Many GMO opponents are targeting the development of Golden Rice–a variation on the Asian staple enhanced with Vitamin A that most health experts say could significantly improve the health of many nutrition poor people in the developing world.
In fact, Greenpeace last week renewed its long running offensive against its introduction, claiming it is a Trojan horse to soften the public opposition to GMOs that Greenpeace itself has helped create.
Those promoting ‘Golden’ rice in the UK and elsewhere appear to be doing so more as means of promoting the wider GM agenda–and attacking opponents of the ‘GM project’ –than as serious means of solving problems in the global south.
That echoed comments it posted on its website earlier this year.
‘Golden’ rice is far from being a sustainable solution to vitamin deficiency – it encourages a diet based solely on rice. In Greenpeace’s opinion, the tens of millions of dollars invested in the development and promotion of GM ‘Golden’ rice would have been better spent in supporting solutions that work.
Ecologically farmed home and community gardens can contribute to healthy and varied diets by directly empowering people to produce their own nutritious food. This is the real long-lasting solution Vitamin A Deficiency VAD) affected communities need.
As the environmentalist and journalist Mark Lynas noted in a speech last week at the International Rice Congress 2014, Bangkok, most scientists and agricultural experts sharply challenge Greenpeace’s perspective. Greenpeace has been actively campaigning against genetically modified vitamin enhanced crops for years, and even went so far as to help endorse a mob attack on test plots in the Philippines.
Genetic engineering, Lynas maintains, is critical to addressing the world’s burgeoning population, which could exceed million by 2050.
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It has been estimated that for every 1 billion people added to the world’s population, 100 million more tonnes of paddy rice need to be produced annually – using less land, water, nitrogen and energy, and resulting in less greenhouse gas emissions, of which rice is a currently a major source.
Crop genetics comes into every aspect of this picture. Changing the biology of rice plants offers the chance to combat major and emerging diseases, to tackle pests with fewer and less toxic pesticides, to increase water- and nitrogen-use efficiency and to increase overall productivity to feed more people on less land.
Familiar tools include conventional cross-breeding and hybridisation, marker-assisted selection and mutagenesis. However, in order to be able to access the widest-possible pool of germplasm it will be essential for rice breeders to be able to use transgenic techniques as well as conventional breeding.
And yet the use of these molecular biotechnology techniques, which are improving all the time in accuracy, variety and usability, remains needlessly controversial.
In its attack on Golden Rice issued last week, Greenpeace maintained that other genetic techniques, such as marker assisted genetics, are superior to GM–a view rejected as simplistic and political by scientists. “This is clearly untrue for Golden Rice, which could not have been created any other way,” Lynas wrote in the Bangkok Post. “None of these potentially life-saving projects could go ahead if GMOs are banned, as many activists seek.”
Three billion people, many of them extremely poor and under nourished, eat rice every day–yet activist groups, led by Greenpeace, are denying one important tool that could help address this tragedy–and without any scientific basis.
