The Bureau of Plant Industry (BPI) opened on Tuesday a P3.1-million facility that will test the entry of genetically modified organisms (GMO) and secure food safety and ensure that local crops are not contaminated by illegal imports.

The testing facility for plant pathogen and GMO detection will enable the Philippines to keep up with its neighboring countries in GMO detection capability even as liberalized trade has been opening up the local market to more potential contaminants.

“It will enable us to test unapproved transformation events (GMOs). We have to be more careful in allowing the entry (of imported commodities) specially now with the approval of Bt rice in China,” said BPI Plant Quarantine Officer-in-Charge Merle B. Palacpac during the launching of the laboratory in Los Baños, Laguna.

Costing only P2 million under an initial budget proposal, the facility obtained a bigger budget from the Department of Agriculture’s (DA) Biotech Program Implementing Unit (PIU) in an aim to upgrade the earlier two-room laboratory into a five-room laboratory. This will make local GMO detection technology closer to other South East Asian countries technologies.

The facility further needs to acquire a P5 million real time PCR (polymerase chain reaction) device which is several times more powerful than regular PCR, according to Dr. Antonio Laurena of the Institute of Plant Breeding.

The real time PCR machine is capable showing result of the presence of a GMO from a sample in just 15 minutes while the regular PCR will take four hours to produce the results, Laurena said. The real time PCR has more powerful detection capability, easily identifying a single GMO seed in 2000 seeds. The regular PCR device has limited detection capability, being able to detect one GMO seed in say only 100 seeds.

Palacpac said the project involves a highly-necessary personnel training in laboratory activities such as sample preparation, genomic DNA isolation, use of PCR, electrophoresis, staining and visualization of DNA. The program is also supported by the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (ISAAA).

At present, detection kits are mostly only commercially available for approved GMOs, while government does not have extensive capability to test for unapproved GMOs that may be illegally dumped into the local market.

Since the need for biotechnology techniques in the country is increasing, Palacpac said it looks apparent that the government should up a separate agency for biotechnology compared to the present setup where all related biotechnology activities (whether involving plant or animals) are still all under DA.

While budget allocation for these critical facilities is so limited, BPI Asst. Sec. Clarito Baron said DA is introducing a reorganization where DA-Biotech will have a more fixed, and hopefully an increased, budget.