GOLDEN RICE: ANOTHER GOLDEN FLEECE AWARD WINNER --
Don't you just hate it when corporations and governments lie to us. Here's yet another example:
wanttoknow.info
A national TV commercial showed a montage of smiling Asian children, caring doctors, rice paddies, and a narrator who says that golden rice can ‘help prevent blindness and infection in millions of children’ suffering from vitamin-A deficiency.”[42] Time magazine went so far as to claim on their cover, “This rice could save a million kids a year.” The biotech company Syngenta claims one month of a delay in marketing Golden Rice, would cause 50,000 children to go blind.[43]
The biotech industry had found its poster child, genetically engineered rice that makes its own beta-carotene—a precursor to vitamin A. In his New York Times Magazine article, “The Great Yellow Hype,” Michael Pollan says that golden rice impales Americans on the horns of a moral dilemma: “if we don’t get over our queasiness about eating genetically modified food, kids in the third world will go blind.”
“Yet the more one learns about biotechnology’s Great Yellow Hope,” Pollan continues, “the more uncertain seems its promise.”[44] A closer look reveals some interesting omissions in the industry’s numbers. According to a Greenpeace report, golden rice provides so little vitamin A, “a two-year-old child would need to eat seven pounds per day.”[45] Likewise, an adult would need to eat nearly twenty pounds to get the daily-recommended dose.
“This whole project is actually based on what can only be characterized as intentional deception,” writes Benedikt Haerlin, former international coordinator of Greenpeace’s genetic engineering campaign. “We recalculated their figures again and again. We just could not believe serious scientists and companies would do this.”[46]
Even the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, which funded development of golden rice, said “the public-relations uses of golden rice have gone too far” and are misleading the public and media. He adds, “We do not consider golden rice the solution to the Vitamin A deficiency problem.”[47]
There are other considerations as well. No published study has confirmed that the human body could actually convert the beta-carotene in golden rice. Also other nutrients such as fat and protein, often lacking in the diets on malnourished children, are needed in order to absorb Vitamin A. And it is not clear whether the genes from the daffodil, which are used to create golden rice, will transfer known allergens from the flower.[48]
The biotech proponents also admit that to persuade people to eat yellow rice may require an educational campaign. But if they are going to spend the time to educate, Pollan asks, why not instead teach “people how to grow green vegetables [that are rich in vitamin A and other nutrients] on the margins of their rice fields, and maybe even give them the seeds to do so? Or what about handing out vitamin-A supplements to children so severely malnourished their bodies can’t metabolize beta-carotene?”
Distributing supplements is precisely what the Vitamin Angel Alliance is doing. They give children who are at risk a high potency tablet, strong enough so that only two are required per year to prevent blindness. At a cost of only $.05 per tablet, only $25,000 is needed to prevent 500,000 children from going blind per year.[49] Contrast this with golden rice, which has cost more than $100 million dollars so far, and is not yet ready.
Michael Khoo of Greenpeace says golden rice “isn’t about solving childhood blindness, it’s about solving biotech’s public relations problem.” If the industry were truly dedicated to the problems of malnutrition and starvation, a tiny fraction of their advertising budget could have been diverted to make an enormous difference already. Khoo says, “It is shameful that the biotech industry is using starving children to promote a dubious product.”[50]
Grains of Delusion, a research report jointly released by humanitarian organizations in Thailand, Cambodia, India, Philippines, Indonesia and Bangladesh, concluded that, “the main agenda for golden rice is not malnutrition but garnering greater support and acceptance for genetic engineering amongst the public, the scientific community and funding agencies. Given this reality, the promise of golden rice should be taken with a pinch of salt.”[51]
NOTES:
[42] Michael Pollan, “The Great Yellow Hype,” New York Times, March 4, 2001, Section 6; p 15
[43] “GE rice is fool’s gold,” Greenpeace, archive.greenpeace.org
[44] Michael Pollan, “The Great Yellow Hype,” New York Times, March 4, 2001, Section 6; p 15
[45] Greenpeace demands false biotech advertising be removed from TV, Letter, February 9, 2001
[46] Opinion piece about Golden Rice by Benedikt Haerlin, archive.greenpeace.org
[47] Greenpeace demands false biotech advertising be removed from TV, Letter, February 9, 2001
[48] “Grains of Delusion,” Jointly published by BIOTHAI (Thailand), CEDAC (Cambodia), DRCSC (India), GRAIN, MASIPAG (Philippines), PAN-Indonesia and UBINIG (Bangladesh), February 2001, www.grain.org/publications/delusion-en.cfm
[49] Vitamin Angel Alliance, vitaminangelalliance.com
[50] FIFRA Scientific Advisory Panel (SAP), Open Meeting, July 17, 2001
[51] “Grains of Delusion,” Jointly published by BIOTHAI (Thailand), CEDAC (Cambodia), DRCSC (India), GRAIN, MASIPAG (Philippines), PAN-Indonesia and UBINIG (Bangladesh), February 2001, www.grain.org/publications/delusion-en.cfm
[52] Dorothy Mclaughlin, “Fooling with Nature, Silent Spring Revisited,” PBS, pbs.org |
