
Golden Rice meets food safety standards in three leading regulatory agencies - jseliger
http://irri.org/news/media-releases/golden-rice-meets-food-safety-standards-in-three-global-leading-regulatory-agencies
======
ScottBurson
My default stance on GMOs is one of caution — in fact, I supported the failed
California GMO labelling proposition — but really, I think that their risks
and benefits should be evaluated individually. Lumping them all together,
either for advocacy or for opposition, is like lumping together all synthetic
pharmaceuticals.

So although there are some GMOs I'm concerned about, Golden Rice is not one of
them. I'm not an expert or anything, so take that for whatever you think it's
worth, but nothing I've read suggests to me that it's likely to cause a
problem. This could change given new information, but I don't think that those
of us urging a certain caution do ourselves any favors by opposing every
single GMO, even those that are pretty clearly beneficial.

~~~
alexandercrohde
> This could change given new information, but I don't think that those of us
> urging a certain caution do ourselves any favors by opposing every single
> GMO, even those that are pretty clearly beneficial.

If only we could say things are "clearly beneficial." However we still don't
understand allergies, autoimmune disorders, or nutrition well. On top of that,
there's the whole field of gut bacteria that we're just starting to take
seriously.

I reflexively push back because proponents won't admit GMO is a giant
experiment. I'm open-minded on the idea of letting people experiment en-masse
with their health. But considering 33% of Americans are obese, I'm not
entirely sold from a pragmatic perspective.

~~~
maxerickson
The idea with golden rice isn't to feed it to fat Americans as a novelty, it
is to make it available in countries where 650,000 children are dying each
year from vitamin A deficiencies.

Concerns about allergies and autoimmune disorders and such associated with
golden rice are comparable to illiteracy, so be sure to wear it proudly.

~~~
makomk
No, the idea is to taint anti-GMO activists with the accusation that they're
killing third world children so that other, more profitable GMOs can be fed to
fat Americans. Golden rice is so utterly incapable of actually solving vitamin
A deficiency that even the IRRI have given up pretending that it can (notice
how the article describes it as "a complementary, food-based solution to
existing nutritional interventions, such as diet diversification and oral
supplementation" \- a working oral supplementation program is effective
without any complementary solution and is much cheaper).

To give some idea of how fundamentally absurd an approach this is, two 5-cent
capsules of vitamin A a year are sufficient to prevent vitamin A deficiency in
kids, whereas as far as I can tell replacing all the rice eaten in countries
whose poor populations are almost entirely dependent on rice with the most
modern, improved varieties of golden rice still wouldn't achieve this. (Oh,
and by the way it inherently has worse yields than the varieties it's based
on, so that golden rice will be more expensive too.)

Even if it worked, the licensing issues made it undeployable in practice.
There's a free license to certain third-world countries that GMO proponents
like to wave in the face of opponents, but that's basically all it's useful
for - due to a one-two punch of requiring the rice to be grown in the country
it's sold in and only licensing countries that can't grow enough rice to feed
their population (almost all of which can't grow rice at all), it cannot be
used for any kind of meaningful deployment of the tech. Despite the complete
and utter lack of any profitable commercial market for golden rice, the GMO
industry couldn't bear to actually give up the possibility that they could
somehow make money from starving third world kids.

~~~
Turing_Machine
> No, the idea is to taint anti-GMO activists with the accusation that they're
> killing third world children

670,000 kids a year die from vitamin A deficiency (and, of course, many more
than that "only" go blind). Golden rice has been around for 18 years now, but
"activists" have prevented its widespread use.

That's 12 million preventable deaths.

~~~
sjburt
Is there a reason they need to get their vitamin A from rice, a crop that
demands precise cultivation practices, and not cheaper and more convenient
vitamin pills?

~~~
Fins
People in those areas have been growing rice precisely enough for centuries.
It is their main food; they will consume rice either way. Acquiring and
distributing vitamin pills would be more difficult.

If it were so easy, why none of the anti-GMO fanatics do so already? But of
course that would involve doing something useful, not strutting around in the
same crowd as anti-vaxxers and flatearthers.

------
jseliger
This is fantastic news; for more background on golden rice and the process of
making better food, I recommend Charles C. Mann's book _The Wizard and the
Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow
's World_. It's an amazing story, though the length of time it's taken to get
golden rice from the lab to the market has been horrific.

~~~
DubiousPusher
Thanks for the rec. I recently read 1491 and really enjoyed it. So now I'm
really looking forward to this.

------
cmroanirgo
I remember seeing a documentary on this is the past. The main things I got
from it was:

1\. It was designed for countries with high levels of Vit A deficiency (as
other comments have noted). Those countries now use simple Vit A pills. There
is no need for 'Golden Rice'.

2\. It has been trialled in Asia but due to it's yellow colour, the people
didn't even want to eat it. In their mind, rice is always white.

I also seem to recall that it is a project that has failed in a few countries
to be accepted as a replacement for traditional rice.

I do not understand why FDA approval was sought, nor why it's for sale in the
US.

This documentary (it might be the one I vaguely remember) shows how the
Phillipines has a government programme which gives Vit A pills twice a year:
[https://youtu.be/TPRqRjCT_vE?t=11m6s](https://youtu.be/TPRqRjCT_vE?t=11m6s)

EDIT: (formatting)

------
sp332
Since the page seems to be struggling to load
[https://web.archive.org/web/20180525203140/http://irri.org/n...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180525203140/http://irri.org/news/media-
releases/golden-rice-meets-food-safety-standards-in-three-global-leading-
regulatory-agencies)

(ahem [https://archive.org/donate/](https://archive.org/donate/))

------
hellowrld
From
[http://online.sfsu.edu/repstein/GEessays/goldenricehoax.html](http://online.sfsu.edu/repstein/GEessays/goldenricehoax.html)

"In order to meet the full needs of 750 micrograms of vitamin A from [Golden]
rice, an adult would have to consume 2 kg 272g of rice per day. This implies
that one family member would consume the entire family ration of 10 kg from
the PDS [?] in 4 days to meet vitamin A needs through "Golden rice".

This is a recipe for creating hunger and malnutrition, not solving it.

Besides creating vitamin A deficiency, vitamin A rice will also create
deficiency in other micronutrients and nutrients. Raw milled rice has a low
content of Fat (0.5g/100g). Since fat is necessary for vitamin A uptake, this
will aggravate vitamin A deficiency. It also has only 6.8g/100g of protein,
which means less carrier molecules. It has only 0.7g/100g of iron, which plays
a vital role in the conversion of Betacarotene (precursor of vitamin A found
in plant sources) to vitamin A. Superior Alternatives exist and are effective.

A far more efficient route to removing vitamin A efficiency is biodiversity
conservation and propagation of naturally vitamin A rich plants in agriculture
and diets."

-Vandana Shiva

~~~
Turing_Machine
What you have posted is a link to a second-hand opinion piece that was copied
from an old Tripod site.

Here's a peer-reviewed journal article that provides real data:

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2682994/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2682994/)

Note that they found that a) Vitamin A is readily absorbed from the golden
rice and b) their estimate is that 50 grams of golden rice per day would be
sufficient to provide the RDA for a child.

~~~
makomk
That piece was probably written about the original version of Golden Rice
developed 18 years ago which was being pushed as the solution to Vitamin A
deficiency despite having about one-thirtieth the beta-carotene content of the
current variety. When you yourself wrote that "Golden rice has been around for
18 years now, but "activists" have prevented its widespread use. That's 12
million preventable deaths." elsewhere in the discussion, it exactly was this
much less effective version of Golden Rice you were claiming that anti-GMO
activists killed millions by blocking the use of, not the one used in the
linked study.

Also, the ease of absorption is annoyingly dependent on the rest of the
person's diet (particularly having enough fat and iron in their diet, if I
recall correctly). The meals used in that study may well be close to the best
case scenario; people with vitamin A deficiency don't generally get that way
by having access to well-balanced meals.

------
roylez
In retrospect, safe doesn't equal healthy, and the damage is usually
recognized decades after. I don't think people know coke was unhealthy in the
first day. GMO food is still very important though, considering globally we
may have a food crisis. However, until that happens, nah, thank you.

~~~
giggles_giggles
One big reason we haven't had a global food crisis is because of GMO food.
Norman Borlaug's
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug#Expansion_to_So...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug#Expansion_to_South_Asia:_the_Green_Revolution))
work in particular comes to mind as being almost single-handedly responsible
for staving off massive famines. Part of that work involved selective breeding
to produce a strain of wheat that would produce more output in the same
acreage.

~~~
pajaroide
Selective breeding isn't genetic engineering though. GMO is used when genes
from a species are inserted into another, not for strains that are produced
through artificial selection of organisms with desirable traits.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Selective breeding isn't genetic engineering though.

Yes, selective breeding is far less controlled and predictable as to
unintended changes; people think of it as safer because of the way it used to
be done which operates over longer time scales, which, aside from not actually
providing any kind of safety, neglects the fact that modern methods allow
selective breeding to operate over much shorter time scales.

~~~
oxryly1
Selective breeding doesn't create fundamentally new organisms like transgenic
GMOs, however -- organisms for which there is no method to predict their
interactions with our one and only environment (Earth, if that wasn't clear
:p).

~~~
dragonwriter
> Selective breeding doesn't create fundamentally new organisms like
> transgenic GMOs,

Yes, selective breeding (both artificial and natural selection) create
fundamentally new organisms.

------
ysleepy
So, is it safe to plant in the world or will it irrevocably merge into the
gene pool of naturally occurring plants?

This is the true concern about GMO, since people royally suck at introducing
new species into ecosystems, an action that often cannot be undone.

~~~
BurningFrog
Regular rice is absolutely not "naturally occurring".

Also... where else would you plant it?

~~~
Turing_Machine
> Regular rice is absolutely not "naturally occurring".

Definitely not. Its genome differs from its wild ancestor in many respects. To
name just one, like most domestic grains it's resistant to "shattering" (i.e.,
the seeds tend to remain attached to the plant, rather than falling off and/or
being scattered when the plant is blown by the wind). That is a great feature
for farmers, but means that the plant would likely go extinct in short order
if left to itself (because the seeds wouldn't be scattered on the ground).

------
robbrown451
Is this likely to be popular in areas of thew world where it isn't strictly
needed, such as the US? I find it aesthetically appealing, although they don't
say whether it tastes any different from white rice.

~~~
wohlergehen
If you want just the aesthetics, add just the tiniest bit of turmeric. It dyes
like crazy and if you add little it adds nearly no taste.

~~~
JasonFruit
Or saffron, which adds a subtle and addictive taste.

------
petesh
Note, from the FDA letter: "... the concentration of B-carotene in GR2E rice
is too low to warrant a nutrient content claim ..."

------
farnsworth
I'm not clear on what it exactly is - a hybrid of different rice varieties, or
a GMO, or something else?

~~~
ollin
Per Wikipedia:

> Golden rice is a variety of rice (Oryza sativa) produced through genetic
> engineering to biosynthesize beta-carotene, a precursor of vitamin A, in the
> edible parts of rice.[1] It is intended to produce a fortified food to be
> grown and consumed in areas with a shortage of dietary vitamin A,[2] a
> deficiency which is estimated to kill 670,000 children under the age of 5
> each year.

So, yes, genetically-modified to produce more beta carotene.

~~~
maoistinquisitr
Which is fundamentally stupid because the beta-carotene to vitamin A pathway
is highly limited. The whole idea is wrong. Vitamin A deficient people need
vitamin A. Stuffing extra beta-carotene into them will just turn them orange
and have other bad effects.

------
baybal2
In the meanwhile, I was struggling to find a normal "asian" rice in Russia few
months ago. Have not found a single store that sold IR8 like rice.

------
John_KZ
What's the EU status?

~~~
Kalium
Appears to be no verdict rendered as of yet.

------
Aelius
Huh. Didn't think HN would be the place to find anti science sentiments.

Seeing a lot of antivaxxer type logic being employed here in the comments.

