Now that the chickens have started coming home to rest over Dr Florence Wambugu and Monsanto's claims for the GM sweet potato, it's worth taking another look at that other GM miracle story - 'golden rice'.
Wambugu & Co. argued that only GM and not conventional breeding could solve the sweet potato problem, but now exactly the opposite has proven to be the case. Golden rice inventor Ingo Potrykus has similarly claimed that his research focuses on problems which cannot be solved by traditional methods, but as the first article below explains that is also not the case.
Potrykus also deliberately ignores the known low-risk solutions to the problem of Vitamin-A deficiency (see second item below). In their place Potrykus, like Florence Wambugu, offers a massively expensive project, in terms of both devlopment, testing and distribution, involving all the uncertainties of genetic engineering.
The second item concludes that like the GM sweet potato, the golden rice project makes no sense except in a context of Public Relations.
1.'Mirage' of GM's golden promise - BBC
2. Profile of Ingo Potrykus - GM Watch
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1.'Mirage' of GM's golden promise
By Alex Kirby
BBC News Online environment correspondent
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3122923.stm
Golden rice burst on a world ready and eager for a new beginning. Announced with a flourish in January 2000, it promised to save millions of people from blindness and disease.
It can certainly help to improve nutrition and health in many developing countries.
But, as the publicists' dust settled, it became clear that golden rice was never going to be a silver bullet.
It is a genetically modified (GM) strain of rice that has been engineered to produce beta-carotene.
That not only gives it its eponymous golden colour, but enables people eating it to produce vitamin A.
The World Health Organisation estimates about 250 million people globally are deficient in vitamin A, increasing their risk of blindness, immune problems and other serious conditions.
Improving on Nature
So golden rice sounded like a real answer to a genuine problem, especially since the biotech company responsible, Zeneca, said it would offer the seeds freely to farmers in poor countries.
The reality, though, appears a little more prosaic. For a start, the genes for beta-carotene are already present in conventional rice.
It is just that they do not work as well in the "natural" varieties as in the novel version.
Beyond that though, poorly-fed people are unlikely to be able to absorb beta-carotene even when they eat golden rice. To use it, they need a diverse diet, including green leafy vegetables.
But the sorts of vegetables people used to be able to find have declined in number as the green revolution of the 60s and 70s emphasised monocultures of new varieties.
Household consumption of vegetables in India has fallen by 12% in two decades.
The prospects for golden rice receded a little further in 2002, when scientists published the draft sequences of the rice genome.
Short cut
That promised quicker results from conventional plant breeding, partly because it established where the beta-carotene "pathway" sat in the rice code.
A scientist from the biotech company Syngenta, which now includes Zeneca, said: "All the genes are present in rice. One could make a non-GM vitamin-A rice simply by studying those genes in a more focused way."
Golden rice may prove part of the answer to vitamin A deficiency, though not the comprehensive solution it seemed to be.
But it would be an answer that came with a hefty price-tag: the persistent concerns about the safety of GM technology to human health and to wild species.
Golden rice looks like being a special case, anyway, because the biotech industry is unlikely to give poor farmers free access to all its inventions.
People who campaign against GM crops are sometimes accused of wanting to deny the wretched of the Earth the chance to escape poverty and disease, all in the name of their own ideological obsession. But some impressive figures echo their concerns.
False dawn
Dr Richard Horton, editor of the British medical journal The Lancet, said: "Seeking a technological food fix for world hunger may be... the most commercially malevolent wild goose chase of the new century."
And from the biotech industry itself, Steve Smith, who worked for Syngenta Seeds before his death in June 2003, said: "If anyone tells you that GM is going to feed the world, tell them that it is not... To feed the world takes political and financial will - it's not about production and distribution."
Every day 800 million people go to bed with empty stomachs. Every day more than 30,000 under-fives die, from easily prevented diseases or from hunger.
The world is out of joint, and it will stay that way until those of us who are well-fed care enough to wage a war on hunger as ferocious as that against terrorism.
Science, perhaps including GM technology, can provide the weapons for that war - but that won't ever be a silver bullet.
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2.from the GM Watch profile of Ingo Potrykus
full text, sources and links at
http://www.gmwatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=105&page=P
The controversy over the PR uses of Golden Rice arose in 2000 when, a year after his official retirement, Potrykus decided it was the time to launch a publicity offensive on Golden Rice. He initially submitted a paper to the journal Nature, with a covering letter pointing up its relevance to the wider GM debate, but Nature rejected it. At that point, Peter Raven, a close ally of Monsanto's, became involved and with Raven's help Potrykus managed to launch his publicity bandwagon.
Potrykus says, 'The press conference in St. Louis, the presentation at the Nature Biotechnology Conference in London, the Science publication with the commentary (Guerrinot 2000), the feature story in TIME Magazine all led to an overwhelming coverage of the "Golden Rice" story on TV, radio, and in the international press.'
His relationship with the biotech industry is a long-standing one. As a result of his research, he is named as 'inventor' and thus has interest in some thirty plant-related patents, most of them belonging to Syngenta/Novartis. Alert to the value of the PR bonanza arising from Golden Rice, the biotech industry was keen to help Potrykus get round the multiple impediments posed by the intellectual property rights (IPR) the industry posessed. Potrykus records how 'only (a) few days after the cover of "Golden Rice" had appeared on TIME Magazine, I had a phone call from Monsanto offering free licenses for the company's IPR involved. A really amazing quick reaction of the PR department to make best use of this opportunity.'
However, the PR exploitation of Golden Rice triggered a number of awkward questions. The journalist Michael Pollan, for instance, wrote in The New York Times magazine, 'A spokesman for Syngenta, the company that plans to give golden rice seeds to poor farmers, has said that every month of delay will mean another 50,000 blind children. Yet how many cases of blindness could be averted right now if the industry were to divert its river of advertising dollars to a few of these programs?' (ie existing, but less well publicised, programs for delivering Vitamin A)
Even Gordon Conway of the Rockefeller Foundation was moved to comment that 'the public relations uses of Golden Rice have gone too far. The industry's advertisements and the media in general seem to forget that it is a research product that needs considerable further development before it will be available to farmers and consumers.'
Pollan responded to another Conway comment, 'We do not consider golden rice the solution to the vitamin-A deficiency problem' , with a question: 'So to what, then, is golden rice the solution?' The answer, Pollan said, was plain: 'To the public-relations problem of an industry that has so far offered consumers precious few reasons to buy what it's selling -- and more than a few to avoid it. Appealing to our self- interest won't work, so why not try pricking our conscience?'
Potrykus himself, in responding to the criticisms of Golden Rice voiced by Greenpeace, claimed to share their disgust 'about the heavy PR campaign of some agbiotech companies using results from our experiments.' However, when asked in an interview by a biotech supporter whether he believed the industry had 'overhyped' the value of golden rice he responded very differently, 'I did not follow the advertisements of the industry, but it is difficult to overhype the value of golden rice.'
In reality, it was Potrykus himself who had encouraged the PR use of Golden Rice as a lever for promoting genetic engineering. He has said that he saw the publicising of Golden Rice as 'a timely and important demonstration of positive achievements of the GMO technology. GMO technology had been used to solve an urgent need and to provide a clear benefit to the consumer, and especially to the poor and disadvantaged. To make the information available to a wider audience for a more balanced GMO discussion, we submitted the manuscript to Nature with a covering letter explaining its importance in the present GMO debate.'
Potrykus saw Golden Rice, then, as a poster-child for GM, which had been struggling to demonstrate any benefits to consumers or the poor. This in turn, he hoped, could help to sway public debate. Potrykus has also proven more than happy to use Golden Rice as a PR weapon with which directly to attack the biotech industry's critics.
He has written, 'What these radical opponents are doing is "Brunnenvergiftung" (well-poisoning) to the disadvantage of the poor. What I find very disturbing, is the fact, that they can play their dirty game without having to take responsibility for what they are damaging.'
In this spirit he has accused Greenpeace of 'crimes against humanity' and complains bitterly of the biosafety checks imposed as a result of the concerns they and other critics have raised. The consequence he says 'is that many thousands are dying, or have severe health problems such as irreversible blindness, who otherwise could live healthy and productive lives.' ('Swiss scientist scores Greenpeace', The Philippine Star, 1 September 2002)
This is curiously at odds with another Potrykus' admission about the criticisms raised by Greenpeace: 'I am happy to acknowledge, that Greenpeace is arguing on a rational basis... I also acknowledge, that Greenpeace has identified a weak point in the strategy of using Golden Rice for reducing vitamin A-deficiency.'
That weak point is the ability of Golden Rice to actually deliver results. The amount of vitamin A precursor it contains falls far short of the normal recommended daily allowance.
Yet Potrykus was already telling the world back in 2000 that 'GMO technology had been used to *solve* an urgent need and to provide a clear benefit' (emphasis added). It was these claims that lay behind the Time headline, 'This rice could save a million kids a year.' But as Gordon Conway of the Rockefeller Foundation has made clear, Golden Rice should never have been touted as 'the solution to the vitamin-A deficiency problem'.
It is a research product in need, as Conway says, of 'considerable further development.'
The renowned Indian scientist Dr Pushpa Bhargava is among many who have complained that when they looked at the arithmetic the Golden Rice 'hype' fell apart.
Hans Herren is another critic of Golden Rice. Herren's work on natural biological control helped save the endangered cassava crop in large areas of Africa (from Senegal to Mozambique), removing a threat to the food security of some 300 million people. A World Food Prize winner, Herren has commented, 'We already know today that most of the problems that are to be addressed via Golden Rice and other GMOs can be resolved in matter of days, with the right political will.'
Vitamin A deficiency, like almost all hunger and malnutrition, thrives where there is poverty, poor food distribution, lack of land and resources to grow food, and a lack of political will to address these issues. And if the will and resources are suddenly available to overcome these difficulties in thecase of Golden Rice, why are they not available in th ecase of cheaper alternative sources of vitamin A already available?
The Golden Rice project makes no sense except in a context of Public Relations.