East West Seeds Corp. (EWSC), a pioneering hybrid vegetable seed producer, has opened an P80 million research and development (R&D) facility in Lipa, Batangas which is the most sophisticated privately-owned R&D facility in the Philippines as it aims to keep its leadership in the hybrid vegetable seed sector.

The plant was opened early this month and is actually an expansion of its original R&D facility in Lipa city, Batangas which sits on a 13-hectare land. Its other R&D Center is located in Bulacan.

"We invested in it through internally general rated fund and some financing so we can improve our breeding. (I think) there is no facility like this yet in the Philippines. And what we have in the Philippines now is comparable to what we have in Thailand now," said Ric M. Reyes, EWSC product manager, in an interview.

EWSC, a multinational company also present in Vietnam, India, Indonesia, and China, has its headquarters in Thailand.

The company claims to capture 80 percent of the market in lowland vegetable seed market. This includes crops like bitter gourd (ampalaya), pumpkin, eggplant, okra, and yard-long bean.

Plant breeding laboratories normally have functions for tissue culture, DNA fingerprinting which facilitates identification of desired trait in plants through molecular markers, biotechnology, and mutation techniques. A germplash repository is important in some plant breeding centers. Cytometry measurement equipment allows for determination of ploidy levels in plants or the number of complete sets of chromosomes in biological cell as part of the breeding process. Some advanced plant breeding technologies employ irradiation techniques using Cobalt 60 for mutation.

After having thrived in Asia, Reyes said the company is also aggressively pursuing expansion in other developing countries particularly in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. It has been looking at Guatemala, Brazil, Mexico for Latin America. EWSC initially operated only in the Philippines in 1982 which was its first commercial site.