Guard to launch trial of country's first Basmati hybrid rice next year

The Guard Agricultural Research & Services (Guard) is going to launch a large scale trial of country's first "Basmati Hybrid Rice" next year on an area of 500 acres of land. "We have already introduced seven to eight coarse long grain hybrid rice varieties in the country which are being cultivated successfully in Sindh and farmers are getting financial benefits of it.
Now we are in the process of cross breeding of a Basmati Hybrid variety for Punjab. The last basmati variety was introduced some 30 years back," said Guard's Chief Executive Officer Shahzad Ali Malik while talking to Business Recorder on Friday.
He said a new variety should have acceptance from farmers, millers and consumers. He said the scientists of their institutes have been assigned the task to develop such a Basmati which has Average Grain Length (AGL) of at least over 8mm to compete with India which had introduced a hybrid having 8.4-8.5mm. He said our present Basmati variety had a length of 7mm.
Likewise, he said they are expecting a yield of 70-80 maunds per acres of this new variety while our existing varieties are giving 30-35 maunds per acre. Shahzad Malik, who is also the founder of Seed Association of Pakistan (SAP) and Rice Exporters Association of Pakistan (REAP), said their organization was working on developing the drought, salinity and heat tolerant varieties which were at different stages including heat tolerant variety being in test stage in Kandhkot and Larkana area of Sindh.
He said that heat was on the rise in Sindh and increase of one degree Celsius in temperature causes a fall of 10 percent in the yield. The Guard CEO said they were working with Chinese counterparts on developing different seed and it was the first time that a consignment of rice seed had been despatched to Philippines last month.
He said soon they would be introducing rice planters to increase ratio of plants sown per acre from existing 40,000 per acre to 80,000-120,000 per acre to get optimum yield. Talking about hopes with the new government, he said the new government should incentivize the agriculture sector, especially the seed sector to get new potent varieties having high yields of different crops.
He said the government should encourage the private companies to go for research and developing new varieties locally. He said companies which were importing seed should be asked to produce locally also. These companies should be asked to produce certain percentage of their total import locally and gradually they should go for complete local production.
He was of the view that private sector had its own resources so the incentive package may not include loan but land could be given on lease or contract for research and seed production.
He said that research in public-private sector could be encouraged but claimed that public sector research institutes discourage such cooperation as they take private research-oriented companies as their competitors.
At the same time, these institutes are authority for approving new varieties. He also said that the new government should look into the mechanism of approving new seed varieties after the 18th amendment. "The authority of approving new seeds should rest with the federal governments," Shahzad Ali Malik suggested.