Talk does not cook rice.” That does not refer to Vice President Jejomar Binay twisting in the wind for the overpriced Makati buildings. The proverb is tailor-fit for Senator Cynthia Villar, who chairs the committee on agriculture.
Villar groused, in an address at the International Rice Research Institute in Los Baños, that action is overdue on “Golden Rice”. The ordinary staple often flicks open a window of vulnerability to Vitamin A shortfalls.
Golden Rice shows promise it can curb deficits which afflict 1.7 million of malnourished pre-school kids. That is compounded by one out of every five lactating mothers. About 19 million pregnant women are affected. And so are the kids gestating in their wombs. Those who survive often have hobbled IQs. “Their elevators will never reach top floor.”
Sure. Villar was preaching to the choir. IRRI is a co-developer of Golden Rice, along with the government-run Philippine Rice Research Institute. But Villar’s assertion is valid.
In Asia, “it is rice or nothing. And if there are problems with rice, there are problems with everything” – including riots. Demand for rice is rising due to population growth: Rice yields are rising too — but at barely half that pace.
The Golden Rice project tries to genetically lace additional vitamin A into the grains. The project started in 1993 by researchers with funding from Rockefeller Foundation. Food and environment safety procedures are overseen by government including the National Committee on Biosafety of the Philippines and Bureau of Plant Industry.
Five trial plots of Golden Rice in Bicol were vandalized by 400 protestors in 2013, reports BBC environment correspondent Matt McGrath. The crop was “weeks away from being submitted for a safety evaluation.” The attackers were members of a group called Sikwal-GMO.
Alliance between rice breeders and nutritionists may seem odd, writes Robert Zeigler of IRRI. As a rice breeder in Colombia with Rockefeller Foundation in the 1950s, Peter Jennings knew that vitamin A deficiency was a scourge.
He found that a yellow rice grain would most likely carry beta carotene, a yellow plant pigment humans convert into vitamin A in their food. Jennings never tracked the pigment in global collections of rice. Mutating millions of plants failed.
“The only path to getting yellow rice, later dubbed Golden Rice, was to engineer it using genetic modification. The teamwork of Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer eventually created, in 1999, the prototype of a genetically modified Golden Rice.
Vitamin A deficiency is the number one cause of preventable blindness among children in developing countries. As many as 350,000 go blind every year. And it is most prevalent among young children and pregnant and nursing women. “Vitamin A deficiency can impair vision and cause other sight problems.” It can also kill you.
Golden Rice today contains beta carotene, as additional source of vitamin A in diets of rice consumers worldwide. Research has shown that just one cup of Golden Rice a day could be enough to provide an adult with half their daily needs of vitamin A. So it could make a big difference to people’s nutrition– and their sight.
Anti-GM “activists” vehemently oppose Golden Rice being approved for production by farmers. They claim it is a “Trojan Horse” technology that would open the doors to release other genetically modified crops.
If Golden Rice effectively reduces blindness, disease, and death caused by vitamin A deficiency in millions of rice consumers, will it pave the way for other GM food crops that may be healthier for people and good for the environment? Therefore, must we stop Golden Rice before it is too late? “The cynicism astounds even a crusty old bird like me” adds Zeigler.
The main surviving mainstream argument against GM crops has boiled down to concerns over corporate control of agriculture and seed supply. “This is a legitimate and worthy of debate and action.”
But Golden Rice was developed by public sector scientists using public funds. Private entities that hold patents over technologies, used to develop Golden Rice, have made them available freely for this purpose.
Please explain to me why “activists” should block a technology developed by the public sector? Why should they hold the world’s poor hostage over a fight about private control of agriculture in rich countries?
There is not enough information to decide if these crops are safe, they claim. Yet they destroy the trials designed to provide the very answers they are demanding. “Could it be that they do not want to see the answers?”
“There’s so much misinformation floating around taken as fact by people,” said Michael D. Purugganan, dean of science at New York University.
“The genes they inserted to make the vitamin are not some weird manufactured material but are also found in squash, carrots and melons.” Raised in a middle-class family in Manila, he felt compelled to weigh in on Golden Rice. “A lot of the criticism of GMOs in the Western world suffers from a lack of understanding of how really dire the situation is in developing countries
Golden Rice appeared on Time Magazine’s cover in 2000, “before it was quite ready for prime time, noted New York Times (Aug 24, 2013.) It is not owned by any company but is being developed by the non-profit IRRI. At stake in this controversy “is not just the future of bio-fortified rice but also a rational means to evaluate a technology whose potential to improve nutrition may otherwise go unrealized.”