The Developing World (Still) Needs Golden Rice

23.06.2024 05:55

It was a proud moment when the Philippines, where I lived for over five years, became the first country to accept biotech Golden Rice. That was in 2021. It’s now a dismal moment that the nation’s highest courts, acting independently...

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Golden Rice began in the 1990s with collaboration between the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH-Zurich) and the University of Freiburg, Germany. Ingo Potrykus and Peter Byer were its main developers. ETH-Zurich itself, the European Commission’s agricultural research program, and the Rockefeller Foundation funded the project.

As the FDA notes, the old-fashioned engineering through cross-breeding … is haphazard and slow, often taking centuries.

Underdeveloped countries in Asia rely on rice to an extent Westerners cannot imagine. On my first trip here my female companion startled me when as a way of saying she was hungry she exclaimed “I need rice!” Unfortunately, in parallel with Western sliced white bread, their white rice provides little nutrition other than calories with a quick sugar fix. They start with brown rice and strip out anything healthy. (READ MORE from Michael Fumento: We Unlocked the Secret to Beating Obesity. It’s Time to Act Like It.)

I wrote at tremendous length about Golden Rice in my 2003 book BioEvolution: How Biotechnology Is Changing the world, and in numerous articles. My late friend Norman Borlaug, was a major advocate for the grain. In his 2000 paper “Ending World Hunger. The Promise of Biotechnology and the Threat of Antiscience Zealotry,” he wrote, “The affluent nations can afford to adopt elitist positions and pay more for food produced by the so-called natural methods; the one billion chronically poor and hungry people of this world cannot. New technology will be their salvation, freeing them from obsolete, low-yielding, and more costly production technology.”

Borlaug, called “The Father of the Green Revolution,” received the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize, with the Nobel Committee declaring, “More than any other single person of this age, he has helped provide bread for a hungry world.”

He developed wheat varieties and improved crop management practices that first transformed agricultural production in Mexico during the 1940’s and 1950’s and later in Asia and Latin America, sparking what today is known as the “Green Revolution.” Because of Borlaug’s achievements in preventing hunger, famine, and misery around the world, when he died the executive director of the UN World Food Program said he “saved more lives than any other person who has ever lived.”

Borlaug “believed firmly in exploiting the new opportunities for creating novel genetic combinations to meet the challenges arising from climate change. He was also an advocate of ‘public good’ research, and argued for the free exchange of genetic material,” according to his obituary in the world’s most prestigious science journal, Nature.

Despite his and the best efforts of many others, including the Department of Agriculture-Philippine Rice Research Institute (DA-PhilRice) in partnership with the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), the appeal of Golden Rice could not defeat the anti-biotech lobby that could give a rodent’s rump about stuff like malnutrition in poorer countries because they’re sitting fat (often literally) and happy, suffering over-nutrition from the likes of U.S. Twinkies and British Cadbury Mini-Rolls. (“GMO -free,” natch.)

But finally, three years ago, sanity won out in the Philippines. In short order:

In October 2022, farmers in the Philippine province of Antique harvested nearly 70 tons of Golden Rice on a large scale for the first time.
In January 2023, the Department of Agriculture Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice) announced that more than 100 tons of fresh paddy “Malusog Rice” had been harvested across 17 pioneer production sites in the country.
The harvested Golden Rice was distributed to households with pregnant women, breastfeeding mothers, and preschool children at risk of vitamin A deficiency in selected provinces.

The rice was developed by splicing two daffodil genes and a third bacterial gene into the rice plant that encoded enzymes into the rice genome. These allow the rice plant to produce and accumulate beta-carotene, not incidentally giving it that daffodil color. The body readily absorbs the beta-carotene.

Sadly, in the urban areas, Filipinos, especially the women, are absolutely exploding in girth such that most are now overweight and perhaps 15 percent are obese. By next week it will be a fifth. But it’s different in the provinces.

Around one in five children from the poorest communities in the Philippines suffer from vitamin A deficiency, which affects an estimated 190 million children worldwide. It’s the most common cause of childhood blindness, as well as a contributing factor to a weakened immune system. As to Bt eggplant, in the Philippines, bugs rule and the country loses up to about three-fourths of its eggplants from insects, requiring massive spraying to even make a dent. Bt eggplant has the insecticide spliced in.

“This milestone puts the Philippines at the global forefront in leveraging agriculture research to address the issues of malnutrition and related health impacts in a safe and sustainable way” said Dr. Jean Balié director General of IRRI, a CGIAR research center, at the time of approval. “The regulatory success of Golden Rice demonstrates the research leadership of DA-PhilRice and the robustness of the Philippine biosafety regulatory system,” he added.

The attractive-looking rice has also received food safety approvals from regulators in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the U.S., but the Philippines was the first country to approve commercial cultivation. Developed countries just don’t have much need for beta-carotene supplementation, and megadosing with store-bought supplements can be harmful.

The Golden Rice project was always an affair of the heart — good people just trying to do good.

Potrykus and Beyer worked to legally secure Golden Rice as a humanitarian project and licensed it to Syngenta, a biopharmaceutical company, to protect the technology for non-commercial use.

The inventors established a “Golden Rice Humanitarian Board” to oversee the development of the technology and grant licenses to national and international research organizations to adapt Golden Rice to local conditions.

The humanitarian sublicense allows resource-poor farmers to grow Golden Rice varieties royalty-free without additional costs for the trait.

The inventors credit Adrian Dubock of Syngenta with helping them navigate the complex intellectual property legal system to protect the technology for humanitarian use.

Alas, both the obvious usefulness of the crop and the lack of a major agricompany like Bayer behind it, has made it an easy target for green groups to delay, delay, delay, regulation. (Six years now and running in Bangladesh.) And to ultimately kill it in the Philippines.

Recombinant gene-splicing (with myriad synonyms such as “GMOs” or the one I commonly use, “biotech,”) that Borlaug hailed as the continuation of his Green Revolution, is touted as dangerous. And the reason is pretty much just because it’s new and first done in the laboratory — ostensibly by foolish if not evil scientists such as Victor Frankenstein and Henry Jekyll. It also takes a lot of money to develop these methods, meaning the multi-national environmentalists and the left stand opposed to deep-pocketed companies such as Monsanto, now part of the much bigger multi-national Bayer.

Yes, since it’s a much better technique for breeding it theoretically could cause more harm. That’s true of so much technology such as the internal combustion engine, which initially saved cities from the horrors of mountains of horse manure but have brought us the trains, planes, and automobiles that we can’t imagine life without. The same engine, of course, has made war vastly more deadly, has polluted the air of many cities, and is tagged, rightly or wrongly, as a major contributor to alleged global climate change.

The arguments against recombinant genetic engineering largely come come down to what in legal terminology is called “touchy-feely,” and “warm and fuzzy.” Or perhaps imagine a petulant child crying “I don’t wanna!”

Thus Greenpeace, which brought the Philippines lawsuit, speaks of “food sovereignty.” Eh? The Center for Food Safety has warned of “super weeds and super bugs,” meaning they have resistance to insecticides. That’s a problem that goes back over a century. Penicillin use quickly led to resistant bacteria; good thing we didn’t have people like the Center for Food Safety when it was approved and rushed into use and inaugurated the age when people no longer feared death from a blister. Such was the fate of President Calvin Coolidge’s son. Indeed, penicillin remains first-line treatment for terrible diseases such as congenital syphilis.

The Union of Concerned Scientists says it eschews genetic modification in favor of “sustainable farming practices that enhance resilience and promote food security.” That’s exactly what biotech food does.

The real concern is that recombinant gene technology is new. As the FDA notes, the old-fashioned engineering through cross-breeding is as old as history. But the process is haphazard and slow, often taking centuries. Cattle, hogs, and turkeys are vastly larger and tastier than they were formerly and chickens lay far more eggs.

Corn went from a grass to ears in pre-Columbian times to more recently standing as high as an elephant’s eye. But it took gene-splicing technology to create corn that produces a protein lethal to specific pests, such as the European corn borer, and corn that is resistant to herbicides, enabling them to be more easily and efficiently protected from weeds. Currently, over 90 percent of U.S. corn, upland cotton, soybeans, canola, and sugar beets are produced using biotech varieties, and unless you’ve gone out of your way to avoid them, you’ve eaten (or worn) all of them. If you’re reading this, it’s likely they haven’t killed you.

But the first recombinant product approved in the U.S. goes back to only 1994, a tomato that stayed fresh longer but apparently didn’t taste very good. More than 120 varieties of GM crops that have been approved in the U.S., mostly versions of herbicide tolerant or insect resistant crops. The International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications lists 32 distinct approved crops, although some haven’t been commercialized. Unlike with so many medications, none has ever been withdrawn. (READ MORE: Trillion Tree Trickery: The Sad Truth About Tree Planting for Climate Change and Diversity)

In case global warming is real (or regardless thereof), biotechnology is being employed to develop drought-tolerant crops including wheat, rice, tomato, soybean, and cotton. Drought-tolerant corn, including certain varieties developed with genetic engineering, is already being grown across dry areas in the United States. Drought-tolerant wheat is approved for use in Argentina and Brazil. Of course, to the extent the threat of warming is useful to curb civilization one can see how these developments would be perceived as negative.

Organizations like the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the European Commission have publicly said genetically modified foods are safe to eat.

Left-leaning philanthropist Bill Gates, despite his execution in the first South Park movie for developing Windows 98, believes that biotech food is “perfectly healthy” and sees them as important to fight against world hunger and malnutrition. Putting money behind mouth, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has invested heavily in the development of bio-fortified crops such as … wait for it … Golden Rice.

But major environmental groups? I haven’t been able to find one that sided with science and humanity.

Nobody has been more influential than Greenpeace. In 2016, 127 Nobel Laureates signed a letter condemning the international group for “misrepresent[ing] the risks, benefits and impacts” of genetically altered food plants. That included co-discoverer of the basic DNA structure, James Watson. The letter called on Greenpeace to “cease and desist,” and on governments to embrace “seeds improved through biotechnology.” Said the laureates, “Opposition based on emotion and dogma contradicted by data must be stopped.” (Allegations that the group was directly behind a 2013 attack on a Filipino Golden Rice test field have never proferred hard evidence; although “encouraged” would certainly work.)

So it was that Greenpeace filed suit in the Philippines in 2022, and in late April the Court of Appeals gave them what they wanted, with the Supreme Court upholding it. The ruling directed the Philippine Rice Research Institute (PRRI) and the University of the Philippines Los Baños (UPLB) to cease and desist from commercially propagating, field testing, and conducting activities related to Golden Rice.

In doing so, the appeals court cited something called a Writ of Kalikasan, a legal remedy unique to Philippine law providing a constitutional right to “a balanced and healthy ecology in accordance with the rhythm and harmony of nature.”

“Rhythm and harmony of nature?” Seriously? But yes, Greenpeace found a touchy-feely weapon to defend its touchy-feely position. Kalikasan is based on something called The Precautionary Principle, a mushy term environmentalists popularized that ignores what may be gained and instead concentrates 100 percent on potential harm, real or imagined. Not incidentally, I asked my favorite Chat AI, Perplexity, in neutral terms to describe The Precautionary Principle. Instead it went on the attack against it!

If applied, the principle is effectively insurmountable — like the joke about putting someone in a round room and telling him to sit in the corner. “We conclude that concerns about risk-risk trade-offs are not a reasonable argument against future application of the precautionary principle,” stated a paper in The Journal of Risk Research, frequently citing work from an obscure author and journalist named Michael Fumento. “Indeed, sound decision-making processes in the face of uncertainty should always consider and attempt to mitigate reasonable risk-risk trade-offs.”

(A companion meaningless term the greens love to use is “sustainable.” Once at a conference I asked the environmentalist speaker to define it without using the word “sustainable”; he could not. It’s explicable only with tautology.)

Greenpeace called the Philippines decision a “monumental win.” And it was. For them. But Potrykus was horrified. “The court decision is a catastrophe for Golden Rice in the Philippines and elsewhere,” he told the journal Science. Many members of The National Academy of Science and Technology, Philippines quickly condemned the ruling.

Whither hence? It’s definitely not going to help approval in Bangladesh, although presumably it doesn’t have such a ridiculous constitutional clause. But opponents will cite it.

Meanwhile, gene-splicing may be the only hope to save the world’s Cavendish bananas, widely considered the best variety, from a disease called Fusarium or Panama Wilt. Australia has just licensed a biotech “back up” banana that is nearly immune to the disease. The Philippines is the world’s second-largest banana exporter with most comprising the Cavendish variety. (Although only an inferior type is sold domestically.) But if Panama Wilt comes to the country, Kalikasan and The Precautionary Principle would dictate that biotech bananas cannot be grown there.

Except … Golden Rice has always been an affair of the heart with people donating time and patents and little money to be made. That might seem good, but it has continually made it an easy target for those seeking regulatory delays (six years now in Bangladesh) and now an outright revocation. It might be okay to have kids go blind but the moneyed interests are not going to let any court stop a lucrative export. Rest assured The Precautionary Principle will give way to the Profit Principle.

Michael Fumento is an attorney, author, and journalist, who has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The National Review, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Forbes, Reason, Policy Review, the Spectator (London), the Sunday Times of London, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.

The post The Developing World (Still) Needs Golden Rice appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.