GOLDEN RICE: BLIND AMBITION?
“It is ironic that some of the worst
concentrations of xeropthalmia and
blindness due to Vitamin A deficiency occur
in populations surrounded by abundant
sources of the vitamins and minerals in
local vegetables and fruits, yet no country
has yet mounted a successful campaign to
solve the Vitamin A problem in this
way.”
Dr. Nevin Scrimshaw, 1991 Laureate of the
World Food Prize
Golden Rice could prevent blindness in
half a million children each year, and
every month that we delay the use of this
sight-saving transgenic crop means that
about 50,000 more children go blind. This
claim by biotech industry representatives
was greeted with skepticism and anger at
FoE Europe's "Sustainable Agriculture in
the New Millennium" conference in May (see
article this issue).
UK biotech company Zeneca's agreement to
help make Golden Rice available to the
developing world's poor farmers was a hotly
debated topic throughout the conference. Is
Golden Rice a triumph of biotechnology that
could eradicate unnecessary suffering? Or
is it merely a PR maneuver by a threatened
industry that would thrust an unproven,
unwanted and perhaps even harmful
technology upon the developing world?
In fact, it was revealed that the gift
of transgenic rice had strings attached --
seventy of them to be precise. Trangenic
manipulation is an extremely complex
process. The creation of Vitamin A rice
requires numerous genes, DNA sequences and
genetic constructs, and each of these
processes may be separately patented. Ingo
Potrykus and Peter Beyer, the scientists
who invented the Vitamin A rice, agreed to
make their share of the Golden Rice
intellectual property available to poor
farmers for free. But truly “free” Golden
Rice would require similar releases from
all 70 patent claimants.
Many other questions remain. How would
the programme be selectively administered
to poor farmers, defined by Zeneca to be
those earning less than US$10,000 per year?
And although farmers are permitted to sell
Golden Rice locally, would they be required
to pay royalties on exports? Would farmers
be able to use the seeds for replanting? Is
the science as sound as GM food proponents
claim?
“Golden Rice is the answer, but what was
the question?” was an oft-heard quip from
NGO representatives at the conference. It
seems that Third World consumers have not
been asked if they want to eat Golden Rice,
or any other genetically modified foods for
that matter. Auxillia Motsi of the Zimbabwe
Consumers International regional office in
Africa was not convinced that Africans
would be any keener to adopt GMOs than the
Europeans who have almost universally
rejected them. Also unaddressed were
cultural food preferences. “You change the
flavour of Coca Cola, and nobody accepts it
because it's culturally linked and people
grew up with it from their childhood,” says
University of California Berkeley
agroecologist Miguel Altieri, “It's the
same thing with colour. People in Asia are
not going to adopt a yellow rice.”
Ironically, dozens of varieties of
Vitamin A rice already exist. “In India the
red rice, which is found in the southern
states, already has Vitamin A in it,” says
Anuradha Mittal of the US Institute for
Food and Development Policy. “But the
problem is very closely linked to what we
have been told constitutes good rice. Good
rice is supposed to be this gleaming white
rice which has been provided to us,
basically making sticky rice and other
varieties that people used to eat something
that is not good enough for consumption,
and deemed as inferior. Never mind that it
has all the virtues!”
“Green Revolution II,” the GM food
revolution, may simply be dealing with
deficiencies caused, in part, by Green
Revolution I, says Malaysian activist Chee
Yoke Ling of the Third World Network. “The
Green Revolution introduced the technology
of polishing and milling the rice. Before
that, we did not eat polished rice. It was
not part of the rice culture. Now they tell
us that we don't have enough Vitamin A,”
says Chee. Rice is polished to prolong its
storage for export and to suit the tastes
of the developed world, according to
geneticist Dr. Mae-Wan Ho of the Institute
of Science and Society at the Open
University in the UK. Making unpolished
rice available for free or at low cost to
undernourished people would go a long way
in solving this deficiency, according to
Ho.
This and other solutions to
micronutrient deficiencies are readily
available, says Mittal, “and we've known it
forever. But there's been a complete
absence of political will on behalf of
those same foundations, those same
corporations that now claim that they want
to end blindness. What they want is more
and more corporate interest.”
blind to solutions
UNICEF currently has solutions to Vitamin
A deficiency, Mittal says, some of which
cost mere pennies per person. Available
solutions include Vitamin A tablets, food
fortification (for example, adding the
vitamin to sugar), and dietary approaches
to educate people -- who may be completely
unaware of the deficiency – about healthy
diets. Moreover, unlike Golden Rice, these
solutions will solve a whole range of
micronutrient deficiencies. Furthermore,
people's ability to absorb Vitamin A
depends on their overall nutrition status.
This underlines the need for global
improvements in nutrition, not “magic
bullets” of Vitamin A. “Are they going to
give us a miracle rice that will be
engineered with everything?” asks Chee.
spin for dollars
Mittal and Chee say that all the hype and
millions of funding dollars injected into
Golden Rice, a product still five or even
ten years in the future, is diverting
much-needed resources from currently
available solutions. “They keep telling us
'we are giving you one more tool.' They are
not,” says Chee. As much as US$100 million
has been spent on Golden Rice thus far,
with funds from the Rockerfeller
Foundation, the Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology, the European Community Biotech
Programme and the Swiss Federal Office for
Education and Science.
Golden Rice may never help poor farmers,
but it could give the beleaguered European
biotech industry a new grasp on life. “One
can only hope that this application of
plant genetic engineering to ameliorate
human misery without regard to short-term
profit will restore this technology to
political acceptability,” wrote the
respected journal Science in a commentary
piece on Golden Rice. The magazine sent
pre-prints of the article to 1700
journalists around the world.
“They've become really good at putting a
human face to their corporate interest,”
says Mittal, “rather than admitting their
motive is profits.” Mittal feels that this
layer of “spin” makes it difficult for
concerned citizens and agencies to have an
honest debate about the real pros and cons
of the technology.
science or fiction?
One essential debate is on the science of
biotechnology. “This will never be a
precise technology,” says Chee. “They can't
defend it from a scientific basis because
they haven't shown us good science yet.”
Golden Rice is a so-called “Second
Generation” GM product, meaning it purports
to have benefits for consumers, not just
for producers. Yet from a scientific
perspective, Golden Rice has the same
drawbacks as the “First Generation” GM
products, according to Ho.
Golden Rice is an unstable construct,
says Ho, made from a combination of genetic
material from viruses and bacteria that are
associated with diseases in plants, as well
as genes from non-food species. For
example, each Golden Rice plant contains
two promoters from the hazardous
cauliflower mosaic virus, which Ho believes
could spread by cross pollination or gene
transfer and have enormous impacts on
health and biodiversity. The product's
instability also means that there is no
guarantee that seeds from Golden Rice
plants will retain the desirable traits
over successive generations, according to
Ho.
Others feel that Golden Rice and other
GMOs must be flatly rejected on ideological
grounds. “It's a Trojan Horse,” argues
Altieri, who says the biotech industry is
already working to penetrate markets in
developing nations and even directing
national research priorities in some
countries. In an atmosphere of little or no
regulation and little or no public debate,
Third World consumers may never have the
luxury of choice when it comes to GMOs.
Janice Wormworth
, FoEI
