Korea repays a 50-year-old rice debt — with a $14.95 million genomics lab for Filipino farmers

The Philippines has opened its first agricultural genomics centre at the University of the Philippines Los Baños, funded by a $14.95 million project from Korea's KOICA with the International Rice Research Institute as partner. IRRI director general Yvonne Pinto calls it "a beautiful story of giving back": in the 1970s, an IRRI rice variety named Tongil helped Korea become rice self-sufficient — now Korea is funding the science that will breed tomorrow's climate-proof rice. More than 3,000 rice genomes, including Philippine heritage varieties, are already sequenced, and AI lets scientists screen 60,000 seed samples in 18 months — work that once took 52 years.