The Scientist, the Patent and the Mangoes - Tripling the Mango Yield in the Philippines
| Author | Elizabeth March |
| Position | WIPO Magazine Editorial Team. Based on film footage by Jean-Francois Arrou-Vignod and Nicholas Hopkins-Hall, WIPO Film, Multimedia and Internet Section |
Born: 1939, Philippines
Education: BS in Agronomy (fruits), University of the Philippines; MSc Horticulture, University of Georgia (1963), PhD Horticulture, University of Hawaii, (1967)
Honors: Elected to the National Academy of Science and Technology of the Philippines, 2004
Mangoes. One of the world's most prized tropical fruits. And over one million metric tonnes of them were harvested in the Philippines last year. But it was not ever thus. The prolific mango production in the Philippines is due in large measure to the ingenuity of one man.
Forty years ago, Filipino horticulturalist, Dr. Ramon Barba developed a simple method for inducing early flowering in mango plants. His invention, widely used today, revolutionized the Philippine mango industry, making the crop one of the country's top export earners.
Dr. Barba now features in a new WIPO short film, which was released on World Intellectual Property Day as the latest in a series of profiles of inventors and creators from developing countries. In the following extracts from his interviews with the WIPO team he describes his invention, its impact and his fight for the patent.
"I studied Tropical Fruit Production at university and was always very interested in the problems of mango production. You see, in the Philippines mangoes have always been very good. But before 1976 it was commercially a neglected fruit because it has such erratic fruiting habits. It is very seasonal. It only fruits one month in a whole year. And if it fruits well one year, it doesn't fruit the next year. Even in the regular season it is erratic.
"We already had a unique practice in the Philippines of using smoke to bring on flowering. But it was a tedious practice, and expensive. So as students we were all thinking, how can we make the mango flower?
"We had concluded that it was ethylene in the smoke which was producing the effect. But you can't just use ethylene - it is a gas, you'd have to cover the tree. So I started experimenting with other chemicals. Potassium nitrate was low on the list, but I included it because I knew from other studies that there is a link between potassium nitrate and ethylene. "It worked - and that was the beginning of everything.
"The process...
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