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Golden Rice: Blind Ambition?
June 2000
Janice Wormworth
Friends of the Earth International
Original Article: Friends of the Earth
Is golden rice a solution to thousands of children in developing countries threatened by blindness?
"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
Current situation
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 2000.
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
Friends of the Earth International
June 2000
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