| Illegal in the Philippines. After years of struggle developing a product that (1) really worked and (2) anybody wanted. There are 200+ other countries in the world. It's approved in the U.S., Canada and other countries but they don't sell it. Given that they are politicizing it so much you think they might grow 10 tons of it somewhere and sell small quantities of it so people could try it out ("get a $20 bag of rice and support its development") but (a) it defeats the narrative they're being victimized by Greenpeace and (b) people may or may not like the sensory characteristics. I don't know how the GR2 trait itself impacts other agronomic characteristics but there is a principle that if an organism is spending energy on one thing it is going to have less for other things. A more definitely problem is that a small number of GR2 seed lines compete with a very large number of other rice lines. Even if the GR2 trait is neutral in other respects, the GR2 rice that is actually developed could be "ok" but not competitive with other seeds you could get. In the US there is a staggering variety of Bt corn or Roundup-Ready soybean seeds because the technology has been licensed to and picked up by most of the big seed vendors so farmers can get seeds that perform well for them. Farmers want these crops because they help their bottom line. If somebody tries to ban them, they'll fight back. PRRI doesn't have a lot of resources to develop a variety of optimized seeds, it doesn't have the deep relationships with seed vendors that (say) Monsanto has, it doesn't have a lot of enthusiasm from possible customers in the Philippines. If local farmers, public health authorities and such had organized to support it there could have been a different outcome. As it is PRRI comes across as another out-of-touch NGO. There are all kinds of little silly things such as the fact that they will start charging you if you grow more than $10,000 worth of it. If they really are out to save people from illness, change the world, and normalize the idea of transgenic crops, they should be giving it away for free. |