The Golden Rice Paradox: Monstrous or Misunderstood?
Rice is a food staple for hundreds of millions, especially in Asia. Although it is an excellent source of calories, it lacks certain micronutrients necessary for a complete diet.
In developing countries, approximately 200 — 300 million children of preschool age are at risk of vitamin A deficiency, which increases their susceptibility to infections such as measles and diarrheal diseases. Every year, about half a million children become blind as a result of VAD and 70 percent of them die within a year of losing their sight.
In the 1980s and 1990s, German scientists Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer developed the “Golden Rice” varieties that are biofortified, or enriched, by the introduction of genes that enable the edible endosperm of rice to produce beta-carotene, the precursor of vitamin A. Rice plants produce beta carotene in the leaves but not in the grains, so Potrykus and Beyer inserted two genes – one from a bacterium, the other from corn — that causes beta-carotene to be synthesized in the edible part of the plant as well.
Vitamin A deficiency is, despite existing interventions, the biggest cause of childhood blindness, and responsible for about 28% of child mortality globally
The people who suffer from vitamin A deficiency have no access to alternative foods, let alone supplements, and they rely heavily on rice – which sometimes constitutes 90% of their daily food. Just 40g of golden rice per day – costing no more than white rice – should provide the vitamin A lacking in their diets.
Given its ability to prevent the scourge of VAD, Golden Rice could make contributions to human health on a par with the Salk polio vaccine but irrational, self-interested, relentless opposition to the testing and widespread availability of Golden Rice has been high on the agenda of activists like Greenpeace, which makes millions per year behemoth with offices in more than 40 countries, whose PR machine is focused on denying millions of children in the poorest nations the essential food nutrients they need to stave off blindness and death.
So is genetically engineered food dangerous? Many people seem to think it is.
In the past five years, companies have submitted more than 27,000 products to the Non-GMO Project, which certifies goods that are free of genetically modified organisms.
The World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science have all declared that there’s no good evidence GMOs are unsafe. Hundreds of studies back up that conclusion. But many of us don’t trust these assurances. We’re drawn to skeptics who say that there’s more to the story, that some studies have found risks associated with GMOs, and that Monsanto is covering it up.
Potrykus and Conway wanted to try everything to alleviate vitamin A deficiency: diversification, fortification, supplementation, and Golden Rice. But the anti-GMO groups refused. They called Golden Rice a “Trojan horse” for genetic engineering. They doubled down on their double standards. They claimed that people in the afflicted countries wouldn’t eat yellow rice, yet somehow could be taught to grow unfamiliar vegetables. They portrayed Golden Rice as a financial scheme, but then—after Potrykus made clear that it would be given to poor farmers for free—objected that free distribution would lead to genetic contamination of local crops. Some anti-GMO groups said the rice should be abandoned because it was tied up in 70 patents. Others said the claim of 70 patents was a fiction devised by the project’s leaders to justify their collaboration with AstraZeneca, a global corporation.
While critics tried to block the project, Potrykus and his colleagues worked to improve the rice. By 2003 they had developed plants with eight times as much beta carotene as the original version. In 2005 they unveiled a line that had 20 times as much beta carotene as the original. GMO critics could no longer dismiss Golden Rice as inadequate. So they reversed course. Now that the rice produced plenty of beta carotene, anti-GMO activists claimed that beta carotene and vitamin A were dangerous.
GMO critics didn’t seem to care how much beta carotene people ate, as long as the food wasn’t genetically engineered. They demanded extra safety tests on Golden Rice, on the grounds that “large doses of beta-carotene can have negative health effects.” But they shrugged off such vigilance in the case of home gardens, saying it was “not necessary to count the amount” of each vitamin consumed. They also advocated the mass administration of vitamin A through high-dose capsules and chemical manipulation of the food supply. By their own alarmist standards—which, fortunately, were unwarranted—this would have been reckless. The human body derives from beta carotene sources, such as Golden Rice, only as much vitamin A as it needs.
Decades after it was invented, Golden Rice still isn’t commercially available. Four years ago anti-GMO activists destroyed a field trial of the rice in the Philippines. Sometime back they filed a petition to block all field tests and feeding studies. Greenpeace boasted, “After more than 10 years of research ‘Golden’ Rice is nowhere near its promise to address Vitamin A Deficiency.” And a million more kids are dead.
The worlds growing population and limited land resources require high intensity of food production. Human nutrition needs both macronutrients and micronutrients. One way of providing micronutrients in staple crops of the poor is biofortification, through plant breeding.
The bottom line is that all methods of plant breeding are acceptable and safe, and some methods can deliver micronutrients not achievable by other methods. Vitamin A deficiency is responsible for around 4500 preventable child deaths daily, and Golden Rice, biofortified with provitamin A, has proven potential as a costless intervention where rice is the staple crop.
The Cartagena Protocol’s concentration on a very narrow concern for environment is changing to embrace concern for sustainable development, food security and climate change.
The World Bank is recommending the use of biofortified cereals, including Golden Rice as an example, as the norm rather than the exception in addressing malnutrition, noting that education, social marketing and mass media are important to optimise the effectiveness of any food-based approaches to malnutrition alleviation.
Regulatory applications have been made for Golden Rice, transformation event GR2E, relating to the safety of human food and feed, which has been confirmed by one regulatory authority at the time of printing. Attitudes to gmo-crops, after two decades, appear to be changing, which is expected to benefit humankind and the environment.
