Transgenic Golden Rice, once hailed as a dietary breakthrough

https://www.science.org/content/article/what-philippine-court-ruling-means-transgenic-golden-rice-once-hailed-dietary

by Metacelsus • 2 years ago

77 110 2 years ago

7734128• 2 years ago

Weird to have a professional article start five sentences with "But..." in such a short article. I do sometimes too, but it's a bit grating when done so many times.

mikhailfranco4• 2 years ago

The Economist loves to do this.

And at the start of paragraphs too.

Beijinger• 2 years ago

"Greenpeace Southeast Asia campaigner Wilhelmina Pelegrina said in a statement. Greenpeace joined MASIPAG, a farmers’ association, and other organizations and individuals in challenging the planting permit. “GM crops have never been proven safe,” Pelegrina asserted."

Well, you can't prove a negative.

I actually wonder how high the acceptance rate for this rice in Asia is. White rice is one of the foundations of their culture. And this rice is not white!

ndsipa_pomu2• 2 years ago

I'd usually be in favour of the various antics of Greenpeace, but this ruling strikes me as odd. There's very little safety testing of traditionally produced crops and there's typically no problem with producing new varieties of existing produce. I could understand it more if it was a push-back against varieties that are engineered to not produce seed so that farmers are continually having to purchase from the company.

frostburg2• 2 years ago

That's also (mostly) propaganda. Farmers are very busy without having to deal with the side business of inefficiently growing their seeds and would buy anyway.

p_l2• 2 years ago

Except the only versions of golden rice that are engineered to prevent growing your own seed is... Mandated by Greenpeace, campaigned to make mandatory in various countries, in order to prevent "contamination"

nobodyandproud2• 2 years ago

Unclear to me: Is golden rice encumbered by any patents?

knodi123• 2 years ago

Yes, but fwiw:

A recommendation was made that golden rice be distributed free to subsistence farmers. Free licenses for developing countries were granted quickly due to the positive publicity that golden rice received, particularly in Time magazine in July 2000. Monsanto Company was one of the companies to grant free licences for related patents owned by the company. The cutoff between humanitarian and commercial use was set at US$10,000. Therefore, as long as a farmer or subsequent user of golden rice genetics would not make more than $10,000 per year, no royalties would need to be paid. In addition, farmers would be permitted to keep and replant seed.

dudeinjapan2• 2 years ago

White rice is one of the foundations of their culture

Golden rice is targeted at the lesser-developed countries in Asia who are less likely to be snobbish about the color. Fried rice (where rice turns a yellow/red/brownish color) is also very common in the Philippines/China/SEA so aesthetically it just looks like fried rice to me. Would be much weirder if green or purple.

aitchnyu• 2 years ago

The cooked form resembles saffron rice, an expensive dish made of rice and saffron. Indian leaders have taken the lead on foods and vaccines and ensured popular adoption and continues today.

https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/66098

https://www.vegrecipesofindia.com/saffron-rice-or-kesar-rice...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-53944723

morkalork• 2 years ago

Except you can make hypotheses about what you could expect to see as negative effects, feed a population of volunteers (or animals) the food, compare them to control population and see if the hypotheses can be accepted or rejected? Complaining about proving a negative or proving something is safe as a knee-jerk reaction is silly. Think about what happened with all the regulations around BPA in plastics food containers. The industry worked around it by substituting BPS and BPF. Demending those alternatives should have been proven safe first is entirely reasonable.

I will admit that Greenpeace will probably just shift goal posts continually with "it's not proven safe enough" while simultaneously never putting in writing what the bar for safety should be..

abduhl• 2 years ago

So you are actually in complete agreement that you can’t prove a negative and you also agree Greenpeace is not operating in good faith but rather is agenda driven.

croes• 2 years ago

And still we have tests for medication, cars etc.

numpad02• 2 years ago

There doesn't seem to be any reviews that actually mention its taste whatsoever, other than it's supposed to taste like rice. Maybe it doesn't taste great, or it's anyhow not a significant value add for farmers.

joshuaissac• 2 years ago

> “GM crops have never been proven safe,” Pelegrina asserted.
Well, you can't prove a negative.

If someone claims that GM crops have never been proven safe, they should be expected to provide evidence to support that claim. I don't think that the claim being negative should shift the burden of proof away from the claimant.

mikhailfranco4• 2 years ago

   Philippine (sic)

... if you must use the country name as an adjective, but usually it is better to choose one of the following:

Filipino for male person, the language (if you do not know it is called Tagalog ), and as a default adjective for most other nouns.

Filipina for female person.

hhshhhhjjjd• 2 years ago

But what if it is a court, not a male or female person?

Still maybe better to say "Court in Philippines..."

xk3• 2 years ago

Even better use the actual court name: "Philippine Court of Appeals revokes sale permit of GM crop Golden Rice"

mikhailfranco4• 2 years ago

The correct spelling is in the linked article:

  What a Philippine court ruling means for 
  transgenic Golden Rice, once hailed as a 
  dietary breakthrough

My comment was an appeal to just copy the actual link title. Perhaps people who did not click through and see the actual title are downvoting for some strange reason.

The quoted title should be as close to the original as possible, within the HN title size limit, and should certainly copy correctly spelled words.

Symmetry• 2 years ago

That's Spanish, but wouldn't it be better to use the more common lanugage, Tagalog, to render it "hukuman ng Pilipinas"? If one were to insist in talking about foreign courts in foreign languages, rather than the language of the readers.

mikhailfranco4• 2 years ago

No, it's English for talking about the Philippines and its inhabitants.

ajross• 2 years ago

Or... greek? That's the origin language of the name, after all. The Philippines were named after king Philip of Spain. Spellings vary.

Regardless, English remains an official language of the nation. Surely using English spellings in English language writing is OK officially?

littlestymaar10• 2 years ago

AFAIK vitamin A deficiency is a recent issue, due to the increased consumption of white rice at the expense of brown rice, which was the traditional way of eating rice for centuries (except among the elite, which had other sources of vitamin A thanks to a more diversified food supply than subsistence farmers).

Golden rice is yet another technological “solution” to a social problem, and unsurprisingly it's also failing for other social issues (fear of GMOs)…

connorgutman4• 2 years ago

You’re not wrong but this is akin to saying that we shouldn’t treat gunshot wounds because we need better gun control. We can do both.

littlestymaar10• 2 years ago

It's not a treatment here (vitamin A supplementation for people with deficiency is, and nobody argues against that), it's more like bulletproof vest in your example. Sure we could generalize bulletproof vest at the same time we're pushing for gun control, but it's not necessarily a desirable thing to do.

delichon• 2 years ago

Golden rice is a sort of Ozempic, high tech remediation for the damages of a modern diet. De-modernizing the diet is a better solution where it can be afforded.

ReptileMan• 2 years ago

I wonder what the long term effects of Ozempic will be. I have a feeling that it will bite us in the ass big time in quite unexpected ways.

hollerith8• 2 years ago

Where was brown rice the traditional way of eating rice (for non-elites)? During what centuries roughly? What is your evidence?

I always thought that brown rice was eaten mainly by Westerners in the 20th Century whose dietary options were varied and plentiful enough that they didn’t notice the anti-nutritive effects of the bran and germ. And maybe also by East Asians millenia ago when rice culture was new and still being explored.

Now if you were to say instead that vitamin A deficiency became a problem in East Asia only with the introduction (millennia ago) of the practice of getting most of one’s calories from rice, I would tend to believe you.

Dalewyn• 2 years ago

Where was brown rice the traditional way of eating rice (for non-elites)? During what centuries roughly? What is your evidence?

Japanese commoners prior to the post-WW2 era mostly ate brown rice, white rice was eaten only by the rich and powerful.

Even today, "hakumai"/"shiroi gohan" (white rice) still holds some of that special regard compared to "genmai" (brown rice), and that's despite the latter now being known as a vastly superior source of nutrients.

I am not familiar with the food histories of other asian countries, but I wouldn't be surprised if they are similar.

Hizonner2• 2 years ago

Where was brown rice the traditional way of eating rice (for non-elites)?

Everywhere.

During what centuries roughly?

At all times up until at least the late 19th century.

What is your evidence?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_rice

I always thought that brown rice was eaten mainly by Westerners in the 20th Century whose dietary options were varied and plentiful enough that they didn’t notice the anti-nutritive effects of the bran and germ. And maybe also by East Asians millenia ago when rice culture was new and still being explored.

That's insane. White rice was extremely labor intensive to produce until machines started doing it.

littlestymaar10• 2 years ago

Where was brown rice the traditional way of eating rice (for non-elites)? During what centuries roughly?

My understanding is that it was the usual way of doing so until mechanization made it affordable.

What is your evidence?

I remembered reading it on acoup, and that's indeed the case:

Consequently, while a diet of mostly brown rice can be healthy, a diet overwhelmingly of white rice leads to Thiamine deficiency, known colloquially as beriberi. My impression from the literature is that this wasn’t as much an issue prior to the introduction of mechanical milling processes for rice. Mechanical milling made producing white rice in quantity cheap and so it came to dominate the diet to the exclusion of brown rice, producing negative health effects for the poor who could not afford to supplement their rice-and-millet diet with other foods, or for soldiers whose ration was in rice. But prior to that mechanical milling, brown rice was all that was available for the poor, which in turn meant less Thiamine deficiency among the lower classes of society.

https://acoup.blog/2020/09/04/collections-bread-how-did-they...

Edit: now that I looked up on Wikipedia, Thiamine is actually vitamin B1, not Vitamin A, so THIS IS NOT THE SAME DEFICIENCY and I stand corrected.

Too bad I can't update my comment above anymore, because it's conveying false information based on an incorrect understanding of mine…

blululu• 2 years ago

Not sure about the downvotes. Vitamin A deficiency is a bogus diet issue. The problem can be solved with a sack of sweet potatoes.

jandrewrogers• 2 years ago

Many people do not find sweet potatoes palatable and won't eat them. Rice doesn't have this issue. The whole point here is to introduce Vitamin A into the food supply of people with limited options at risk of Vitamin A deficiency without changing the diet so as to encourage adoption.

This is no different than when western countries started iodizing salt. It was much more effective at eliminating iodine deficiency than telling people to just eat seafood.

numpad02• 2 years ago

Or by adding back brown rice to cookers. Same deal as whole grain breads, a healthier option. Won't work for sushi, but sushi comes with fish slices on top too, so...

littlestymaar10• 2 years ago

Sweet potatoes, spinach or carrots, yes, but idk how easy these are to grow in the Philippines.

adrian_b3• 2 years ago

The solution for any nutritional deficiencies is not the "fortification" of the staple foods.

I believe that the future of food sources is in genetically-engineered organisms, but I am dismayed by the fact that all the current attempts of genetic modifications have stupid goals.

The "fortification" of staple foods is extremely stupid, because the amount of staple food that is consumed varies widely with sex, size, age and physical activity and it is not proportional to the daily requirements for various vitamins or minerals. The amount of vitamins ingested from "fortified" food is always either insufficient or wasted as excessive.

The staple foods are required to provide only proteins and/or fats and/or carbohydrates. For everything else there are specific sources that are needed only in small quantities, so they usually do not add up to a major part of the cost of the food.

The daily intake of vitamin A can be obtained for instance from 100 grams of carrots, which in Europe, where I live, cost much less than 10 cents, so they can be afforded by anyone. In other parts of the world, where carrots are less common, there are various vegetables with similar properties, e.g. sweet potatoes and many others.

If they have vitamin A deficiency in their population, the solution is not buying more expensive yellow rice, but teaching everyone which is the amount of the cheapest locally available vegetable that is a suitable source of beta-carotene, which must be eaten daily.

newsclues• 2 years ago

Diversity of nutrition sources rather than centralized nutrition from a single staple makes a lot of sense.

connorgutman4• 2 years ago

You are philosophically correct but the flaw with this argument is time and $$$. With each passing year millions of people around the world die or go blind from vitamin A deficiency. Most of these cases are due to an over-reliance on white rice in particular, making golden rice essentially a drop-in solution for much of the world’s poorest. The goal is (or should be) to stop the bleeding with golden rice while also investing in and providing education around more diverse agricultural production.

adrian_b3• 2 years ago

It should be obvious that golden rice must be more expensive than traditional rice, otherwise it would not be promoted by whichever company has invented it.

Therefore it would take $$$ from the pockets "of the world’s poorest" to the pockets of that company.

Correct education is the "drop-in solution" for the poor, not convincing them to buy a more expensive "IP-protected" product, so that their lives will become dependent of the new exclusive supplier.

makomk2• 2 years ago

They're not just philosophically correct but probably correct in practice as well. Golden rice - especially the original version of it - is not just an easy drop-in solution. It requires the development of specific variants suited to the climate where it's grown, the original version didn't supply enough vitamin A even in an ideal scenario and had pretty major yield reductions which made the rice more expensive (which is a huge problem when poverty is one of the major reasons people are so dependentt on rice in the first place), and this was compounded by licensing restrictions which blocked both cross-border sales and most growing in countries which were self sufficient for food production.

Those licenses made it effectively unavailable both to most countries which imported their rice and most countries that were self-sufficient. I think the two countries that had early trials may well have been the only two that were both eligible to make use of it and able to do so, and in at least one case that was a result of an error which resulted in them being counted as eligible when they weren't. They mostly seem to have been a PR stunt, something big biotech could point to and claim that they'd given the world a free solution to vitamin A deficiency that was being blocked by evil anti-GMO campaigners that wanted kids to go blind.

dukeyukey2• 2 years ago

"Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots."

People will do what people do. Better operate within that than to change people.

adrian_b3• 2 years ago

People do not need to "live" on carrots or whatever other sources of vitamins are needed. These are needed only in small quantities in comparison with the main food. Carrots need not be eaten raw. They should be boiled either in a soup or with the rice. In many places carrots are a normal addition to rice, to make it tastier, regardless of any vitamin benefits.

I have given the example of a natural source, which should be the cheapest in most places, but even taking a vitamin A capsule per day must be cheaper than replacing white rice with yellow rice and it is guaranteed to provide the right amount of vitamin, unlike eating yellow rice and it also avoids the dependency of a monopolistic supplier.

Unlike for a genetically-modified crop, for vitamin capsules or tablets or powders there are many suppliers in various countries and for most of them the prices have become much cheaper than for the equivalent amount of fresh vegetables or fruits.

infecto2• 2 years ago

I understand what you are saying but the missing piece is a willing and able population.

I don’t know the data so I am making guesses but perhaps the population impacted the most is not the middle class living in more metro areas but the rest of the population. I am reminded about the iron deficiency in Malaysia maybe? They introduced cast iron casted into good luck shapes for the population to use during cooking.

em-bee2• 2 years ago

a problem that is easily solved with education. the money invested in this rice could easily instead be spent on educational campaigns to influence peoples eating habits. and i don't mean advertising but actually going door to door and talking to everyone. repeatedly, and getting everyone involved along the way. people learn to improve their hygiene to avoid spreading diseases, they can also learn to eat better.

i'd like to see evidence that teaching people failed before i believe that this is not working.

connorgutman4• 2 years ago

Been furious about this one for years. When the alternative is death and/or going blind who the fuck cares if there’s side effects? No one is saying it should end up in American grocery stores without proper testing but it could save and improve millions of lives around the world. For those who don’t know Greenpeace is essentially leading the campaign against GR via millions in “Zero GMO” funding. That kind of mindset won’t last long once wealthy nations start experiencing crop shortages caused by CC. Maize production will be first.

imtringued2• 2 years ago

I don't know about you, but there is significant competition in the vitamin A space. Carrots, sweet potatoes, spinach, etc. Nothing prevents anyone from promoting those today. The fact that you are myopically focusing on a single solution really tells me that the people going blind are just a side show for you.

connorgutman4• 2 years ago

That’s an odd and hurtful statement to make towards a stranger online. Trust me none of this is a side show for me. I’m an agricultural scientist who deeply cares about global food security and part of that is going to have to be GMOs. The fact that we can’t even try supplementing certain developing markets with golden rice because of a NGO in America where food security is mostly an afterthought is criminal.

admissionsguy• 2 years ago

required the government to follow the so-called precautionary principle

Someone should make a version of the meme with the death going door to door with a bloodied scythe but with the figure of nassim taleb instead.

MrBuddyCasino• 2 years ago

The precautionary principle also lead him horribly astray during covid.

manicdee• 2 years ago

I wonder if the actual issues with this rice are similar to the miracle rice programs of the '70s where western aid programs introduced commercial strains of rice to traditional farmers in Indonesia and other SE Asian countries. These strains promised higher yield but at the cost of buying in commercial fertilisers and herbicides. The side effect of higher rice yield was disappearance of fish and companion/accidental crops that would typically grow in the rice paddies, along with poisoning of rivers downstream due to excess nutrients from fertilised rice paddies.

AdmiralAsshat• 2 years ago

Don't forget that they didn't have the natural drought resistance that the indigenous strains of rice had developed over thousands of years.

HarryHirsch• 2 years ago

I understand that the deal is that "golden rice" is a low-maintenance GMO crop whose purpose is to get a foot in the door for other GMO crops, with all the issues that you mentioned.

DrDroop2• 2 years ago

Lets stop a good thing from happening and then congratulate ourselves we have stopped bad thing from happening.

achow2• 2 years ago

On the other hand in 50-60s...

..The Government of India signed an agreement with the Rockefeller Foundation to carry out research to achieve higher food production. The program started with research for the development of suitable hybrids of maize followed by hybrids of sorghum and pearl millet.

The dwarf wheat bred by Dr. Borlaug in Mexico, named Sonaro 4 and Larmarojo, were introduced. These efforts created an agricultural revolution.

I consider myself a farmer and used to grow wheat on 80 acres. I was very happy to harvest about 500 quintals every year – about six quintals (600 kg) for every acre. The planting of Sonaro 64, with the agronomic practices recommended, led to a harvest of 20 quintals (2000 kg) an acre, which was more than three times the previous yield.

I remember three to four years after the introduction of those seeds, India’s wheat production expanded significantly, and quite rapidly India became self-sufficient in food.

https://www.worldfoodprize.org/index.cfm/88533/18096/when_th...

mistrial92• 2 years ago

that quote is impressive but it neglects to mention the chemical inputs that are enmeshed in those crop cycles

skywal_l• 2 years ago

Another quote:

"The green revolution has won a temporary success in man's war against hunger and deprivation; it has given man a breathing space. If fully implemented, the revolution can provide sufficient food for sustenance during the next three decades. But the frightening power of human reproduction must also be curbed; otherwise the success of the green revolution will be ephemeral only. Most people still fail to comprehend the magnitude and menace of the "Population Monster"...Since man is potentially a rational being, however, I am confident that within the next two decades he will recognize the self-destructive course he steers along the road of irresponsible population growth..."

Finding out the author of this quote is left as an exercise to the reader...

bilsbie• 2 years ago

You raise a good point regardless. The trust in science and technology is gone. We’ve been bamboozled so many times that we first see new developments with mistrust instead of wonder.

derlvative• 2 years ago

He typed on his device powered by billions of nanometer sized transistors made using quantum mechanics

DrDroop2• 2 years ago

Well, the article does not mentioned anything about second order effects of the use of fertilisers and herbicides that happened 50 years ago in another country so I am going with: No.

imtringued2• 2 years ago

Buying seed and fertilizer and pesticides from another country is almost the same as importing the food directly. You have a poor country that is struggling to export products and then you tell it to import even more? Recipe for disaster.

noobermin• 2 years ago

Was this entirely about the safety of the rice and not the intellectual property issues? That always seemed like a more serious issue with these.

ericyd2• 2 years ago

I was scared of GM crops when they first started getting news attention, but I've flipped now. Quoting a Greenpeace representative, the article writes:

“GM crops have never been proven safe,” Pelegrina asserted.

This might be true in some way, but what kind of proof are they looking for? What evidence has been presented that GM crops are unsafe? Proving the absence of something (health risk) is quite hard. On the other hand, GM crops have been consumed by many people for many years now and haven't found any large scale deleterious effects.

jeremiahbuckley• 2 years ago

“You can't build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery.” - Norman Bourlag

consumer451• 2 years ago

I was scared of GM crops when they first started getting news attention, but I've flipped now.

I think putting this into binary options, of pro-GM, anti-GM, is not ideal.

It's like saying "I am pro-chemistry," or "I am anti-chemistry."

Just as with chemistry, various GM products can have largely positive or largely negative outcomes.

The question which needs to be asked on each and every GMO product introduction is along the lines of: is this new product like creating fertilizer from natural gas, or like adding lead to gasoline?

ericyd2• 2 years ago

Good point, I appreciate the nuance. I guess I meant that I no longer have a blanket anti stance, and now I'm open to asessing more openly

Rexxar• 2 years ago

> “GM crops have never been proven safe,” Pelegrina asserted.

This argument is always funny as we can also say "Traditional crops have never been proven safe"

BurningFrog• 2 years ago

Since you can never be 100.0% sure about anything, the Precautionary Principal always results in deciding not to do something.

This is why people only apply it to things they don't want to do.

Hizonner2• 2 years ago

You can also never be 100 percent sure that not doing something is safe, so the "hard" form of the Precautionary Principal is simply obvious stupid garbage.

rootsudo2• 2 years ago

I find it ironic that people here assume the country is acting in good faith. For when you read the article in question and know some cultural background of the country - more stock of rice would decrease the price of rice hurting the current rice farmers and decreasing the value of farm land, rice brokers, etc. it’s a real complicated issue where even if you go get milled rice you’ll get rocks thrown in as it increases the weight by 5-15%.

This isn’t any fear of gmo risks, but an act to protect the status quo.

eynsham2• 2 years ago

And I find it odd that you write of ‘the country’ simpliciter when this is a court ruling against a scheme with the support of the government.

rootsudo2• 2 years ago

That’s the poiht, it’s from the country, from the government and different sides of the government are arguing it. One side wants it and one side doesn’t.

It isn’t odd, it’s politics.

gruez• 2 years ago

more stock of rice would [...]

Does golden rice have better yields? Or is it just like any other rice but with more vitamin A?

greatgib• 2 years ago

I'm not really sure if it applies to this case, but the worse thing with GMO is that when you start using them, you are not free anymore. Like using a SaaS software.

Usually you can use your own seeds from your production for your next batch. But GMO plants are supposed to produce sterile seeds that you can't reuse. And in fact you wouldn't even be allowed to, as it is the intellectual property of the chemical company producer.

So, farmers will have to buy and depend on a company for the seeds that they have to use at every season...

boomboomsubban• 2 years ago

To be fair to the GMO's, it's not that they try to create sterile plants, it's that much of their benefit comes from hybrid vigor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis

Turing_Machine• 2 years ago

Usually you can use your own seeds from your production for your next batch.

I'm sorry, that is simply not true. Yes, there are so-called "heirloom" varieties that come true from seed, but commercial farming in the United States has been relying on hybrid seed for well over a hundred years now, and hybrids in general do not come true from seed.

Seed production is a highly specialized form of farming.

No large-scale farmer saves seed for replanting.

Transgenic Golden Rice, once hailed as a dietary breakthrough

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