The Southeast Asia Regional Initiatives for Community Empowerment (SEARICE) along with the Western Mindanao State University has sponsored a forum on 21 July 2010 at the WIMSU Gym to inform the public about the decision of the Philippine National Halal Board to  include a provision on the Philippine National Halal Standards (PNHS) on GMO foods indicating that these (along with cloned animals) are “not subject to certification”, citing in the annex the perspective on GMOs lifted from the Muslim Mindanao Halal Certification Board (MMHCB) Guidelines, which indicate that GMOs are to be considered as masbooh, neither halal nor haram but best to avoid.

"Contrary to what was published in the Sunstar on 20 July 2010, SEARICE has been and is always been critical of GMOs in food and agriculture" said, Jean Yasol, SEARICE campaigns officer.  Yasol added that safety issues regarding GMOs remain a gray area. There is no consensus yet among the scientific community with regards to safety of GMOs and its effects to public health. To date, contamination of GMOs to local seed supplies and to the environment remains one of the unresolved issues surrounding GMOs.  GMOs have been presented as a quick fix to various problems such as hunger and climate change".

Good day to all. I am Eduardo Ybot, a farmer from President Roxas, North Cotabato and a member of Sustainable and Ecological Education on Diversity of Seeds kon SEEDS –a farmers’ organization that strives to conserve local and traditional seeds in North Cotabato.

Farming is not an easy way of life. Farming feeds my family and sends my 3 children to school. I till a half-hectare of rice land and a half-hectare of upland vegetable farm. It is a reality that if I depend on rice farming alone, I would not able to support my family.

I started rice farming in 1974, at the height of the Green Revolution. I was one of the farmers who convinced my fellow farmers to embrace Masagana 99. We attended seminars to avail of loans from Masagana 99 because we were ignorant of the new technologies developed by IRRI – new seeds that use fertilizers and pesticides.

In my experience, my yield increased. But later on, when we stopped applying fertilizers, pesticides, and stopped using the seeds developed by IRRI, our yield declined. We ended up depending on this modern technology and in the process, lost our traditional ways of farming that did not require use of fertilizers and pesticides.

Because we relied on the use of modern technology, we learned to resort to loans from traders and middlemen because fertilizers and pesticides were expensive. As consequence, even if we have good harvest, we did not earn. The irony is that, instead of farmers dictating the price of our produce, it is the traders that determine the price of our products. This is the effect of Green Revolution on our way of life.

This is the reason why we at SEEDs strive to develop seeds that do not require fertilizers and pesticides, can withstand drought, can resist pest and diseases and that we do not have to borrow loans. We continue to discover technologies how to manage our farms that do not harm our health and our communities.

At present, there are new technologies that are being developed and promoted to us such as the use of GMOs, hybrid rice among others. They say that these technologies will address the problem of food production. But what is new? What will change when we still have to resort to buying seeds every cropping season? This was the same promise of Green Revolution before. We are fed up with such promises.

What food security are we talking about? We are not even sure of these technologies as the effects on the environment, health, water and soil are still unknown.

In the span of IRRI’s 50 years, nothing has changed in our way of life. We have become indebted. Because IRRI is already 50 years old, it is about time that IRRI listens to the voices and pleas of small farmers like me.

I hope IRRI focuses and supports the efforts of smallholder farmers who are continuously developing and discovering ways and technologies that will free us from the bondage of debts, that are clean and safe for our health and our environment, instead of pushing for uncertain technologies such as hybrid rice and GMOs.

Eduardo Ybot, April 14, 2010

The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), the world's leading rice research center, commemorates the 50th year of its establishment this year on the heels of one of the worst rice supply crisis the world has experienced. The crisis reached its height in 2008 and its effects continue to be felt today. Ironically, one of the countries severely hit by the crisis was the Philippines, the world's largest net importer of rice and host to IRRI for half a century already.

The rice crisis shows that fifty years of massive rice research and development by IRRI, costing millions of mainly public dollars has not helped secure global rice supply and assist countries, especially the rice eating nations, to anticipate and prepare for such crisis situations. IRRI has failed to address global food security.

While the rice crisis was multi-faceted in its causes, from socio-economic to political and to environmental dimensions, it is clear that IRRI, after many years of research and development, has failed to develop technologies, approaches and strategies in rice production appropriate and adapted to changing conditions and contexts farmers, communities and consumers around the world.

Such a failure unfortunately stems from a paradigm that has plagued IRRI from its very start, and this basically adheres to the concept of "technology of yield at whatever the cost and whatever the effects."

IRRI has indeed transformed rice farming from one rooted in local cultures to one that is dictated mainly by profit-motives of those who control the technologies of production and the markets of consumption. The environmental damage wrought by IRRI-introduced chemical-based rice agriculture remains to be fully measured.

Moreover, IRRI has cultivated the corporate agenda into its rice research and development by entering into R&D agreements with agro-chemical and biotech companies, such as Bayer, Du Pont, Syngenta, BASF, Dow Agroscience, Monsanto, Group Limagrain, Lan o’Lakes and Devgen.

Thus, even at the height of the rice crisis, IRRI continued to promote the same perspective of technological fixes revolving around the development and adoption of genetically modified rice and hybrid rice, among others, as solutions to the problems at hand. If such solutions are to be adopted at wider scale, we can only wait for the next rice crisis to explode, and the worst may yet to come.

It is time for rice to be taken back into the hands of farmers, communities and consumers. We believe that rice can be grown and produced in ways that respect cultures, empower farmers, protect the environment, provide sufficient economic benefits to producers, and supply healthy food for all.

We believe that rice is much too valuable to allow IRRI to set the direction for its future as a crop and staple for more than a billion people.

IRRI should change its paradigm and its ways, or remain irrelevant and a failure to farmers, communities and consumers.

Contact details:

Paul Borja,SEARICE Policy Information Unit Coordinator

Mobile: +63917511-9498

Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

(Top: SEARICE banner; 2nd and 3rd from top: protest action at IRRI)

April 14, 2010--SEARICE, a regional NGO engaged in community-based crop breeding in 5 Asian countries, is calling on the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) to stop developing and propagating “Frankenstein rice,” or genetically modified (GM) rice varieties, in the Philippines because of the potential hazards this poses on human health and the environment.

The IRRI marks its 50^th anniversary on April 14, yet SEARICE and its farmer-partners maintain that IRRI has yet to get its priorities straight. For instance, the IRRI is pinning its hopes on the C4 rice project, which aims to “re-engineer” rice to make it more efficient in using water and fertilizers, and thus boost its yield. The C4 project, which is being funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, will reportedly bring about a second Green Revolution.

“Why should Filipino farmers welcome another Green Revolution when the first one has had such disappointing results,” says Jean Yasol, SEARICE policy officer. In fact, the Philippines--IRRI’s host country for the last 50 years—has become one of the most food insecure countries in the world and is now the top exporter of rice. IRRI might have produced the “miracle rice” of the 1970s but that miracle proved to be momentary and unsustainable given the rising cost of fertilizers and pesticides that farmers have had to shoulder.

Moreover, the rice shortage which hit countries in 2008 was especially severe in the Philippines. While the rice crisis could not be attributed to any particular action of IRRI, it has nonetheless been questioned for persisting in its strategy of pushing yield frontiers to address the rice production problem. This strategy is exemplified by IRRI’s promotion of costly technologies, such as hybrid rice, GM rice, and more recently, the C4 rice project. Instead, IRRI should be trying to address the gap between yields achieved in its research stations and actual yields in farmers’ fields where conditions are far from ideal.

IRRI continues to pin its hopes on technology as the solution to poverty despite evidence of its failure. The Green Revolution in particular has worsened inequalities between resource-rich and poor rice farmers across Southeast Asian countries, and led to the further marginalization of small farmers.

Observers speculate that the research agenda of IRRI is being driven by giant agrochemical and biotech companies such as Bayer, Du Pont, Syngenta, BASF, Dow Agroscience, Monsanto, Group Limagrain, Lan o’Lakes and Devgen, with which IRRI has entered into agreements in recent years.

The perception that IRRI is serving business interests more than those of governments and farmers may be an indication of an emerging trend. SEARICE expects that at the rate it is going, IRRI will be generating technologies that would rely on agrochemical inputs and would create dependency on companies. Technologies will become less and less accessible to small farmers.

“We have yet to see an IRRI that considers rice farmers, its primary constituency, as real partners in its research and development work,” says Yasol. “We have yet to see the day when smallholder farmers determine and drive IRRI’s research agenda, through their active participation in all aspects of research and development and by being allowed to innovate and “own” the technology.”

SEARICE believes that unless IRRI reforms itself, and becomes relevant to small farmers, it should have no reason to celebrate—whether the past 50 years, or the next 50.--by Teresa L. Debuque