Author : Ebora, Reynaldo V.

Summary : The Philippines, in order to be agriculturally competitive has to acquire new technologies and actively participate in technology transfer from developed countries. The development of transgenic plants with inherent resistance to insect pests will be an important component which can be integrated into a pest management program since its use is compatible with almost all control measures like chemical, cultural, biological, or the use of resistant varieties. At present, there are no commercially available transgenic plants yet in the Philippines and most of the transgenic plants in the country are just in the research and development (R&D) stage. Since all of the present commercially available transgenic plants, are temperate varieties, there is a need to produce our own transgenic plants, or to introgress or cross breed these temperate transgenic plants to local high yielding. In corn for example, efforts are directed toward the introduction of Bt toxin to local varieties for resistance to Asian corn borer and other caterpillar pests. IRRI has a transformation program developing stem borer resistant rice by introducing the Bt gene in the rice genome. The use of transgenic plants in the Philippines is definitely very different than those previously deployed in developed countries like the USA or Canada because of the differences in ecology, and farming systems. Filipino scientists and farmers should therefore conceptualize the best deployment strategies for transgenic plants in the Philippines considering that ours is a tropical country and where farmers are owning only small pieces of land planted to different crops.