Rice and Goats

Thanks to the generosity of Romeo and his colleagues, I spend two days touring the various research facilities of the Central Luzon State University in the Science City of Munoz.


I visited the Philippines Rice Research Institute, or PhilRice, and was shown the ways in which they are improving rice breeds to resist insects, grow faster, need less fertiliser and so on. The photo shows part of their gene bank of rice varities. I was particularly interested in Golden Rice, which is a genetically modified form of rice that helps to prevent blindness in children. It has a higher dose of a precursor to Vitamin A, so that people who eat it can make more Vitamin A. About half of Filipino children suffer from Vitamin A deficiency, and this can lead to blindness if severe. Golden Rice is one way of addressing this problem in a country where rice contributes about 40% of the calories in the average diet. I asked the researchers about the public reaction to GM foods and they said that there had been no adverse public reaction. There is not the same kind of uninformed hysteria about GM foods in Asia as there is in Europe.


One of the products marketed by PhilRice is tapuy, or rice wine. The chap who was giving me the tour of PhilRice was the artist who, amongst other things, designed bottle labels. He showed me his labels for the wine, and lamented the fact that the Filipino Cabinet had apparently refused to allow production of his label. The label had a drawing of a Filipino indigenous person drinking rice wine. The cabinet apparently felt that it was politically incorrect to show an indigenous person drinking alcohol in public. And so the label was changed to a picture of some rice. The photo shows the artist's labels on the right with the new ones on the left.


I visited the Small Ruminants Centre where I met a bunch of goats of varying breeds. The Centre also had ten sheep, grazing under the tamarind trees. I told the researcher that my family were sheep farmers and he asked how many sheep my family owned. I said 'about 4,000' and he laughed and said something like, 'oh for a minute there I thought you said 4,000'. I nodded and said that was correct - about 4,000 sheep on about 2,000 acres. The look he gave me was priceless. He'd clearly never heard of such things. I had to explain that in Australian terms it wasn't a particularly big farm, but I don't think he believed me.