A few days ago The Guardian had an interesting article about “Golden Rice”.
Basically, this rice is a genetically modified (GM or GMO) type of rice (called Golden Rice) that has been engineered to contains beta carotene, which the body converts to vitamin A.
Vitamin A deficiency is a huge problem in the developing world. WLBOTT has covered the topic in a recent BLOTT . Vitamin A deficiency leads to a lot of suffering, especially in children, causing blindness, malnutrition, and increased childhood mortality.
Vitamin A is found in most foods in the west but in developing countries it is conspicuously lacking in diets, a deficiency that “is associated with significant morbidity and mortality from common childhood infections, and is the world’s leading preventable cause of childhood blindness,” according to the World Health Organization. Estimates suggest it causes the deaths of more than 100,000 children a year.
The Philippines had become the first country – in 2021 – to approve the commercial cultivation of Golden Rice, which was developed to combat vitamin A deficiency, a major cause of disability and death among children in many parts of the world.
A scientists compares vitamin-A enriched Golden Rice and ordinary rice in Manila, the Philippines. Photograph: Erik de Castro/Reuters – The Guardian
But campaigns by Greenpeace and local farmers last month persuaded the country’s court of appeal to overturn that approval and to revoke this. The groups had argued that Golden Rice had not been shown to be safe and the claim was backed by the court, a decision that was hailed as “a monumental win” by Greenpeace.
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 the rice. It is intended to produce a fortified food to be grown and consumed in areas with a shortage of dietary vitamin A.
Vitamin A Deficiency: Simple Solutions / Complex Implementations
The problem comes down to huge segments of the world’s population surviving on diets consisting mainly of rice, corn, and wheat. The diet of our brothers and sisters is so poor that their daily food doesn’t contain basic nutrition that we take for granted in the west.
One simple solution is to fortify all cooking oil in these countries with vitamin A.
This is not needed in the US, but let’s say if it were….
Congress passes a law requiring cooking oil producers to add vitamin A, is carefully specified amounts
The FDA is given power to monitor and enforce this law; they routinely and efficiently sample commercial cooking oil
Food manufacturers comply with this simple and cheap requirement (but not without a lot of bitching from idiots like Alex Jones and MTG – they’re taking away our freedom to die from malnutrition! Vitamin A causes chem-trails!)
Manufacturers that don’t comply are heavily fined, making compliance by far the more cost-effective path
But then you have countries that are so incredibly poor, or corrupt (or both) that they can’t institute something this simple. You end up having heroes (like Helen Keller International) that go village-by-village, child-by-child dispensing vitamin A doses.
Vitamin A deficiency / Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=550815https://www.bioanalyt.com/oil-fortification-icheck-chroma/ 49 countries mandate fortification of vegetable oils or fats. (Source: Hoogendoorn et al. 2FASEC. 2016)
The Devil’s Advocate: Banning a Life-Saving Rice
Let’s take a minute to look at some of the arguments against the introduction of Golden Rice. Some of the counter-arguments are nonsense, but some have valid foundations.
GMO Distrust in General
Monoculture
Distrust of Corporate Producers
Poor nutritional value of Rice / Lack of Access to Healthy foods
GMO Distrust in General
This may be the least persuasive argument. Plant hybridization has taken place since the birth of agriculture.
Respected scientists reject this claim:
Although golden rice has met significant opposition from environmental and anti-globalisation activists, more than 100 Nobel laureates in 2016 encouraged use of genetically modified golden rice which can produce up to 23 times as much beta-carotene as the original golden rice.
Although we consider the fear of GMOs as a weak argument, it does yield the best AI images.
Monoculture
Let’s say that Golden Rice is introduced, and it becomes a great success. Millions of childhood deaths and injuries are avoided by this vitamin-A enhanced rice. But what happens if 70% of the world’s rice crop becomes a single genetic variety? A single pathogen could recreate the horrific Irish Potato Famine, but on a much greater scale.
Monoculture gives modern agriculture enormous economies of scale, thus allowing inexpensive commodities to feed the world. But it comes with problems in general (not just related to Golden Rice).
Monoculture/solely crop production farms are the farming types by which farmers grow only crops, both annual crops/trees and field crops, such as wheat, corn, rice, rapeseed, sugar cane, and cotton.
Monoculture is widely used in industrial farming systems, including conventional and organic farming, and has allowed increased efficiency in planting and harvest. Continuous monoculture, or “monocropping” where the same species is grown year after year, can lead to unsustainable environments such as building up disease pressure and reducing particular nutrients in the soil.
The first problem with monoculture in farming is the increased use of pesticides. Monoculture crops are highly prone to blight and pests because of the lack of diversity. What many farmers will do is increase the usage of pesticides to protect the crops. In doing so, these chemicals affect the soil, water and other variables of growth.
One the one hand, these images are a thing of beauty: the enormous scale and low-cost production of food is one of mankind’s greatest achievements. Imagine how much human labor has been freed up to pursue other activities, like WLBOTT?
On the other hand, plethora of potential problemos.
Distrust of Corporate Producers
Do we really need to preach to the choir here? Let’s leave this for a future BLOTT.
Poor nutritional value of Rice / Lack of Access to Healthy foods
The controversy over Golden Rice reminds me, oddly, of a Maeve Bincy story called “The Christmas Gift”. In the story, the protagonist is a mother and housewife who spends much of her life in the kitchen. Her family, with good intentions, buys her a small television set for the kitchen, failing to realize that the problem is that she spends so much of her time in the kitchen, not the lack of a TV.
So fortifying rice with vitamin A is indeed a noble and well-intentioned goal, but shouldn’t the ultimate goal be: fix the crippling poverty that causes people to have such desperately poor diets?
Semi-Sequitur: Maeve Binchy
Anne Maeve Binchy Snell (28 May 1939[1] – 30 July 2012) was an Irish novelist, playwright, short story writer, columnist, and speaker. Her novels were characterised by a sympathetic and often humorous portrayal of small-town life in Ireland, and surprise endings.
Her novels, which were translated into 37 languages, sold more than 40 million copies worldwide. Her death at age 73, announced by Vincent Browne on Irish television late on 30 July 2012, was mourned as the death of one of Ireland’s best-loved and most recognisable writers.
Wikipedia / Photo by Jon Kay at English Wikipedia. – Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons., CC BY-SA 3.0
