www.checkbiotech.org ; www.raupp.info ; www.czu.cz

Flood resistant rice, developed this year with the help of genetic
engineering, may reach farmers as soon as 2009, helping them cope with
global warming and the extreme weather it is expected to bring, December
2006.

Scientists, led by David Mackill at the International Rice Research
Institute in the Philippines, announced in August that they had identified a
gene that enables rice to survive for up to two weeks in water.

It is regarded as one of the top breakthroughs in rice research this year as
flooding causes annual losses of over $US1 billion, with south and southeast
Asia the hardest hit.

Mackill said they were already conducting field trials in India and
Bangladesh and that they planned to extend it next year to Laos, Indonesia,
Cambodia and Myanmar.

"It's going pretty well," he told Reuters via telephone on Thursday,
referring to the tests in India and Bangladesh that could lead to
commercialisation of the variety.

"If everything goes well, we might see it in two years. That would probably
be in 2009," he said.

Mackill and Pamela Ronald at the University of California at Davis said they
were also sending the rice seed to China, the world's top rice producer and
consumer, which faces many floods and droughts each year.

Though the flood resistance rice on trial is not genetically modified, they
used genetic engineering to identify the submergence-tolerant gene after
decades of attempts to do so via conventional methods, they said.

"We are quite excited," said Ronald, adding the technique could also be used
to identify other complex genes for traits such as drought- or
salt-tolerance.

"I think this is really the first case where we've been able to successfully
identify one of the key traits," said Ronald.

The scientist is also known for her disease-resistant Xa21 rice - one of the
top candidates to become the world's first GMO rice grown commercially,
possibly in China.

The breakthrough came in a year full of renewed warnings about the
devastating effects of climate change.

The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research also said new
crops were needed to prepare the most vulnerable.

Mackill and Ronald said they used the non-GMO species for field trials
partly due to consumer concerns over the safety of GMO products.

"What we would like to do is get something we can use quickly," said
Mackill.

"Right now, there is really no GMO rice approved for commercialisation. So
the countries would have to develop safety guidelines and all that. That may
take time."

But looking further ahead, the scientists did not exclude the possibility of
also developing GMO species.

"Consumers are not aware of the huge potential of genetic engineering,"
Ronald said.

"The marker assisted breeding is quite limited because you can't change the
gene. We can only attain a tolerance of about two weeks under water ... We
are trying to enhance that tolerance for in the future when people are not
so worried about GMO."

[www.smh.com.au]

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