News Analysis
Golden Rice: Lifesaver?
By AMY HARMON
Published: August 24, 2013 67 Comments
ONE bright morning this month, 400 protesters smashed down the high
fences surrounding a field in the Bicol region of the Philippines and
uprooted the genetically modified rice plants growing inside.
Jes Aznar for The New York Times
Genetically engineered Golden Rice grown in a
facility in Los Baños, Laguna Province, in the Philippines.
Erik De Castro/Reuters
Mothers with masks made from baby bathtubs protested
Golden Rice in Quezon City, the Philippines, in June.
Had the plants survived long enough to flower, they would have betrayed a
distinctly yellow tint in the otherwise white part of the grain. That
is because the rice is endowed with a gene from corn and another from a
bacterium, making it the only variety in existence to produce beta
carotene, the source of vitamin A. Its developers call it “Golden Rice.”
The concerns voiced by the participants in the Aug. 8 act of vandalism
— that Golden Rice could pose unforeseen risks to human health and the
environment, that it would ultimately profit big agrochemical companies —
are a familiar refrain in the long-running controversy over the merits
of genetically engineered crops. They are driving the desire among some
Americans for mandatory “G.M.O.” labels on food with ingredients made
from crops whose DNA has been altered in a laboratory. And they have
motivated similar attacks on trials of other genetically modified crops
in recent years: grapes designed to fight off a deadly virus in France, wheat designed to have a lower glycemic index in Australia, sugar beets in Oregon designed to tolerate a herbicide, to name a few.
“We do not want our people, especially our children, to be used in these
experiments,” a farmer who was a leader of the protest told the
Philippine newspaper Remate.
But Golden Rice, which appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in 2000
before it was quite ready for prime time, is unlike any of the
genetically engineered crops in wide use today, designed to either
withstand herbicides sold by Monsanto and other chemical companies or
resist insect attacks, with benefits for farmers but not directly for
consumers.
And a looming decision by the Philippine government about whether to
allow Golden Rice to be grown beyond its four remaining field trials has
added a new dimension to the debate over the technology’s merits.
Not owned by any company, Golden Rice is being developed by a nonprofit group called the International Rice Research Institute
with the aim of providing a new source of vitamin A to people both in
the Philippines, where most households get most of their calories from
rice, and eventually in many other places in a world where rice is eaten
every day by half the population. Lack of the vital nutrient causes
blindness in a quarter-million to a half-million children each year. It
affects millions of people in Asia and Africa and so weakens the immune
system that some two million die each year of diseases they would
otherwise survive.
The destruction of the field trial, and the reasons given for it,
touched a nerve among scientists around the world, spurring them to
counter assertions of the technology’s health and environmental risks.
On a petition supporting Golden Rice circulated among scientists and
signed by several thousand, many vented a simmering frustration with
activist organizations like Greenpeace, which they see as playing on
misplaced fears of genetic engineering in both the developing and the
developed worlds. Some took to other channels to convey to American
foodies and Filipino farmers alike the broad scientific consensus that G.M.O.’s are not intrinsically more risky than other crops and can be reliably tested.
At stake, they say, is not just the future of biofortified rice but also
a rational means to evaluate a technology whose potential to improve
nutrition in developing countries, and developed ones, may otherwise go
unrealized.
“There’s so much misinformation floating around about G.M.O.’s that is taken as fact by people,” said Michael D. Purugganan,
a professor of genomics and biology and the dean for science at New
York University, who sought to calm health-risk concerns in a primer
on GMA News Online, a media outlet in the Philippines: “The genes they
inserted to make the vitamin are not some weird manufactured material,”
he wrote, “but are also found in squash, carrots and melons.”
Mr. Purugganan, who studies plant evolution,
does not work on genetically engineered crops, and until recently had
not participated in the public debates over the risks and benefits of
G.M.O.’s. But having been raised in a middle-class family in Manila, he
felt compelled to weigh in on Golden Rice. “A lot of the criticism of
G.M.O.’s in the Western world suffers from a lack of understanding of
how really dire the situation is in developing countries,” he said.
Some proponents of G.M.O.’s say that more critical questions, like where
biotechnology should fall as a priority in the efforts to address the
root causes of hunger and malnutrition and how to prevent a few
companies from controlling it, would be easier to address were they not
lumped together with unfounded fears by those who oppose G.M.O.’s.
“It is long past time for scientists to stand up and shout, ‘No more lies — no more fear-mongering,’ ” said Nina V. Fedoroff,
a professor at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
in Saudi Arabia and a former science adviser to the American secretary
of state, who helped spearhead the petition. “We’re talking about saving millions of lives here.”
Precisely because of its seemingly high-minded purpose, Golden Rice has
drawn suspicion from biotechnology skeptics beyond the demonstrators who
forced their way into the field trial. Many countries ban the
cultivation of all genetically modified crops, and after the rice’s
media debut early in the last decade, Vandana Shiva, an Indian environmentalist, called it a “Trojan horse”
whose purpose was to gain public support for all manner of genetically
modified crops that would benefit multinational corporations at the
expense of poor farmers and consumers.
In a 2001 article, “The Great Yellow Hype,”
the author Michael Pollan, a critic of industrial agriculture,
suggested that it might have been developed to “win an argument rather
than solve a public-health problem.” He cited biotechnology industry
advertisements that featured the virtues of the rice, which at the time
had to be ingested in large quantities to deliver a meaningful dose of
vitamin A.
But the rice has since been retooled: a bowl now provides 60 percent of
the daily requirement of vitamin A for healthy children. And Gerard Barry,
the Golden Rice project leader at the International Rice Research
Institute — and, it must be said, a former senior scientist and
executive at Monsanto — suggests that attempts to discredit Golden Rice
discount the suffering it could alleviate if successful. He said, too,
that critics who suggest encouraging poor families to simply eat fruits
and vegetables that contain beta carotene disregard the expense and
logistical difficulties that would thwart such efforts.
Identified in the infancy of genetic engineering as having the potential for the biggest impact for the world’s poor, beta-carotene-producing rice was initially funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the European Union. In a decade of work culminating in 1999, two academic scientists, Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer, finally switched on the production of beta carotene by adding daffodil and bacteria DNA to the rice’s genome. They licensed their patent rights to the agribusiness company that later became Syngenta, on the condition that the technology and any improvements to it would be made freely available to poor farmers in the developing world. With the company retaining the right to use it in developed countries, potentially as an alternative to vitamin supplements, Syngenta scientists later improved the amount of beta carotene produced by substituting a gene from corn for the one from daffodil.
If the rice gains the Philippine government’s approval, it will cost no
more than other rice for poor farmers, who will be free to save seeds
and replant them, Dr. Barry said. It has no known allergens or toxins,
and the new proteins produced by the rice have been shown to break down
quickly in simulated gastric fluid, as required by World Health
Organization guidelines. A mouse feeding study is under way in a
laboratory in the United States. The potential that the Golden Rice
would cross-pollinate with other varieties, sometimes called “genetic
contamination,” has been studied and found to be limited, because rice
is typically self-pollinated. And its production of beta carotene does
not appear to provide a competitive advantage — or disadvantage — that
could affect the survival of wild varieties with which it might mix.
If Golden Rice is a Trojan horse, it now has some company. The Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation, which is supporting the final testing of
Golden Rice, is also underwriting the development of crops tailored for
sub-Saharan Africa, like cassava that can resist the viruses that
routinely wipe out a third of the harvest, bananas that contain higher
levels of iron and corn that uses nitrogen more efficiently. Other
groups are developing a pest-resistant black-eyed pea and a “Golden
Banana” that would also deliver vitamin A.
Beyond the fear of corporate control of agriculture, perhaps the most
cited objection to G.M.O.’s is that they may hold risks that may not be
understood. The decision to grow or eat them relies, like many other
decisions, on a cost-benefit analysis.
How food consumers around the world weigh that calculation will probably
have far-reaching consequences. Such crops, Scientific American
declared in an editorial last week, will make it to people’s plates
“only with public support.”
Greenpeace, for one, dismisses the benefits of vitamin supplementation
through G.M.O.’s and has said it will continue to oppose all uses of
biotechnology in agriculture. As Daniel Ocampo, a campaigner for the
organization in the Philippines, put it, “We would rather err on the
side of caution.”
For others, the potential of crops like Golden Rice to alleviate
suffering is all that matters. “This technology can save lives,” one of
the petition’s signers, Javier Delgado of Mexico, wrote. “But false
fears can destroy it.”
