Transgenic Golden Rice, once hailed as a dietary breakthrough
science.org
science.org
..The Government of India signed an agreement with the Rockefeller Foundation to carry out research to achieve higher food production. The program started with research for the development of suitable hybrids of maize followed by hybrids of sorghum and pearl millet.
The dwarf wheat bred by Dr. Borlaug in Mexico, named Sonaro 4 and Larmarojo, were introduced. These efforts created an agricultural revolution.
I consider myself a farmer and used to grow wheat on 80 acres. I was very happy to harvest about 500 quintals every year – about six quintals (600 kg) for every acre. The planting of Sonaro 64, with the agronomic practices recommended, led to a harvest of 20 quintals (2000 kg) an acre, which was more than three times the previous yield.
I remember three to four years after the introduction of those seeds, India’s wheat production expanded significantly, and quite rapidly India became self-sufficient in food.
https://www.worldfoodprize.org/index.cfm/88533/18096/when_th...
> "The green revolution has won a temporary success in man's war against hunger and deprivation; it has given man a breathing space. If fully implemented, the revolution can provide sufficient food for sustenance during the next three decades. But the frightening power of human reproduction must also be curbed; otherwise the success of the green revolution will be ephemeral only. Most people still fail to comprehend the magnitude and menace of the "Population Monster"...Since man is potentially a rational being, however, I am confident that within the next two decades he will recognize the self-destructive course he steers along the road of irresponsible population growth..."
Finding out the author of this quote is left as an exercise to the reader...
(seethers gonna seethe, lol)
> “GM crops have never been proven safe,” Pelegrina asserted.
This might be true in some way, but what kind of proof are they looking for? What evidence has been presented that GM crops are unsafe? Proving the absence of something (health risk) is quite hard. On the other hand, GM crops have been consumed by many people for many years now and haven't found any large scale deleterious effects.
I think putting this into binary options, of pro-GM, anti-GM, is not ideal.
It's like saying "I am pro-chemistry," or "I am anti-chemistry."
Just as with chemistry, various GM products can have largely positive or largely negative outcomes.
The question which needs to be asked on each and every GMO product introduction is along the lines of: is this new product like creating fertilizer from natural gas, or like adding lead to gasoline?
This argument is always funny as we can also say "Traditional crops have never been proven safe"
I believe that the future of food sources is in genetically-engineered organisms, but I am dismayed by the fact that all the current attempts of genetic modifications have stupid goals.
The "fortification" of staple foods is extremely stupid, because the amount of staple food that is consumed varies widely with sex, size, age and physical activity and it is not proportional to the daily requirements for various vitamins or minerals. The amount of vitamins ingested from "fortified" food is always either insufficient or wasted as excessive.
The staple foods are required to provide only proteins and/or fats and/or carbohydrates. For everything else there are specific sources that are needed only in small quantities, so they usually do not add up to a major part of the cost of the food.
The daily intake of vitamin A can be obtained for instance from 100 grams of carrots, which in Europe, where I live, cost much less than 10 cents, so they can be afforded by anyone. In other parts of the world, where carrots are less common, there are various vegetables with similar properties, e.g. sweet potatoes and many others.
If they have vitamin A deficiency in their population, the solution is not buying more expensive yellow rice, but teaching everyone which is the amount of the cheapest locally available vegetable that is a suitable source of beta-carotene, which must be eaten daily.
Those licenses made it effectively unavailable both to most countries which imported their rice and most countries that were self-sufficient. I think the two countries that had early trials may well have been the only two that were both eligible to make use of it and able to do so, and in at least one case that was a result of an error which resulted in them being counted as eligible when they weren't. They mostly seem to have been a PR stunt, something big biotech could point to and claim that they'd given the world a free solution to vitamin A deficiency that was being blocked by evil anti-GMO campaigners that wanted kids to go blind.
Therefore it would take $$$ from the pockets "of the world’s poorest" to the pockets of that company.
Correct education is the "drop-in solution" for the poor, not convincing them to buy a more expensive "IP-protected" product, so that their lives will become dependent of the new exclusive supplier.
The biggest "IP protections" on golden rice came from... Greenpeace and other anti-GMO activists - who wanted prevention against "accidental contamination" of non-gmo with gmo.
People will do what people do. Better operate within that than to change people.
I have given the example of a natural source, which should be the cheapest in most places, but even taking a vitamin A capsule per day must be cheaper than replacing white rice with yellow rice and it is guaranteed to provide the right amount of vitamin, unlike eating yellow rice and it also avoids the dependency of a monopolistic supplier.
Unlike for a genetically-modified crop, for vitamin capsules or tablets or powders there are many suppliers in various countries and for most of them the prices have become much cheaper than for the equivalent amount of fresh vegetables or fruits.
I don’t know the data so I am making guesses but perhaps the population impacted the most is not the middle class living in more metro areas but the rest of the population. I am reminded about the iron deficiency in Malaysia maybe? They introduced cast iron casted into good luck shapes for the population to use during cooking.
i'd like to see evidence that teaching people failed before i believe that this is not working.
Habit and tradition are hard to break. Along with that going back to my original point, it could be that a significant part of the population does not have the money or access. Lots of people have access to rice as their sole staple food when no money is available.
Edit: I am not as close to the Philippines but have lots of friends that emigrated and my understand is that there is a significant part of the population that are still living very poor. Also leaning on my life in Vietnam for comp of rural poor living in a growing country.
i am in a developing country now. what i have observed is that people here eat more than twice as much rice or other staple food in a meal than i do myself. i suspect that this is to make up for the lack of nutrients they could otherwise get from eating more vegetables.
Well, you can't prove a negative.
I actually wonder how high the acceptance rate for this rice in Asia is. White rice is one of the foundations of their culture. And this rice is not white!
I will admit that Greenpeace will probably just shift goal posts continually with "it's not proven safe enough" while simultaneously never putting in writing what the bar for safety should be..
Golden rice is targeted at the lesser-developed countries in Asia who are less likely to be snobbish about the color. Fried rice (where rice turns a yellow/red/brownish color) is also very common in the Philippines/China/SEA so aesthetically it just looks like fried rice to me. Would be much weirder if green or purple.
https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/66098
https://www.vegrecipesofindia.com/saffron-rice-or-kesar-rice...
> Well, you can't prove a negative.
If someone claims that GM crops have never been proven safe, they should be expected to provide evidence to support that claim. I don't think that the claim being negative should shift the burden of proof away from the claimant.
> A recommendation was made that golden rice be distributed free to subsistence farmers. Free licenses for developing countries were granted quickly due to the positive publicity that golden rice received, particularly in Time magazine in July 2000. Monsanto Company was one of the companies to grant free licences for related patents owned by the company. The cutoff between humanitarian and commercial use was set at US$10,000. Therefore, as long as a farmer or subsequent user of golden rice genetics would not make more than $10,000 per year, no royalties would need to be paid. In addition, farmers would be permitted to keep and replant seed.
From a farmer’s point of view, that’s a definite yes.
This is why people only apply it to things they don't want to do.
This isn’t any fear of gmo risks, but an act to protect the status quo.
It isn’t odd, it’s politics.
Does golden rice have better yields? Or is it just like any other rice but with more vitamin A?
Usually you can use your own seeds from your production for your next batch. But GMO plants are supposed to produce sterile seeds that you can't reuse. And in fact you wouldn't even be allowed to, as it is the intellectual property of the chemical company producer.
So, farmers will have to buy and depend on a company for the seeds that they have to use at every season...
I'm sorry, that is simply not true. Yes, there are so-called "heirloom" varieties that come true from seed, but commercial farming in the United States has been relying on hybrid seed for well over a hundred years now, and hybrids in general do not come true from seed.
Seed production is a highly specialized form of farming.
No large-scale farmer saves seed for replanting.
Golden rice is yet another technological “solution” to a social problem, and unsurprisingly it's also failing for other social issues (fear of GMOs)…
But also I think the "treating the gunshot wound" analogy is a better fit. A crop that produces vitamin A is a treatment for population suffering from vitamin A deficiency. And "let people grow this crop" is a much smaller social problem than "dramatically reduce poverty".
Maybe, but I'm not sure law enforcement would agree with you, for their own very good reasons.
> But also I think the "treating the gunshot wound" analogy is a better fit. A crop that produces vitamin A is a treatment for population suffering from vitamin A deficiency.
No, it's not a treatment, it's a prevention measure, and its effect is very slow (the population must accept the reinforced food, and incorporate it in sufficient fashion in their diet, and it can take decades before the entire population is positively affected). “letting people grow this crop” is only the very beginning of a very complex social process that you are oversimplifying.
I don't have a particular opinion on the use of Golden Rice nor on GMOs in general, but believing that it will instantly solve the social problem at stake is delusional, and such delusion is exactly part of the lobbying campaign from GMOs industrial, which, unlike GMOs themselves, is a problem.
The only way for such a technological solution to be as effective as advertised, is with strong political support and regulation allowing its very quick generalization (that's what we did with iodized salt) but one must be careful with such an approach, because its effectiveness itself is a danger if things have hidden side effect (see the adverse effects of added fluorine in tap water to prevent dental cavities).
Iodized salt is a good example of a technical solution success story, and the one that was top of mind for me too. I don't think anyone thinks we should have waited for the underlying social problems to clear themselves. It certainly points out that these solutions need to be implemented well and have government support in order to be successful, but that's exactly why people are so upset about the political setbacks to golden rice.
I always thought that brown rice was eaten mainly by Westerners in the 20th Century whose dietary options were varied and plentiful enough that they didn’t notice the anti-nutritive effects of the bran and germ. And maybe also by East Asians millenia ago when rice culture was new and still being explored.
Now if you were to say instead that vitamin A deficiency became a problem in East Asia only with the introduction (millennia ago) of the practice of getting most of one’s calories from rice, I would tend to believe you.
Everywhere.
> During what centuries roughly?
At all times up until at least the late 19th century.
> What is your evidence?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_rice
> I always thought that brown rice was eaten mainly by Westerners in the 20th Century whose dietary options were varied and plentiful enough that they didn’t notice the anti-nutritive effects of the bran and germ. And maybe also by East Asians millenia ago when rice culture was new and still being explored.
That's insane. White rice was extremely labor intensive to produce until machines started doing it.
Here is someone producing rice without any machine that is “95% white” (less than 5 percent of the bran remains). In fact, when using this primitive tech the bran and germ seem to come off as an unavoidable side effect of removing the husk, which no one suggests should be left on the rice grain and no one eats AFAIK.
To make it easy for you to verify my “95% white” assertion, I have “jumped” to a close-up of the rice just before cooking, but of course to verify that no machine is used, you have to watch from the start of the video (to minute 9).
If you are not a visual person but rather an auditory person, you can hear a narrator in this next video say, "pounding . . . removes the husk and the bran layers" (emphasis mine). Rice with the bran layer removed is white rice.
The technique (mortar and pestle) depicted in the 2 videos I linked to seems to be able to produce only rice that is between about 90% and 99% white, and to get the 90%-white rice, you probably have to put up with an annoying amount of inedible rice husk in your food because (again) removing the husk removes the bran as a side effect.
The second video goes on to say that "there are some locals" (in the Philippines) who are still using the technique:
https://youtu.be/bkSEpVnlVv8?si=36mTEWV4xM1xtsfB&t=162
--so, the burden is on you to provide evidence that brown rice can be made at all without using machines that only became available after 1750.
But what tells you that it is the default process for making rice? There could be an easy process to make brown rice, and this “tiring and laborious” process to make white rice, and such a video would tell you nothing about the former.
> --so, the burden is on you to provide evidence that brown rice can be made at all without using machines that only became available after 1750.
The thing is that the literature talks about the fact that people used to eat brown rice in most of Asia, and when it comes to evidence, an individual YouTube video doesn't weight as much as you think it does. Also I don't know where you got your 1750 figure from, but it's likely to be more like 1950 or even later in most countries.
I picked 1750 because that is the earliest date before which I am sure that the people who eat a lot of rice would definitely not have had access to precisely-machined steel parts.
I strongly suspect that precisely-machined steel parts are necessary to turn just-harvested rice plants into brown rice: older rice-processing methods can only produce white rice (more precisely, rice with at least 90% or 95% of the bran removed whereas modern brown rice has most of the bran intact).
(Precisely-machined parts as also needed, I suspect, to produce rice with no bran at all attached -- 100%-white rice we might call it -- where most of the grains are not broken into pieces.)
Both of the creators of the 2 Youtube videos I linked to say that when they were children, their families of origin used the technique depicted in the videos to get the rice they needed to survive. The technique makes white rice and cannot be modified to make brown rice: one of the creators outright says that the process of removing the husk also removes the bran. If there is some other technique that does not rely on post-1750 technology that can make brown rice (husk removed, but bran left on the grain), why weren't subsistence rice farmers using it? Either it does not exist (my guess) or the rice farmers prefer white rice to brown rice.
I know that many internet commentators say that traditional subsistence rice farmers since the dawn of rice culture ate brown rice. But lots of falsehoods get repeated over and over on the internet.
Except we're not talking about “people talking about stuff on the internet” but dedicated literature on food production in Asia, which, albeit not perfect, is far less prone to propagate urban legends than internet forums.
I'm interested in learning more and in eliminating any false beliefs I have.
> I relied primary for this on Hsu, Han Agriculture: The Formation of Early Chinese Agrarian Economy (206 B.C. – A.D. 220) (1980) and F. Bray, The Rice Economies: Technology and Development in Asian Societies (1986) which were recommended to me by specialists in the field. The latter is a wealth of technical details on rice cultivation, although it is as focused on the transition to mechanization and modern agriculture as to the conditions of pre-modern rice cultivation.)
Again, I know nothing about rice cultivation except what I read in this blog post, but the source is an historian and he himself is quoting the work of people who have dedicated a good part of their academic career to this topic. They might still be wrong − academia isn't perfect − , but it would need far more than a Youtube video presenting one way to process rice as a rebuttal for their work.
For what it is worth, the assertion in the post by acoup you linked to that I am most confident is false is, "prior to that mechanical milling, brown rice was all that was available for the poor".
I believe that to be false because I am confident that using the primitive technique depicted in both of the videos I linked to, continuing to pound the rice continues to remove rice bran with the result that with enough pounding, the fraction of bran left on the grain can be driven down to 0.1% or lower, which I'm sure no one would call brown rice.
This "0.1%-brown" rice might consist mostly of grains that have broken into 2 or 3 or 4 pieces, but I've cooked and eaten white rice like that in the past, which is how I know it is perfectly edible and as far as I can tell just as nutritious as intact grains. (The broken pieces I got were the product of modern manufacturing: probably the factory has an easy way to separate broken pieces from intact grains, and for cosmetic purposes, omitted broken pieces from their product, and then they gave the broken pieces to a food bank or something like that.)
My understanding is that it was the usual way of doing so until mechanization made it affordable.
> What is your evidence?
I remembered reading it on acoup, and that's indeed the case:
> Consequently, while a diet of mostly brown rice can be healthy, a diet overwhelmingly of white rice leads to Thiamine deficiency, known colloquially as beriberi. My impression from the literature is that this wasn’t as much an issue prior to the introduction of mechanical milling processes for rice. Mechanical milling made producing white rice in quantity cheap and so it came to dominate the diet to the exclusion of brown rice, producing negative health effects for the poor who could not afford to supplement their rice-and-millet diet with other foods, or for soldiers whose ration was in rice. But prior to that mechanical milling, brown rice was all that was available for the poor, which in turn meant less Thiamine deficiency among the lower classes of society.
https://acoup.blog/2020/09/04/collections-bread-how-did-they...
Edit: now that I looked up on Wikipedia, Thiamine is actually vitamin B1, not Vitamin A, so THIS IS NOT THE SAME DEFICIENCY and I stand corrected.
Too bad I can't update my comment above anymore, because it's conveying false information based on an incorrect understanding of mine…
Japanese commoners prior to the post-WW2 era mostly ate brown rice, white rice was eaten only by the rich and powerful.
Even today, "hakumai"/"shiroi gohan" (white rice) still holds some of that special regard compared to "genmai" (brown rice), and that's despite the latter now being known as a vastly superior source of nutrients.
I am not familiar with the food histories of other asian countries, but I wouldn't be surprised if they are similar.
This is no different than when western countries started iodizing salt. It was much more effective at eliminating iodine deficiency than telling people to just eat seafood.
Philippine (sic)
Filipino for male person, the language (if you do not know it is called Tagalog ), and as a default adjective for most other nouns.
Filipina for female person.
Regardless, English remains an official language of the nation. Surely using English spellings in English language writing is OK officially?
Still maybe better to say "Court in Philippines..."
What a Philippine court ruling means for
transgenic Golden Rice, once hailed as a
dietary breakthrough
The quoted title should be as close to the original as possible, within the HN title size limit, and should certainly copy correctly spelled words.
And at the start of paragraphs too.
Someone should make a version of the meme with the death going door to door with a bloodied scythe but with the figure of nassim taleb instead.