Considering the opposition to golden rice (sometimes violently [1]) to fulfill this role in other parts of the world, these bananas are probably DOA. So long as middle-class Westerners imagine someone somewhere might end up making a profit, they will prefer children in developing countries starve and go blind [2].
I have to say this is likely the most intelligent conversation thread I have come across on this subject, and I have seen a few.
Here are a few thoughts which may find some resonance.
Golden Rice is the first significant GMO that is not designed to benefit the farmer - it is designed to benefit the consumer.
Until Golden Rice, seed companies developed GMOs which would be attractive to Farmers - by allowing them to plough less, use less pesticide, endure drought, resist disease and increase yield. Since all farmers operate on profit motive (pretty much like everyone else when it comes to their work) they buy the seeds which help ensure they do not go broke, and hopefully thrive.
This is why the CEO of Lululemons making an impolite statement causes a 15% drop in their stock price, but 1.5 million people marching in 600 cities calling for the death of Monsanto does not even budge their value or their revenue. Farmer are their ONLY customers, and farmers tend to be unimpressed by urban marches, buying the seeds they see as most profitable, even if they cost three times as much.
As well, the fact that the vast majority of urbanites are not really familiar with actual farming realities, it has been easier for NGO's and political forces to exagerate the danger, mobilize communities and raise funds and followers on the issue. There is no consequence for someone in the city to oppose GMOs, unlike cellphones, which also have a risk/benefit dynamic going on.
Golden Rice (and bananas) changes this conversation entirely, as now instead of being concerned with crop yields (Nobody in a city actually cares about this) the issue is the real blindness and death of millions of children in front of their parents who are doing their best to feed them. Everyone in the city cares about children.
So the Precautionary, Principle, when applied to Golden Rice, calls for comparing the risk of doing something ( permitting commercial cultivation) with the risk of not doing something (another 6,000 children dying each day)
Greenpeace's statement on the risk of Golden Rice is they are concerned about "unforeseen health and environmental problems". 'Unforeseen', of course meaning you cannot see it, and therefore do not know what it is or might be.
In their eyes that risk justifies blocking Golden Rice, which immediately ends vitamin A deficiency in whoever eats 60 grams a day of it. This has been proven beyond any doubt - lack of 150-year studies notwithstanding.
They say it is a quick-fix and that it costs too much money.
The WHO spends between 500 million and a billion dollars each year on vitamin A supplement programs. The entire Golden Rice development budget over 25 years has been 35 million dollars.
The seeds of Golden Rice are true and grow more Golden Rice - unlike vitamin pills which you need to come back with every week.
All farmers earning under $10,000/year will pay no royalty, so it will cost them ( virtually all the poor farmers in Asia and Africa) the same as normal rice. And the distribution is controlled by government and NGO organizations, so there is no corporate involvement.
Yet, it was ready for distribution in 2004, and only the political, legal and social activism of Greenpeace and other groups which hold a zero-tolerance position on all GMOs has blocked it.
There is only one difference between normal rice and Golden Rice and that is the presence of beta-carotene in the grain. Rice leaves are already full of beta-carotene but are inedible. So there is not even a new nutrient or element in Golcen Rice, just the corn gene that allows it to put the beta-carotene in the grain ( the same way it does in a corn plant)
I highly respect the statements about civil discourse above, and will do my best to say this without vilifying anyone: I have only encountered two underlying dynamics within the opponents of Golden Rice:
Either they lack the critical thinking capacity to grasp the science which confirms its safety, and concurrently believe the unsubstantiated claims about its danger and the unrealistic 'better ways' that should be done,
or,
they are cynical enough and lacking in compassion to the extent they think it is better to continue to deny families this cure, as long as GMO do not 'win'
After six months of campaigning to support Golden Rice I can report with certainty that 80% of the public understand the issue and immediately favor an exemption for Golden Rice on Humanitarian grounds. So we will see it in fields and the immediate drop in death from vitamin A deficiency that will accompany it.
I invite all conversation on this issue, either here or by email.
Many thanks,
Michael Moore
Executive Director
Allow Golden Rice Society
www.allowgoldenricenow.org
mmoore@allowgoldenricenow.org
> they will prefer children in developing countries starve and go blind
Please don't use inflammatory language like this when arguing on HN. It's unsubstantive (because it overstates things for agitation effect) and tends to provoke low-quality subthreads.
Here's something PG once wrote that clarifies this principle:
[HN comments] should be written in the spirit of colleagues cooperating in good faith to figure out the truth about something, not politicians trying to ridicule and misrepresent the other side.
Sorry, I don't see why you consider what I wrote "inflammatory". Children in developing countries starving and going blind is the status quo. Opposing an existential solution without bothering to provide an alternate existential solution is de facto preferring the status quo. This should not be a controversial statement.
Well, it's inflammatory because it depicts opponents as monsters who prefer to see children suffer. That's plainly one meaning of such language, regardless of whether there's also an abstract factual interpretation. It's not as bad as if you had accused someone personally, but it's still bad. It provokes a downward spiral in the discourse. HN threads are sensitive to this.
There are places where inflammatory, provocative language does well: in the rough and tumble of political debate, for example, or battles of literary wit. The trouble is that if we have much of it here, it rides roughshod over everything else. It's a tradeoff. The values of HN are intellectual substance and personal civility, and those are fragile in a public anonymous forum, so we all should consciously protect them. This still leaves lots of room to make one's point (albeit at the cost of a certain blandness), so it shouldn't be a problem.
That is an entirely different part of the world with an entirely different culture and set of existing problems. It is entirely possible that "golden bananas" might actually be helpful in some African countries...
Golden rice treats a symptom and is not a cure. Instead of spending millions of dollars on treating symptoms I wonder if all that effort should instead be invested in finding a cure. There is an idea that biotechnology alone will solve all the world's problems without trying to understand what causes those problems. Or even understand the situation outside their own worldview.
Vitamin A deficiency is rarely an isolated phenomenon but usually coupled to a general lack of a balanced diet. It seems like a too first world centric solution to say "you eat mostly rice? Lets alter the rice" rather than looking into the reasons why you eat mostly rice. And vitamin A is a single nutrient.
I'm not sure if there was any other unforeseen consequences taken into account as nothing exists in a vacuum. Will encouraging golden rice consumption lead to discouraging a varied diet? Who knows. Did they take into account that vitamin A is a fat fat-soluble vitamin and there should be fat in the diet for proper absorption? I honestly don't know on the second question.
FYI, rice is an extremely healthy food, and typically it has been something that the poor are lucky to have. It also contains fat (in non-white rice).
Also, what do you want people to "find a cure" for? The growing population of humans? Climate change, which will radically alter geography especially in Africa, the Middle East, and India? Wealth imbalance, which has existed since the beginning of agriculture? It's extremely naive to suggest that "millions of dollars" is sufficient to "find a cure" for whatever it is that causes the "symptom" of human malnourishment.
WOW. Nobody argued that rice wasn't good for you. A diet of all or mostly rice leads to nutrition deficiencies.
>in non-white rice
People eat white rice because it doesn't spoil as fast, especially in the tropics.
Education, treating poverty, and encouraging biodiversity and a varied diet among the population. Teaching things like backyard farming, hygiene, breastfeeding. Also vaccines since infection drains vitamin A deficiency and a large cause of mortality from infectious diseases is due to vitamin A deficiency.
Other problems like political instability and poverty are more difficult to find a solution to. I'll let other people study that one.
> The overall prevalence of VAD is decreasing markedly because of increased awareness of VAD as a public health problem and increased measles immunization and vitamin A supplementation or fortification programs. However, the prevalence of VAD is increasing or is unknown in some regions because of political instability, high rates of infectious disease, and increasing poverty.
>Children grow and develop well when they have access to affordable, diverse, nutrient-rich food, appropriate maternal and child care, adequate health services and a healthy environment including safe water, sanitation and good hygiene.
>Underlying these causes are factors such as household food insecurity (due to poverty or other reasons), inadequate care and feeding practices, unhealthy household environments and inadequate health services
> Improving the availability of affordable, nutritious foods requires a broad approach, encompassing all the farmers, businesses, institutions and processes (such as supply chains) which produce, process and make foods available to communities.
>In the short term, vitamin A supplementation is the most effective way to reduce vitamin A deficiency and child mortality (see page 70). Doing something about vitamin A deficiency on its own, however, will not deal with the larger problem of undernutrition and deficiency of other micronutrients essential for growth, health and educational development. This is why, in this issue of the Community Eye Health Journal, we suggest that vitamin A deficiency must be addressed – not just with supplementation – but also by working with mothers to address the immediate and underlying causes of chronic undernutrition. This will improve their children’s health and diet and therefore also their general nutrition. In particular, we should encourage improved hand washing practices and work with families to overcome customs associated with inadequate complementary or weaning foods.
That being said, I don't actually believe that giving golden rice to farmers is currently a bad idea as it is already there. I just think the whole initiative was tackling the problem the wrong way. I also worry about any unintended consequences.
It isn't a popular opinion around here because there is a view that science will fix all the world's problems. Too often the societal problems that cause those problems are ignored. Even suggesting that GMOs might not be the answer we are all looking for gets you lumped in with the loonies and a flurry of downvotes.
I think people were reading "this is treating a symptom of larger problems" and thinking you meant "We should not be treating symptoms but should be focusing on the root cause."
This makes sense when you have only a few minds working on the problem and the root cause can be tackled directly and simply. However, there are many minds with many different specialties and the root cause is complex enough that it makes sense to divide it into individual problems. Especially since those symptoms contribute to the cause. Obesity causes joint pain and joint pain causes lack of exercise. And so it sometimes sounds silly to criticize someone for just dealing with joint pain rather than the larger problem.
But it now sounds like you are actually saying "We shouldn't forget that there are also other problems to solve here." And this is very true.
We should be treating the symptoms and also be focusing on the root cause.
I believe a lot of people have a mindset that technology can/should solve all the world's problems. The mindset can be misguided. When we pump hundreds of millions of dollars in a technology that might not take into consideration the human elements of the problem it is trying to solve - or the unintended consequences of such technology - we should be looking objectively and asking questions. Even if those questions don't have immediate answers.
It seems like if someone brings up any rational doubt or even QUESTIONS about GMOs they are instinctively labeled an "anti-science loon" and dismissed. Dismissing doubt by saying "you want children to go blind and die" isn't productive.
Everything has a trade-off as there isn't finite resources or time. I believe golden rice was misguided and the time and resources spent on it could have been better spent elsewhere, even on cheaper and more proven supplementation programs. It was over engineering.
I read an article in a magazine about how problems might not be solved in a straightforward manner and there is a lack of testing for various interventions to see which one works best or even works. There is a movement to science based aid. The example given that there was a trial for the best way to increase a child's education. Many things were tested such as free textbooks, more teachers, teacher education, etc. Do you know what worked the best for increasing children's education? Anti-parasitic medications. Children lose significant school time due to parasites. Which is in NO WAY obvious.
Right. We share the opinion in your first paragraph. The second paragraph is because people who believe in science are still humans and therefore still have an in-group out-group instinct; You probably already know this. We also have a strong pattern-matching instinct: "You said $statement? You've probably from $ideological_group."
I'm totally willing to believe that golden rice was over-engineering and was imprudent allocation of resources, but I thought we didn't yet know enough because it was still in testing. Has it actually been deployed?
Science based aid is great if you can choose your metrics successfully.
Here is the deal, we simply haven't had the time to determine if this is safe. And anyone who says it is is lying, because that's simply impossible to tell at this point. We know that with our best intentions and cutting edge science, we created margarine, something to save the arteries of the world. Only to find out that we didn't understand the science well enough, and margarine was essentially the stuff causing the problem. So, am I willing to use people as an experiment so they don't have a vitamin deficiency? Not yet. I want to see far more evidence, and I want to see a lot more studies conducted over at least 10-20 years.
Hmm. Let me ask you a question. What is really truly safe? The food that we eat are only determined to be safe through the test of time, food that we have eaten over hundreds of years with no mass death.
Even so, it can be dangerous if we eat too much of it. Eg, beer has been around for many years and have been seen to be healthy in some circles, but too much of it can be fatal.
So how do you really know for sure? Would it not be possible that the plant we eat has gone through nature's version of modification known as evolution and has become toxic for consumption?
Figure out what is actually being done. What I found was that a single enzyme found in a closely related species was being imported into this species. It is a more efficient enzyme than a very similar enzyme that is already present. So having this new enzyme (a protein) in the modern cultivated banana pushes the equilibrium slightly towards the manufacture of Vitamin A over its precursor. This might subtly effect the equilibrium metabolism of the plant, but likely no more than a particularly hot or cold day would. Further, the enzyme is only expressed in the fleshy portion of the plant, and so has little bearing the 'plant', only its fruit.
As for the health of the consumer, there is more variation and deviation between two species of banana (of this same kind) than there is between the modified and cultivated varieties. And keep in mind too that the cultivated varieties as we currently eat them are so far removed from their genetic capacity to survive as to actually be sterile.
A single, more efficient protein from a similar species was imported from a non-cultivated species into the more common, sterile, cultivated species to shift the fruit's own biochemical equilibrium along a single metabolic axis towards a few-fold increase in the production of Vitamin A.
On the scale of risk, this one is very near the bottom.
It was mostly about making a fat spread that was cheaper than butter. Relatively recent marketing probably made lots of health claims.
I suppose that makes the development a closer parallel with golden rice (or bananas), but I think you are underestimating the understanding that the developers of these organisms have.
Interestingly enough butter consumption has skyrocketed and has surpassed margarine consumption for the first time since the 50s. The hype has worn off, the health benefits haven't been proven, and margarine has become the poster child for "fake" foods.
It helps that butter tastes so much better. I grew up on margarine and butter was like a forbidden fruit to my mom because it was "so bad for you." I grew up thinking butter was death in stick form. I always bought margarine as an adult because you do what your parents did unless you have a reason not to. Well, at some point a few years ago I questioned it and switched over to butter. Guess who also switched to butter recently after decrying it my whole life? My mom.
Golden Rice is the first significant GMO that is not designed to benefit the farmer - it is designed to benefit the consumer. Until Golden Rice, seed companies developed GMOs which would be attractive to Farmers - by allowing them to plough less, use less pesticide, endure drought, resist disease and increase yield. Since all farmers operate on profit motive (pretty much like everyone else when it comes to their work) they buy the seeds which help ensure they do not go broke, and hopefully thrive.
This is why the CEO of Lululemons making an impolite statement causes a 15% drop in their stock price, but 1.5 million people marching in 600 cities calling for the death of Monsanto does not even budge their value or their revenue. Farmer are their ONLY customers, and farmers tend to be unimpressed by urban marches, buying the seeds they see as most profitable, even if they cost three times as much.
As well, the fact that the vast majority of urbanites are not really familiar with actual farming realities, it has been easier for NGO's and political forces to exagerate the danger, mobilize communities and raise funds and followers on the issue. There is no consequence for someone in the city to oppose GMOs, unlike cellphones, which also have a risk/benefit dynamic going on.
Golden Rice (and bananas) changes this conversation entirely, as now instead of being concerned with crop yields (Nobody in a city actually cares about this) the issue is the real blindness and death of millions of children in front of their parents who are doing their best to feed them. Everyone in the city cares about children.
So the Precautionary, Principle, when applied to Golden Rice, calls for comparing the risk of doing something ( permitting commercial cultivation) with the risk of not doing something (another 6,000 children dying each day)
Greenpeace's statement on the risk of Golden Rice is they are concerned about "unforeseen health and environmental problems". 'Unforeseen', of course meaning you cannot see it, and therefore do not know what it is or might be.
In their eyes that risk justifies blocking Golden Rice, which immediately ends vitamin A deficiency in whoever eats 60 grams a day of it. This has been proven beyond any doubt - lack of 150-year studies notwithstanding.
They say it is a quick-fix and that it costs too much money.
The WHO spends between 500 million and a billion dollars each year on vitamin A supplement programs. The entire Golden Rice development budget over 25 years has been 35 million dollars.
The seeds of Golden Rice are true and grow more Golden Rice - unlike vitamin pills which you need to come back with every week.
All farmers earning under $10,000/year will pay no royalty, so it will cost them ( virtually all the poor farmers in Asia and Africa) the same as normal rice. And the distribution is controlled by government and NGO organizations, so there is no corporate involvement.
Yet, it was ready for distribution in 2004, and only the political, legal and social activism of Greenpeace and other groups which hold a zero-tolerance position on all GMOs has blocked it.
There is only one difference between normal rice and Golden Rice and that is the presence of beta-carotene in the grain. Rice leaves are already full of beta-carotene but are inedible. So there is not even a new nutrient or element in Golcen Rice, just the corn gene that allows it to put the beta-carotene in the grain ( the same way it does in a corn plant)
I highly respect the statements about civil discourse above, and will do my best to say this without vilifying anyone: I have only encountered two underlying dynamics within the opponents of Golden Rice: Either they lack the critical thinking capacity to grasp the science which confirms its safety, and concurrently believe the unsubstantiated claims about its danger and the unrealistic 'better ways' that should be done, or, they are cynical enough and lacking in compassion to the extent they think it is better to continue to deny families this cure, as long as GMO do not 'win'
After six months of campaigning to support Golden Rice I can report with certainty that 80% of the public understand the issue and immediately favor an exemption for Golden Rice on Humanitarian grounds. So we will see it in fields and the immediate drop in death from vitamin A deficiency that will accompany it.
I invite all conversation on this issue, either here or by email. Many thanks, Michael Moore Executive Director Allow Golden Rice Society www.allowgoldenricenow.org mmoore@allowgoldenricenow.org