SPROUTING UP: GRAINS OF DELUSION: GOLDEN RICE

Sprouting Up: GRAINS OF DELUSION

March 2001

Golden Rice has hit the headlines again. The biotechnology industry has been slammed from various corners over the latest vanguard in its campaign to win over the public to the promises of genetic engineering. Syngenta, the company holding most of the patents on Golden Rice, has been making itself an easy target.

Syngenta’s Dr Adrian Dubock recently claimed that, "The levels of expression of pro-vitamin A that the inventors were aiming at, and have achieved, are sufficient to provide the minimum level of pro-vitamin A to prevent the development of irreversible blindness affecting 500,000 children annually, and to significantly alleviate Vitamin A deficiency affecting 124,000,000 children in 26 countries." He has also stated that each month Golden Rice’s entrance to the market is delayed will result in 50,000 children going blind. However, a simple calculation based on recommended daily allowance (RDA) figures show an adult would have to eat at least 12 times the normal intake of 300g of rice to get the daily recommended amount of provitamin A from Golden Rice.

Greenpeace has been characterising the Golden Rice project as "international deception." In Canada, it has filed a complaint against television commercials claiming that "Golden Rice could prevent blindness and infection in millions of children" to the Advertising Standards Committee. "This isn’t about solving childhood blindness, it’s about solving biotech’s public relations problem," says Greenpeace’s Martin Khoo. Even Ingo Potrykus, the Swiss scientist who developed Golden Rice and has historically adopted industry’s position on vitamin A rice, is unimpressed with industry’s hype. "I share Greenpeace’s disgrace about the heavy PR [public relations] campaign of some agbiotech companies using results from our experiments, which were exclusively done within public research institutions, and using exclusively public funding," Potrykus remarked at a recent meeting in France. But he still remains confident that they will be able to increase the provitamin A content of Golden Rice and argues that RDA figures are "luxurious" recommendations, rather than accurate indicators of the vitamin levels really needed by the body to function.

The Rockefeller Foundation, which has been very supportive of the development of Golden Rice and is funding work to transfer it to the South, has also acknowledged that "the public relations uses of Golden Rice have gone too far." In a letter to Greenpeace, Rockefeller head Gordon Conway states that "we do not consider Golden Rice the solution to the vitamin A deficiency problem. Rather, it provides an excellent complement to fruits, vegetables and animal products in the diet, and to various fortified foods and vitamin supplements."

This hoopla has all happened just when the first samples of this rice are arriving in India and the Philippines for further research and development. Under Indo-Swiss collaboration (with Potrykus at the helm), Golden Rice technology is to be made available to the Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR) and the Indian department of biotechnology. The project, funded to the tune of $US 2.6 million over seven years, aims to engineer the provitamin A genes into local varieties of rice.

But what do local organisations and farmers really think about the whole idea of genetically engineered Vitamin A rice? A new report produced jointly by BIOTHAI (Thailand), CEDAC (Cambodia), DRSC (India), MASIPAG (Philippines), PAN-Indonesia (Indonesia), UBINIG (Bangladesh) and GRAIN shows that, on the ground, people are not enthusiastic about this new technology. Indeed, " … at the end of the day, the main agenda for golden rice is not malnutrition but garnering greater support and acceptance for genetic engineering … Golden Rice is merely a marketing event." The report situates Golden Rice where it is intended to land: farmer’s fields in Asia.

The report first examines the promises: the benefits for the consumer and the farmer; the benefits of the public-private collaboration; and the benefits of the "free" license agreements. To make these promises has been easy, but even at this stage they reveal serious flaws. In reality, malnutrition stems from poverty, which Golden Rice cannot address. Furthermore, evidence shows that Golden Rice will have little effect on reducing vitamin A deficiency, providing at most 20% of an adult’s vitamin A requirements. In addition, one of the biggest problems with Golden Rice is the hidden agenda behind it. Significantly, the Philippine-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) has been called on to "continue to campaign for genetic engineering as a legitimate breeders’ tool, using the ‘golden’ rice as a flagship" by its technical advisors. With the arrival of Golden Rice in the Philippines in January 2001, IRRI is now set to fine-tune the rice for Asian conditions.

This report shows that local alternatives do exist. But will they survive the onslaught of genetic engineering?

“The best chance of success in fighting vitamin A deficiency and malnutrition is to better use the inexpensive and nutritious foods already available, and in diversifying food production systems in the fields and in the household. The euphoria created by the Green Revolution greatly stifled research to develop and promote these efforts, and the introduction of golden rice will further compromise them. The promoters of golden rice say that they do not want to deprive the poor of the right to choose and the potential to benefit from golden rice. But the poor, and especially poor farmers, have long been deprived of the right to choose their means of production and survival. Golden rice is not going to change that, and nor will any other corporately-pushed GE crop.”

“Grains of Delusion: Golden Rice seen from the ground” is available on GRAIN’s website: www.grain.org or from the GRAIN office