the NGOs like Helen Keller International tell us that these programs are simply not sufficient because they do not reach into the deep pornoes all the way where you need to have, where you have those most deficient people. So they're not sustainable programs often because they cost money and you can only run them with a certain logistic setup. So they have done this for many, many years and progress has been relatively limited. So that's why an intervention that focuses on a stable food crop. Golden rice is not the only one in Africa. There has been a lot of emphasis on orange sweet potato or orange maize as a stable food crop. An intervention that focuses on a food crop that is your basic carbohydrate supply on a daily basis brings up your supply level right away. You will still need on top of that other sources of vitamin A, vegetable or even from processed food. But it brings up your supply. Our goal is 50% of the daily need through eating golden rice, not more, not 100%, 50% in those people who need it. And then you have these other sources to hopefully have a healthier diet. And if, of course, you economically advance and have higher income, you can buy more of these other sources then you really need less of the golden rice someday. So we look at it as in some ways a temporary solution that may be needed to overcome a lingering problem that has not been solved for decades, a lingering problem once and for all within the next 50 years. And that's, I think, a responsibility that we have also for the next generation in some ways. So what it's, I think, in the end, all about also giving people a choice. And for some reason, some people think they do not want to eat GM rice. And that's just your choice. It's like me saying, well, I'm eating meat. And they're saying, no, I don't want to eat meat. Or some people suggesting that the only food to eat is organically grown food, whereas others say, no, I don't care. We should give people choices. We should not dictate to them what is good for them or what is bad. Dr. He, any additional comments? Yes. I think the golden rice is one option. If you are economically well off, I think, obviously, that source of diet doesn't give you that. So I agree with Kim on this. There was a question about the relationship between average rice yields and annual growth rates. My simple answer is, I do not know if any of that study would be an interesting study to conduct, but I don't know. But about average yields considering gladmate change and everything? Well, we know the year trends of rice in every country. And there are big differences, obviously. Some countries in the last 20 years have had big yield increases, Vietnam, for example. Others have stagnated. Thailand is in that category, for example. What about the Philippines? The Philippines is like modest increases. And sometimes, affected by extreme weather or climate, we have a lot of disasters here in the country. But there are also some countries which have had much faster increases. The reasons for this are very complicated. There are many reasons. There are endowment with land and water. There's climate. There are political decisions. There's investment. So it's not easy to say this country has done better than this country because of this, this, and this. What about government spending in agriculture? Government spending is still, I think, the primary force. And if there are fluctuations in this, if there is not sufficient attention to agriculture, you will not have a sustained growth. So where does the Philippines stand? I want to speak. I have done a comparison. I stand for government spending in the Philippines. I would be actually looking this up myself. Something for further discussion. Okay, we have Custer, then Sol, and then Melody. Unfortunately, I think that's our last round of questions. Custer, your calories from that, I'll do that. Considering the present status of GM rice, when do we have any time on the target when consumers can buy it from groceries as golden rice or even golden brown rice? That's my first question. Second question, with regards to the environment, do we have, does it have an impact on contaminating the genetic resources of our indigenous rice? Do we have a wide-scale plantation of golden rice or some genetic and market diverse? Sir, please, can you enlighten me on what really happens when we do the field tests of the golden rice and what are we expecting from the conduct of these field tests? And third question is that, in the light of the August attack on the field test of golden rice, what steps have you taken and you will be taking before the end of the year? Are there any concrete steps or actions that you're going to take? So it's somewhere that golden rice has already been tested with the targeted vitamin A deficient children. I'm not sure, but if there is, could you update us on results? Okay, thank you for the questions. Regarding the timeline, we have a step-by-step multi-triode approach in evaluating golden rice. So we start from the contained experiments, then we go on a limited, confined field testing, one site, one location, and then finally, multi-location field testing, several systems and several locations. We have completed the multi-location field testing. Well, we need to review our data. If we have sufficient and complete data, so we can submit them to the Bureau of Plant Industry. We need to evaluate the effect of the destruction of our built sites in PD. But if we have our way, then we would like to proceed with submitting the dossier couple in the next few months. So that's the timeline. In terms of when it's going to be available for farmers to plant and for the consumers to meet, we don't know because the regulators will determine how fast it determines the completeness and validity of those data. So they will have their own timeline in terms of evaluation. Somebody mentioned about one of the questions about golden rice getting incorporated to other rice production systems. That's not a big concern, especially once we get by safety approval because what's the concern? It's safe and annoying. But for those, for the rice that we produce in the Philippines and export to other countries and we still have approval yet for GM rice, then we will have to be very careful that golden rice will not be planted in those areas where heirloom rice is being planted. And in terms of what do we expect from the field trial, well, field testings are very important to the evaluation of products like golden rice because you want to see how they actually grow in the field. And I'd like to tell you that there's no difference between golden rice and golden added rice unless you see how much of the grain you see that golden rice is yellow and golden added rice is white. And field trials are also very important because that's how we produce the grains that will be evaluated in laboratories in terms of composition, beta-arutin level and so on. So in terms of the question on what's our plan regarding the destruction of one of our field trial sites, we are contemplating filing legal action but that's not definite yet. We are still reviewing it, but it's a possibility. And on Melody's question whether golden rice has been tested on human, no, it's not, no such study was done for being done in the Philippines. Wait. It's in the timeline but not at this time. We might be able to do that once we get the biosecurity. Once. Might or... But it's plan of evaluation. That's bioefficacy, we will. We will do a nutrition study once we get the biosecurity. But that will be down the line. What's the nutrition study that is most like a clinical study of... Nutrition study, bioefficacy, does it work? How much improvement in the vitamin A status will the consumption of golden rice and regular basis for 30 days, something like that. And that study will be conducted by the Helip, Healer International because HKI has the expertise to do that kind of study. So you'll do this kind of study in the Philippines with children and adults? We will see, but what we have in mind will be the adults first. And how about children? The children maybe later because it's also very important to have that kind of information. So they will have to be included in any nutrition study? Yes, some are down the line, but initially they are adults and also the women. It's because the women and the children are forgettable in terms of vitamin A deficiency. But eventually... Eventually, yes. The first thing to establish is that people who eat golden rice can actually effectively convert the beta-carotene that is embedded in a starch matrix and rice, effectively converted into vitamin A in a human body. That's what we call bioefficacy. So that is our main target. So because if we can show that, and that has already been demonstrated in some other studies, that it is as efficient or even more efficient than eating the old beta-carotene from another source like carrots or green leafy vegetables, then you have proved that this is something that will have the intended nutritional impact on these people. So the current knowledge that we have suggests that the beta-carotene from a starch source like golden rice is actually more efficient than the beta-carotene-ventated leafy green vegetables. So it's actually very promising, but as Tony has pointed out, once we have bio-safety approval in the Philippines, there is need to do a few more subsequent nutrition studies. It's part of the process. We want ourselves to be 100% sure that it has the intended nutritional benefit and that it also has no harmful effects on anybody eating it. We don't expect that. There's no evidence for any of that, but of course it is our responsibility to study that very carefully. And as Tony said, he wants to eat it himself and his family, so he will push anything out for release that is not safe. Sir, how lovely to take you so far to develop golden rice, because you are talking of the long process. Yeah, since when has the history been doing this? Okay, so the whole history is actually quite long. I think active research on golden rice is now crap. If you include the very early stages, I would say it's about 20 years. 20 years now, out of now. Yeah, but here in the Philippines, of course, it took off... Well, there was a first-most discovery of the actual biochemical pathway, the gene. So that was basic science done by a scientist in Switzerland and a scientist in Germany. So the active work here in the Philippines, where we now focus on actually making it into a variety for release, that's probably been going on for a little more than 10 years. We started in 2006, yeah. Yeah, so it was a little bit of a precursor, so it's actually less than 10 years of the breeding process. But these things take time, and the problem is that, well, not the problem, but we have no interest in rushing something out. We want to do it carefully, step by step, also because it's a new thing also for the Philippines as a country. So, sir, excuse me, are you eyeing my safety approval? Where is the end of 2013? When we submit to those years, there is a response time that is, I think, was it 90 days or 60? 90 days, yeah. So we cannot control the response time. So we will try to submit it within the next few months, but then whether, how fast the response is, is out of our control as a decision by the biosafety committee. Do those three countries, does it take longest here in the Philippines? We are furthest ahead and present in the Philippines, well, also because we started doing it. But the process in the other countries could catch up at some point. Thank you very much. So at this point, we would like to say few last things and then invite you back down to Plenary. What's your name? Yeah, yeah, which is going on right now. So we started the session with Sophie Clayton talking about the science behind understanding rice genes and that it has the huge potential to help farmers and consumers, but that it's not the first GM crop or food. And then we heard from Dr. Yaw, the richness of rice genetic diversity, 117,000 or so, and that we're only able to exploit around 5% of that. And from Tom Navasera of the technologies that we can use in speeding up the process in genome sequencing, then from Dr. Doberman, when does it make sense to use GM versus conventional breeding? The GM route is a long process as we've been discussing quite exhaustively over the past few minutes. And it makes sense when there is a great benefit to rice producers and consumers. And that such as golden rice where there is a big humanitarian need and Dr. Alfonso expounded on that, that there is massive vitamin A deficiency in some subpopulations in the Philippines and in other countries that leads to sickness, blindness, and in some cases even death, especially among women and children. And lastly, there were questions about regulatory process, there were questions about other kinds of studies and the like, et cetera, et cetera. And just wanted to share that, or just wanted to point out that we did this in an hour or so. And that's really wonderful. So thank you for the engagement. Thank you to Sophie and her public relations team for putting this together. Thank you to our panel. Thank you to Marco and his team for helping us with the live stream and others for monitoring the tweets, et cetera, et cetera. So see you downstairs and for the rest of the conference. We hope. You haven't had lunch yet?