Local agriculture expert hails Monsanto

A local representative of the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) hailed yesterday a move by Monsanto, a worldwide leader in agricultural research, to make available its rice genome map to public researchers and development institutions.

Dr. Emil Q. Javier, technical advisory committee chairman of FAO's Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, said Monsanto's gesture was a "most welcome development for the global scientific community, particularly for the developing countries."

"We take this as an extremely positive and encouraging sign that the private sector is open to arrangements that will allow developing countries access to the best that science can offer on equitable terms," Javier said in a statement.

Monsanto, a wholly owned subsidiary of Pharmacia, announced earlier a major scientific breakthrough in decoding the genetic make-up of rice, adding it will share its findings with researchers around the world.

The company also revealed that a "working draft" of the rice genome has been completed, providing the first and most extensive genetic detail of 12 chromosomes of rice.

This will enable agricultural scientists to greatly accelerate the development of more nutritious and higher yielding rice which would also be pest and disease resistant, and adaptable to any environmental situations.

The study is expected to lead to further understanding of the genetic structure of other plants such as corn, wheat, rye, barley, oats, millet and sorghum.

Monsanto's rice genome research was conducted at the University of Washington in Seattle under the supervision of Dr. Leroy Hood.

Monsanto aims to make available its rice sequence files and the tools used in the study, to the International Rice Genome Sequence Project (IRGSP) which has research teams in 10 countries working to complete the entire genome sequence of rice.

IRGSP was established because of the "tremendous resources" required to complete the task which could be completed sooner through multinational collaboration.

Countries actively involved in IRGSP are Japan, the United States, China, Korea, France, Taiwan, Great Britain, Thailand, Canada and India.

Monsanto will transfer the data of its working draft to the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) of Japan, the leading IRGSP agency.

MAFF will, in turn, make the data available to IRGSP members for use in completing the entire sequence of the rice genome which was initially expected to be completed in 10 years to the tune of more than $200 million.

But with the data provided by Monsanto, the researchers are expected to speed up their mission by several years.