Millions of lives would not have been lost to malnutrition
I remember posting articles about golden rice when B&W was brand new; that was a long time ago.
It’s still being held back because of GMO-panic.
Stifling international regulations have been blamed for delaying the approval of a food that could have helped save millions of lives this century. The claim is made in a new investigation of the controversy surrounding the development of Golden Rice by a team of international scientists.
Golden Rice is a form of normal white rice that has been genetically modified to provide vitamin A to counter blindness and other diseases in children in the developing world. It was developed two decades ago but is still struggling to gain approval in most nations.
“Golden Rice has not been made available to those for whom it was intended in the 20 years since it was created,” states the science writer Ed Regis. “Had it been allowed to grow in these nations, millions of lives would not have been lost to malnutrition, and millions of children would not have gone blind.”
Vitamin A is abundant in rich countries but in developing ones it’s not.
Lack of it is believed to be responsible for killing more children than HIV, tuberculosis or malaria – around 2,000 deaths a day. On a global scale, about a third of children under five suffer from the condition which can also lead to blindness.
As a solution to this crisis, Peter Beyer, professor of cell biology at Freiburg University in Germany, and Ingo Potrykus of the Institute of Plant Sciences in Switzerland, turned to the new technology of genetic manipulation in the late 20th century. They inserted genes for a chemical known as beta-carotene into the DNA of normal rice. In this way, they modified the rice genes so that the plants started to make beta-carotene, a rich orange-coloured pigment that is also a key precursor chemical used by the body to make vitamin A.
“In Bangladesh, China, India and elsewhere in Asia, many children subsist on a few bowls of rice a day and almost nothing else. For them, a daily supply of Golden Rice could now bring the gift of life and sight,” states Regis in his book, Golden Rice, which is published this month.
But it hasn’t happened, partly because of groups like Greenpeace that think GMO food is Of The Devil and more because of…
The real problem has rested with an international treaty known as the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, an agreement which aims to ensure the safe handling, transport and use of living modified organisms, and which came into force in 2003.
The Cartagena Protocol contains a highly controversial clause known as Principle 15 or, more commonly, the precautionary principle. This states that if a product of modern biotechnology poses a possible risk to human health or the environment, measures should be taken to restrict or prevent its introduction. The doctrine, in the case of Golden Rice, was interpreted as “guilty until proven innocent”, says Regis, an attitude entirely out of kilter with the potential of the crop to save millions of lives and halt blindness.
Precaution is good but you have to look at the risks in both directions – the new thing has these risks and not adopting the new thing has these risks. Millions of children going blind or dying ought to be in the scales.
And yet GMO soy is common…
Millions of children under five. Three quarters of a million per year — that’s almost 15 million times a parent has had to bury their young child since the turn of the century, because of vitamin A deficiency. And anti-GMO activists like the despicable huckster Vandana Shiva have done everything they can to stop Golden Rice, offering no feasible solutions in its place. It’s been two decades now and the corpses have piled up and these narcissistic bourgeois anti-GMO hypocrites couldn’t care less. They say people could just grow other crops, but it’s been two decades and that hasn’t even begun to work. And they don’t care, because of ideological narrowmindedness. It’s “let them eat cake” but woke.
Let them eat (Organic Whole Foods) kale.
Consider the term “GMO”:
AKA something wealthy corporations and their cronies get to control and generate profit from.
Poor people don’t get to access those profits, and contrary to the “green revolution” monologue, they are most often forced into growing more singular mono-crops that are incapable of withstanding ongoing shifts in climate and economics.
If we took the tax credits and foreign aid money those corporations who patent GMO seeds/technologies earn, and apply them to providing various viable seed stocks and appropriate education about general agricultural principles, those dying people would obtain far better outcomes than they do from mono-cropping patented GMO seeds – but wait, then they wouldn’t be poor and it would be harder to earn profits from them . . .
GMO is primarily an excuse for controlling food production and maximizing profits – real science is founded on education, not patented “Deus Ex Machina White Saviour™️” fascism.
What the hell are you talking about? The International Rice Research Institute is an intergovernmental organization dedicated to eradicating hunger in the developing world. Not a corporate behemoth. Nobody is trying to profit off of golden rice. Nobody. Neither the letters G, M nor O stand for “corporate.” Genetic engineering in and of itself is merely a method of cultivating plants. Literally, it is nothing more than that. Put the bong down, paranoid kid.
If you have issues with specific crops or specific corporations — be specific about which crops, which issues and which corporations. Don’t blame the entire method of genetic engineering itself. It’s like saying the entire concept of electric power is evil because, like, evil corporations like use electricity to power their factories to like make bad shit and stuff, so like electricity is like bad and corporate, mmmkay?
Fifteen million people are dead because of this unthinking posturing horseshit. Fifteen. million. human. beings. None of whom are you or anyone you know or ever will know. So how about shut the fuck up with your “white saviour” nonsense, you bourgeois little dipshit.
ktron — Are you really that stupid or gullible or ideology-driven?
GR was developed by IRRI [with considerable support by the Gates Fn], as a seed variety that can be planted and replanted by poor farmers. No patent fees or seed restrictions, no RoundupReady, just rice with carotene. Enough carotene to make the difference for the poorest children in the world.
Unless you are prepared to deliver kale or spinach to the 10s of millions of children most affected, shut up and worry about some other slippery-slope. Please.
“Are you really that stupid or gullible or ideology-driven?”
Possibly both?
What do we provide these people with after Bill Gates and Wikipedia tell us we can feel better?
Which two?
Hey, maybe you’re wrong about golden rice. Wouldn’t that be great news? Maybe it is.
ktron, what do you mean ‘provide them with’? After they have golden rice, they can grow it adinfinitum. Those countries and individual farmers can develop new and localised varieties, they can keep ahead of the fungus resistance curve through breeding (*). In short, they gain not only an immediate tool for feeding people a high nutrient crop, but can take ownership of the continued development and evolution of said crop even without GMO breeding techniques.
I’m a trained scientist (non-expert in this field), who believed that we should be cautious about genetically modified crops, especially the commercially locked down round-up ready type of thing. I’m still politically opposed to sterile crops and round-up ready type philosophy, but the evidence around food safety of release ready food crops is now stretching into decades and I’m not aware of any problems yet.
* I once worked for a research organisation that used both conventional and GMO methods on plants. While not involved in that aspect of the work (I was downstream of the breeding), colleagues would talk about how plant varieties often declined in yield, disease resistance and quality over time. possibly in part from seed dilution, but also cross pollination in the wild where farmer retain seed and also because diseases adapt.
“Artymorty”, “loren russell” . . .
Ideas have consequences.
At the end of the day, it is what it is. (Nods head sagely.)
So ignore the GMO aspect. It’s clearly a red herring.
Widen the scope.
What else do we do for these people?
Do we “encourage” their governments to ensure their enfranchisement?
Or do we just feel good because they can now clearly see the jackboots stomping on their children’s heads?
Capital “S” Science [intentionally SIC] is such a very small part of the solution – why are so many people so dedicated to letting its nominal applications excuse them from any further involvement?
“Ideas have consequences.”
Yes, like this ridiculous idea you have, which is that if a plant that was cultivated using a modern technique instead of an old-fashioned one it is tainted with some kind of superstitious “corporate” “white saviour” mojo and should be destroyed. And the consequence of that idea is that fifteen million children die horribly and many more become permanently blind. Another consequence of your ridiculous idea is that you, ktron, are incapable of feeling one whit of compassion for those millions and millions of people, because you’re too invested in your precious superstitious “idea” about how some plant cultivating methods imbue magic bad juju onto the world to let yourself look at the actual real-life human cost of your foolishness.
Dear Artymorty,
I have now securely fastened my Scientifically Approved Hair Shirt.
I openly confess, I’m an utter idiot about biology, chemistry, physiology, et al, and how they relate to geography, climate, physics, economy, human population, and governance.
However, the question still stands:
What are we doing for these people (beyond these nominally self-replicating food banks)?
/eyeroll
There goes your credibility.
“real science is founded on education, not patented”
Real agricultural science introduced patented food crops a long time ago. Think Golden Delicious apple.
Ktron is apparently advocating total worldwide anticapitalist revolution or absolutely nothing, with no in between.
Good luck with that.
A while ago I was at a meeting discussing policy re driverless cars. A few people said ‘we need driverless cars because they will reduce death and injury from road accidents.’ I said I had no reason to disbelieve this fact, but it seems to have been expressed backwards–wouldn’t we first want to ask ‘how can we reduce death and injury from road accidents?’ and then consider what answers, potentially including driverless cars, we can develop, if that’s our actual objective? Someone said ‘yeah, no one cared about safety before they wanted to start selling driverless cars….’ and I said I didn’t think that was quite true–we have seatbelts, airbags and improved infrastructure design, so it’s not as if no one cares about road safety–but if road safety is actually our objective, why aren’t we asking and answering questions about road safety instead of jumping straight to ‘driverless cars will improve road safety’?
Good question — but I think that’s really a different topic. You could ask the same question about vaccination programs. ‘Okay, fine, children are dying less often, but now what are we doing for all these people (beyond disease prevention?)’ If anti-vaxxers have been preventing vaccines from getting to these countries, there’s a much more immediate problem.
Guest #17 also makes a reasonable point, but again I think it irrelevant. “If road safety is our objective, then why aren’t we asking and answering questions about road safety instead of jumping straight to ‘seatbelts will improve road safety?”
We seldom have the opportunity to work from scratch and come up with an overall plan, like founding a city and laying out the entire road system beforehand on paper. Instead, we do what we can. Golden Rice is one thing which could be done, and it really doesn’t seem to preclude doing other things. It’s not getting done, prevented, it seems, by ignorance and arrogance. That’s the topic, and a problem.
See? They’re cis-White-Men and therefore can’t be the saviors of woke-world.
In Canada “the focus is on the traits expressed in the products and not on the method used to introduce those traits.” (https://www.loc.gov/law/help/restrictions-on-gmos/canada.php)
Molecular biologist Nina Fedoroff is an advocate for GMO’s (https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/utopian-dinner-table-how-to-feed-the-world-in-100-years-1.4971915). Marco Giovannetti suggests “Although it’s not a popular narrative, genetic engineering can be an important ally in protecting the environment”. (https://massivesci.com/articles/gmo-excerpt-environmental-damage/)
Concerns have been raised on the introduction of a new germ line on ecology. For example, does a plant genetically modified to be resistant to a brand of weed pesticide result in the natural evolution of weeds with increased resistance from applications of the pesticide?
There are natural transgenic processes (horizontal gene transfer), even by traditional grafting (e.g. Michael Le Page, New Scientist, Oct. 12, 2019 p. 9). Indeed, there is a hypothesis that the mitochondrion was introduced as a bacterium.