Golden Rice meets food safety standards in three leading regulatory agencies
irri.org
irri.org
So although there are some GMOs I'm concerned about, Golden Rice is not one of them. I'm not an expert or anything, so take that for whatever you think it's worth, but nothing I've read suggests to me that it's likely to cause a problem. This could change given new information, but I don't think that those of us urging a certain caution do ourselves any favors by opposing every single GMO, even those that are pretty clearly beneficial.
If only we could say things are "clearly beneficial." However we still don't understand allergies, autoimmune disorders, or nutrition well. On top of that, there's the whole field of gut bacteria that we're just starting to take seriously.
I reflexively push back because proponents won't admit GMO is a giant experiment. I'm open-minded on the idea of letting people experiment en-masse with their health. But considering 33% of Americans are obese, I'm not entirely sold from a pragmatic perspective.
Concerns about allergies and autoimmune disorders and such associated with golden rice are comparable to illiteracy, so be sure to wear it proudly.
To give some idea of how fundamentally absurd an approach this is, two 5-cent capsules of vitamin A a year are sufficient to prevent vitamin A deficiency in kids, whereas as far as I can tell replacing all the rice eaten in countries whose poor populations are almost entirely dependent on rice with the most modern, improved varieties of golden rice still wouldn't achieve this. (Oh, and by the way it inherently has worse yields than the varieties it's based on, so that golden rice will be more expensive too.)
Even if it worked, the licensing issues made it undeployable in practice. There's a free license to certain third-world countries that GMO proponents like to wave in the face of opponents, but that's basically all it's useful for - due to a one-two punch of requiring the rice to be grown in the country it's sold in and only licensing countries that can't grow enough rice to feed their population (almost all of which can't grow rice at all), it cannot be used for any kind of meaningful deployment of the tech. Despite the complete and utter lack of any profitable commercial market for golden rice, the GMO industry couldn't bear to actually give up the possibility that they could somehow make money from starving third world kids.
670,000 kids a year die from vitamin A deficiency (and, of course, many more than that "only" go blind). Golden rice has been around for 18 years now, but "activists" have prevented its widespread use.
That's 12 million preventable deaths.
If it were so easy, why none of the anti-GMO fanatics do so already? But of course that would involve doing something useful, not strutting around in the same crowd as anti-vaxxers and flatearthers.
In the context at hand, rice is more convenient.
Yes those evil corporations are trying to save children from blindness just to make anti science activists look bad. The bastards!!!
Sarcasm aside, did you know most of our crop varieties have been modified using radiation? Those types of mutations are still used today and require little testing, much less than what golden rice has been through.
> (Oh, and by the way it inherently has worse yields than the varieties it's based on, so that golden rice will be more expensive too.)
This is straight up FUD. The first version didn't have the same yield but the more recent ones do.
> it cannot be used for any kind of meaningful deployment of the tech
Why not? It clearly states they will provide the technology to the National Agricultural Research Centres and other public sector research institutions, in developing countries. Once the farmers have the crop they can replant as much as they like and they don't have to rely on capsules anymore.
> the GMO industry couldn't bear to actually give up the possibility that they could somehow make money from starving third world kids.
Except the GMO industry (whatever that means) is not involved in the development of Golden Rice (apart from some patents).
Personally, I'm quite comfortable describing "keeping children from going blind or dying outright" as "clearly beneficial".
> However we still don't understand allergies, autoimmune disorders, or nutrition well. On top of that, there's the whole field of gut bacteria that we're just starting to take seriously.
That "argument" would prevent us from ever introducing a new plant variety of any kind.
Or never, because it's not really about "enough testing", it's about a kneejerk reaction to an unfamiliar process.
People shouldn't be downvoting you. That's a very important point. There shouldn't be knee-jerk reactions in either direction. (GMOs in general, not the rice.)
Here's an example of how little humans know about how vitamins work: if you give smokers beta carotene in supplement form, it increases their chance of lung cancer, even though in food form it reduces it.[1][2]
[1] http://goaskalice.columbia.edu/answered-questions/dangers-be...
Like what?
He's going to mention the terminator seed that doesn't actually exist. I guarantee it.
1. It was designed for countries with high levels of Vit A deficiency (as other comments have noted). Those countries now use simple Vit A pills. There is no need for 'Golden Rice'.
2. It has been trialled in Asia but due to it's yellow colour, the people didn't even want to eat it. In their mind, rice is always white.
I also seem to recall that it is a project that has failed in a few countries to be accepted as a replacement for traditional rice.
I do not understand why FDA approval was sought, nor why it's for sale in the US.
This documentary (it might be the one I vaguely remember) shows how the Phillipines has a government programme which gives Vit A pills twice a year: https://youtu.be/TPRqRjCT_vE?t=11m6s
EDIT: (formatting)
(ahem https://archive.org/donate/)
"In order to meet the full needs of 750 micrograms of vitamin A from [Golden] rice, an adult would have to consume 2 kg 272g of rice per day. This implies that one family member would consume the entire family ration of 10 kg from the PDS [?] in 4 days to meet vitamin A needs through "Golden rice".
This is a recipe for creating hunger and malnutrition, not solving it.
Besides creating vitamin A deficiency, vitamin A rice will also create deficiency in other micronutrients and nutrients. Raw milled rice has a low content of Fat (0.5g/100g). Since fat is necessary for vitamin A uptake, this will aggravate vitamin A deficiency. It also has only 6.8g/100g of protein, which means less carrier molecules. It has only 0.7g/100g of iron, which plays a vital role in the conversion of Betacarotene (precursor of vitamin A found in plant sources) to vitamin A. Superior Alternatives exist and are effective.
A far more efficient route to removing vitamin A efficiency is biodiversity conservation and propagation of naturally vitamin A rich plants in agriculture and diets."
-Vandana Shiva
So like 100 grams of rice by dry weight, a modest single serving (300 or 400 calories).
Here's a peer-reviewed journal article that provides real data:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2682994/
Note that they found that a) Vitamin A is readily absorbed from the golden rice and b) their estimate is that 50 grams of golden rice per day would be sufficient to provide the RDA for a child.
Also, the ease of absorption is annoyingly dependent on the rest of the person's diet (particularly having enough fat and iron in their diet, if I recall correctly). The meals used in that study may well be close to the best case scenario; people with vitamin A deficiency don't generally get that way by having access to well-balanced meals.
And that discounts any Black Swans lying in wait from transgenic organisms; we may still yet have a disaster, since GMOs don't yet have same track record as pre-industrial agriculture. OTOH, industrial agriculture has been pretty awful, so maybe GMOs are a step up from THAT...
That's a non-sequitur, and you're adding the loss stats in with waste.
> And that discounts any Black Swans lying in wait from transgenic organisms; we may still yet have a disaster...
Once it's a black swan, it's already discounted, the term itself means the thing is unlikely.
I think the subject deserves more study, but we have people dying of hunger right now, and that's plainly more compelling than "something really bad might happen, we have no idea what, why or how likely it is."
This is especially true if they only need a few years of GMOs to break bad cycles with conventional agriculture (such as eating next years seeds because they have no food now).
For well over half a century we have understood that most famines are a result of entitlement failures, not lack of food availability.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_famines#Failure_of...
That "something really bad" might be localized ecological collapse, which I find pretty compelling, too.
If you can come up with a technology or logistical process to make a significant change to that without causing famine, you've got a company with billions in revenue.
For example there are very few distributors for grain: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-big-five...
The systems we have in place are meant to protect that near monopoly as much as they are to distribute food. On top of that, countries give loans to poor countries in exchange for 2 promises: 1) that they use the money to buy grain from the country lending the money 2) they don't grow grain themselves. In that way, we actively undermine world agriculture.
If your massive improvement disrupts these players, I think you're going to be in for a very rough time of it. Things like GMO further solidify the near monopolies, by restricting where you can buy seed, etc. This is one of the reasons you see a big political push for them.
* To understand why, watch the movie Grave of the Fireflies. Or watch Indy Neidel on youtube talk about the "turnip winter"
Yes, selective breeding is far less controlled and predictable as to unintended changes; people think of it as safer because of the way it used to be done which operates over longer time scales, which, aside from not actually providing any kind of safety, neglects the fact that modern methods allow selective breeding to operate over much shorter time scales.
That said, I don't really have an opinion on GMOs. I'm fine with you partaking first, though. :-)
Yes, selective breeding (both artificial and natural selection) create fundamentally new organisms.
"Not necessarily" but sometimes.
So do many non-GMO engineered crops where the trait that is the focus of optimization isn't yield, since a “yield problem” is deteemined by comparison to mainstream crops which are engineered for yield traits.
> That's partly because this kind of genetic modification isn't actually all that controlled
That's even more true of selective breeding, whether by traditional or more rapid modern means, so that's not a problem with GMOs compared to any real alternative, it's a problem of all existing methods compared to a hypothetical state where we have both perfect modelling to predict phenotypical effects of genetic changes and perfect ability to make arbitrary, error-free edits to genetic code. And even then we are stuck with the fact that some traits at inherently in conflict.
Most of the food is still farmed by poor small scale farmers, which are often more efficient than large-scale farmers.
Except the BT gene is exactly the opposite of a pesticide-heavy monoculture. The point is to make spraying unnecessary. Do you usually just invert the reality of things that clash with your preferred narrative?
>Most of the food is still farmed by poor small scale farmers, which are often more efficient than large-scale farmers.
Curious about this claim, I found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_productivity#Sour...:
Some sources of agricultural productivity are:
-Mechanization
-High yield varieties, which were the basis of the Green revolution
-Fertilizers: Primary plant nutrients: nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium[5][6] and secondary nutrients such as sulfur, zinc, copper, manganese, calcium, magnesium and molybdenum on deficient soil
-Education in management and entrepreneurial techniques to decrease fixed and variable costs and optimise manpower
-Liming of acid soils to raise pH and to provide calcium and magnesium
-Irrigation
-Herbicides
-Genetic engineering
-Pesticides
-Increased plant density
-Animal feed made more digestible by processing
-Keeping animals indoors in cold weather
Some quotes from a UN report:
Smallholders manage over 80 per cent of the world’s estimated 500 million small farms and provide over 80 per cent of the food consumed in a large part of the developing world.
Moreover, multiple studies have found that smallholdings are relatively more productive per hectare than large-scale plantations (Feder 1985; Barrett 1993; Banerjee, Gertler and Ghatak 1998; Rosset 1999; Borras, Kay and Akram-Lodhi 2007) and are also more resource-efficient (Altieri and Koohafkan 2008).
https://www.ifad.org/documents/10180/666cac24-14b6-43c2-876d...
A very first-world thing to be able to say when rejecting GMOs and other things that can improve crop yields for the less fortunate citizens of the world.
This is the true concern about GMO, since people royally suck at introducing new species into ecosystems, an action that often cannot be undone.
Also... where else would you plant it?
I definitely prefer the Big Ag corps answering that question... and until they have an answer don't f*ck with the one environment we live in.
Definitely not. Its genome differs from its wild ancestor in many respects. To name just one, like most domestic grains it's resistant to "shattering" (i.e., the seeds tend to remain attached to the plant, rather than falling off and/or being scattered when the plant is blown by the wind). That is a great feature for farmers, but means that the plant would likely go extinct in short order if left to itself (because the seeds wouldn't be scattered on the ground).
> Golden rice is a variety of rice (Oryza sativa) produced through genetic engineering to biosynthesize beta-carotene, a precursor of vitamin A, in the edible parts of rice.[1] It is intended to produce a fortified food to be grown and consumed in areas with a shortage of dietary vitamin A,[2] a deficiency which is estimated to kill 670,000 children under the age of 5 each year.
So, yes, genetically-modified to produce more beta carotene.
Seeing a lot of antivaxxer type logic being employed here in the comments.