"This is a historical breakthrough for the Philippines. We last exported rice 30 years ago," said SL Agritech Corp. (SLAC) Chairman Henry Lim Bon Liong in an interview.

The export was committed by SLAC through a memorandum of agreement (MoA) signed last Feb. 26 with state-owned Bangladesh Agricultural Development Corp. The volume, equivalent to 10,000 bags (at 20 kilos per bag) or 10,000 hectares, is part of Bangladesh’s own effort to accelerate growth in rice production and fight hunger in its poverty-stricken communities.

The 10,000 bags of seed export is only an initial volume as the company targets to enable planting of the tropical hybrid rice variety on at least 10 percent or 100,000 hectares out of one million hectares of potential rice land in Bangladesh.

The Philippines exported a total of about 600,000 MT of commercial rice including to Bangladesh over at least three years in the 1970s.

Amid the country’s apparent success to return to the export market, Lim expressed a warning that Bangladesh may eventually overtake the Philippines as an exporter of commercial rice after importing the seeds.

Now world’s biggest rice exporters — Thailand and Vietnam— trained their technicians to learn techniques of growing rice at the University of the Philippines at Los Banos and other local institutions several years back..

"The irony is if we don’t want to discipline ourselves, we might later import rice from Bangladesh," he said.With a program of Department of Agriculture (DA) for a P20 billion program for rehabilitation of irrigation systems in three years, Lim believes the Philippines can not only be sufficient in rice but can become a rice exporter.

DA has set a P4.4 billion irrigation repair program in 2006, P7 billion in 2007, and P8 billion in 2008 which is on top of the regular budget of the National Irrigation Administration (NIA) and the DA’s regular rice program budgeted with P1 billion in 2005.

Some hybrid rice exporters in Isabela led by Romeo Vasquez has been planning to export hybrid rice to the Middle East, but they have yet to gather a bigger volume of rice so as to make shipments cheaper, and they must be able to prove reliability of supply.

Despite the shipment of the hybrid rice seeds, the Philippines’ becoming a net exporter of rice remains to be a far-fetched dream since the country is already set to import at least one million MT of rice this year with only a 14.6 million MT rice output in 2005, a negligible growth of 0.6 percent from 14.5 million MT in 2005.

With the absence of intensive marketing, distribution, and technologydemonstration costs, the company will be exporting the seeds at a slim margin and at a price which Bangladesh finds to be economically-viable for its own hybrid rice propagation.

Hybrid rice, which has enabled farmers to hit at least a six to seven MT per hectare yield compared to the inbred seed’s three MT per hectare, is expected to produce the same high yield in Bangladesh with earlier field testings. The tropical hybrid rice variety has even hit a record yield of 17.2 MT per hectare in Baao, Camarines Sur which is now the world’s second highest rice yield just next to China’s 18.4 MT per hectare.