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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Yes those evil corporations are trying to save children from blindness just to make anti science activists look bad. The bastards!!!
Sarcasm aside, did you know most of our crop varieties have been modified using radiation? Those types of mutations are still used today and require little testing, much less than what golden rice has been through.
> (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.)
This is straight up FUD. The first version didn't have the same yield but the more recent ones do.
> it cannot be used for any kind of meaningful deployment of the tech
Why not? It clearly states they will provide the technology to the National Agricultural Research Centres and other public sector research institutions, in developing countries. Once the farmers have the crop they can replant as much as they like and they don't have to rely on capsules anymore.
> the GMO industry couldn't bear to actually give up the possibility that they could somehow make money from starving third world kids.
Except the GMO industry (whatever that means) is not involved in the development of Golden Rice (apart from some patents).
> 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.
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?
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.
I'm glad at least 1 more person in the thread bothered to read about this. It's completely clear that this useless product is only used to break resistance to GMOs and flood the market with hoards of potentially dangerous modified strains.
Anything that results in genetically or chemically novel foods should be viewed with caution. However GMO is a very tiny subset of the different ways to come up with chemically or genetically novel foods. I don't see why GMOs should be treated differently from any other novel cultivar or species.
How much more thoroughly? Golden rice has been going through clinical trials for almost a decade now. When do we decide it's safe? Fifty years? Two hundred?
Or never, because it's not really about "enough testing", it's about a kneejerk reaction to an unfamiliar process.
> 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.
People shouldn't be downvoting you. That's a very important point. There shouldn't be knee-jerk reactions in either direction. (GMOs in general, not the rice.)
Here's an example of how little humans know about how vitamins work: if you give smokers beta carotene in supplement form, it increases their chance of lung cancer, even though in food form it reduces it.[1][2]
> If only we could say things are "clearly beneficial."
Personally, I'm quite comfortable describing "keeping children from going blind or dying outright" as "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.
That "argument" would prevent us from ever introducing a new plant variety of any kind.
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.
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
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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...) 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.
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.
A traditional method of breeding new plants is to expose them to mutagens and see what happens. The results of these experiments are in the food supply and not labeled as GMOs.
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.
I've mentioned elsewhere in the thread that golden rice has yield problems, as do many GMO foods. That's partly because this kind of genetic modification isn't actually all that controlled; one of the side effects is that it disrupts a random selection of completely unrelated genes.
> I've mentioned elsewhere in the thread that golden rice has yield problems, as do many GMO foods.
So do many non-GMO engineered crops where the trait that is the focus of optimization isn't yield, since a “yield problem” is deteemined by comparison to mainstream crops which are engineered for yield traits.
> That's partly because this kind of genetic modification isn't actually all that controlled
That's even more true of selective breeding, whether by traditional or more rapid modern means, so that's not a problem with GMOs compared to any real alternative, it's a problem of all existing methods compared to a hypothetical state where we have both perfect modelling to predict phenotypical effects of genetic changes and perfect ability to make arbitrary, error-free edits to genetic code. And even then we are stuck with the fact that some traits at inherently in conflict.
Selective breeding performed slowly over longer time scales did at least give the breeders time to notice some kinds of severe problems. If you're breeding wheat and accidentally introduce a toxic mutation, you might notice the resulting pile of dead horses. There won't be a warning like this in every case, but it's not right to say that there's zero benefit to going slow.
That said, I don't really have an opinion on GMOs. I'm fine with you partaking first, though. :-)
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).
What you are describing is transgenics, GMO just means that the genetics were modified using gene editing tools rather than breeding techniques the vast majority of GMO food products are not transgenic.
And that discounts any Black Swans lying in wait from transgenic organisms; we may still yet have a disaster, since GMOs don't yet have same track record as pre-industrial agriculture. OTOH, industrial agriculture has been pretty awful, so maybe GMOs are a step up from THAT...
That's a non-sequitur, and you're adding the loss stats in with waste.
> And that discounts any Black Swans lying in wait from transgenic organisms; we may still yet have a disaster...
Once it's a black swan, it's already discounted, the term itself means the thing is unlikely.
I think the subject deserves more study, but we have people dying of hunger right now, and that's plainly more compelling than "something really bad might happen, we have no idea what, why or how likely it is."
Exactly. Possibly getting cancer when you are 70-80 would be a minor price to pay to not be guaranteed to starve to death when you are 5.
This is especially true if they only need a few years of GMOs to break bad cycles with conventional agriculture (such as eating next years seeds because they have no food now).
A black swan would be less on the scale of "higher long-term risk of cancer", and more like "unintended side effect wiped out pollinators and now the local agriculture is imperiled".
I think you should read Taleb's followup Antifragile sometime. The point is not that black swans are unlikely, but that they are catastrophic, and we can't even quantify how unlikely they are, so we have to find ways to prepare for them without basing it on probability estimates.
That "something really bad" might be localized ecological collapse, which I find pretty compelling, too.
If you can come up with a technology or logistical process to make a significant change to that without causing famine, you've got a company with billions in revenue.
While I understand your logic, I don't think you can make this claim universally. Our food distribution systems are set up to be efficient, but they are also set up to be beneficial for a very small number of players.
The systems we have in place are meant to protect that near monopoly as much as they are to distribute food. On top of that, countries give loans to poor countries in exchange for 2 promises: 1) that they use the money to buy grain from the country lending the money 2) they don't grow grain themselves. In that way, we actively undermine world agriculture.
If your massive improvement disrupts these players, I think you're going to be in for a very rough time of it. Things like GMO further solidify the near monopolies, by restricting where you can buy seed, etc. This is one of the reasons you see a big political push for them.
Hmmm... I'd be interested to know more about this. Its going to be fairly hard to fight this I suppose. The US does have a powerful military interest* to be doing this, but I've not read about them actually doing so.
* To understand why, watch the movie Grave of the Fireflies. Or watch Indy Neidel on youtube talk about the "turnip winter"
A very first-world thing to be able to say when rejecting GMOs and other things that can improve crop yields for the less fortunate citizens of the world.
A mouse born and raised in a maze will think that is the whole world - until it's taken out of the maze. Everyone in this thread could do with a lesson in permaculture -- the food crisis is manufactured.
GMO is largely about implanting resistance against herbicides such as glyphosate or genes for the production of pesticides like the BT-gene. Both are there to support pesticide heavy monocultures of which we are seeing the negative effects unfolding.
Most of the food is still farmed by poor small scale farmers, which are often more efficient than large-scale farmers.
>GMO is largely about implanting resistance against herbicides such as glyphosate or genes for the production of pesticides like the BT-gene. Both are there to support pesticide heavy monocultures of which we are seeing the negative effects unfolding.
Except the BT gene is exactly the opposite of a pesticide-heavy monoculture. The point is to make spraying unnecessary. Do you usually just invert the reality of things that clash with your preferred narrative?
>Most of the food is still farmed by poor small scale farmers, which are often more efficient than large-scale farmers.
Some sources of agricultural productivity are:
-Mechanization
-High yield varieties, which were the basis of the Green revolution
-Fertilizers: Primary plant nutrients: nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium[5][6] and secondary nutrients such as sulfur, zinc, copper, manganese, calcium, magnesium and molybdenum on deficient soil
-Education in management and entrepreneurial techniques to decrease fixed and variable costs and optimise manpower
-Liming of acid soils to raise pH and to provide calcium and magnesium
-Irrigation
-Herbicides
-Genetic engineering
-Pesticides
-Increased plant density
-Animal feed made more digestible by processing
-Keeping animals indoors in cold weather
I don't think any of these correlate with smaller farm size. Do you have any sources?
The BT-Gene just puts the production of pesticides into the plant. That doesn’t magically make them not pesticides anymore.
Some quotes from a UN report:
Smallholders manage over 80 per cent of the world’s estimated
500 million small farms and provide over 80 per cent of the food consumed in a large part of the developing world.
Moreover, multiple studies have found that smallholdings are relatively more productive per hectare than large-scale plantations (Feder 1985; Barrett 1993; Banerjee, Gertler and Ghatak 1998; Rosset 1999; Borras, Kay and Akram-Lodhi 2007) and are also more resource-efficient (Altieri and Koohafkan 2008).
> 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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.