Earlier this year, University of the Philippines Los Baños’ Institute of Plant Breeding (IPB) held its first-ever International Plant Breeding Conference at The Manila Hotel as part of its 50th founding anniversary celebration.

The two-day conference brought together some of the world’s most respected plant breeding experts and personalities. One of the highlights of the program was a fashion show showcasing abaca fabric held in collaboration with the Department of Science and Technology – Philippine Textile Research Institute (PTRI) and the Department of Science and Technology – Philippine Council for Agriculture, Aquatic and Natural Resources Research and Development.

Called “KatHABI: Textile Innovation Fashion Show x IPB Abaca Hybrid,” it featured garments made from an IPB-developed abaca hybrid blended with other locally sourced natural fibers.

I spoke with PTRI Director Dr. Julius Leaño, Jr. about the potential of cultivating abaca for textile.

Not your regular abaca

The first thing Leaño explained was that the abaca fiber used to create the textile  showcased isn’t the kind associated with the high value crop, but a type crossed with another banana species (abaca itself being a type of banana). “Abaca is plagued by two viruses: mosaic and bunchy top,” he said in Taglish. “The clever idea was to cross abaca with a native banana species that… is disease resistant.”

The resulting plant that is 50 percent abaca and 50 percent banana is then back-crossed to abaca, and the resulting plant back-crossed further until results achieved 90 percent genomic character from abaca. Back crossing is a plant breeding technique where a hybrid is crossed with one of its parent plants to strengthen certain genetic traits.

“The downside was its tensile strength suffered,” Leaño said, tensile strength being one of the biggest reasons Philippine abaca dominated the global marine cordage industry until the advent of plastic.

However, researchers discovered other characteristics: the resulting fiber was finer, whiter, and wasn’t prone to the bunchy top virus. In short, it had great potential as a textile crop. First called Bandala, it was later launched as the Dioscoro 1 variety, though Leano said that they will continue to use “Bandala” when referring to textile, which only took two years to develop. “If you analyze it genomically, abaca is a Filipino plant, so it must be used.”

A high value crop

Leaño also stressed its agricultural importance. “It still is a farmer’s plant. Many farming communities on the eastern seaboard are still dependent on abaca,” he said. “Abaca is also  a climate-resilient model for farming. It grows back in a year or two after a storm.”

He added that compared to other fibers, abaca is the cheapest, and it also currently has the most advanced supply chain. “There’s also a lot of opportunity because its standards for textiles haven’t been established yet.”

The textile industry consumes a lot of fiber, especially now that there’s a growing consumer demand for natural textile. “You talk about tons, you don’t talk about kilograms,” Leaño said. “We can compare this against the more expensive pineapple and banana fibers. You can buy abaca at ₱100 to ₱ 150 per kilo, while pineapple would shoot as high as ₱600 per kilo and banana as high as ₱400... Those are some of the considerations in the commercialization of the abaca.”

Textile as an expression of nationhood

Leaño is proud of Dioscoro 1, the result of cooperation between two agencies. “After IPB planted and harvested, we were called in to document the characteristics of their output versus native abaca. This is good because you can see how organizations work together, and how it did not end as a publication, but it actually was the start of another commodity,” he said. “It was really a consummation of sorts, of something they developed that could result in economic activity. It’s that complementation with IPB that we’re trying to use for other fiber commodities.”

PTRI’s future plans involve using the same model to revive Philippine cotton and other plants that may be used for fibers. They also plan to use digital printing to associate native flora with Filipino textile. “We have a lot of gumemela, musa, hoyas, and other Philippine flora that may be used as our own identity for digital printing,” Leaño explained. “Do you know how when you see certain digital prints, you know that they’re Japanese, Chinese, or African? We want to create our own print that will immediately be associated with the Philippines…  We are using  stock photos of plants from IPB to showcase something that’s really ours, and I think that it’s a very nice complementation of a plant breeding institution and an industrial research institution like PTRI.”