I'm of the opinion that Rice
in general is a stupid crop. More precisely it's a niche crop since it needs 2.5-3 times more water than any other grain per acre for about the same yield (it beats out wheat but loses to corn). It should really only be grown in areas with excessive water and suitable fields.
In their infinite wisdom, perpetually dry California grows over half a million acres of rice using up their scant water resources, because certain super-wealthy donors have grandfathered-in subsidies for it.
Anyway back to golden rice specifically. It's a clever idea to genetically engineer crops to contain more vitamins. However golden rice specifically makes me suspicious. Imma point to this interview with Slate:
Ingo Potrykus is a co-inventor of golden rice, which is genetically engineered to combat blindness and death in children by supplying 60 percent of the...
slate.com
So what's the reason for suspicion?
They were against it from the beginning. They said it was fool’s gold because children would need to
eat several kilograms of it to get their daily requirement. Children only eat around 300 to 400 grams a day. We worked out that Greenpeace wasn’t right, and that the rice contained enough to meet children’s needs, but we couldn’t prove that because we didn’t then have data from an actual trial.
...
The original gene, which makes an enzyme called phytoene synthase, came from the narcissus flower, and they replaced it with one from maize that is far more efficient. It produced
20 times more beta carotene, the molecule from carrots that combines with a second molecule of itself once inside our bodies to make a molecule of vitamin A. It was a big success.
But again, we couldn’t prove we had enough to meet children’s needs, so the Greenpeace myth about golden rice being useless lived on.
How does he know he can produce 20 times more beta carotene but can't prove anything? That should be concrete and measurable, and he should only need like, a couple of pounds of the stuff to send samples to all sorts of labs to test it. How was he able to get this data he's so confident in with no actual trial? How come everybody wickedly hates his product for being a GMO when half the crops in the US are GMOs and nobody is screaming in horror at it?
On the flipside, I have precious little respect for
Greenpeace or
Friends of the Earth so I don't find their claims convincing either. The fact that
every field of golden rice somehow gets destroyed before it can finally be harvested and tested decade after decade... it could be those morons but it happens so consistently it just makes me wonder if it's false flag BS to hide that the rice doesn't grow well or have as many vitamins as claimed in it. Call me a conspiracy theorist if you like. Why doesn't he just grow a sample crop of ten square feet indoors if it's so easily vandalized? He shouldn't need an acre of the stuff to get a sample suitable for lab testing to prove his claims.
The gripping hand, however, is that beta carotene simply isn't all that and a bag of chips. Why? Because close to
half of all humans have genetic issues converting it into vitamin a, and have to get their vitamin a from other sources. So spamming beta carotene in rice isn't actually going to solve the problem because so many of those kids can't actually benefit from it.
As far as the problem he's trying to solve, there's kinda a much simpler one. Give the kids a multivitamin pill. In the interview, the guy explained that getting vitamins to the kids was too hard because you needed infrastructure to distribute pills... apparently, no infrastructure is needed to distribute rice. This is another thing that makes me suspicious, the guy has a long line of excuses for why his product always fails and a long line of excuses for why everything besides his product is just too hard, but at a certain point I just see "always has an excuse."
So overall, I'm not educated enough to be
sure if golden rice is a winner in vitamins or not, but the attitude of the guy selling it, and the fact that for some reason he keeps being just a few years away from production for decades on end, and that I see no explanation or plan to deal with the fact that lots of humans can't actually use beta-carotene, makes me deeply suspicious of him specifically. GMOs that supply vitamins in general, I'd say it's a good idea, I'm just unenthused about golden rice. The problem he's trying to solve isn't that hard. Beta carotene is insanely abundant in carrots and sweet potatoes, f'rex, and where you can get maybe 5-7000 pounds of rice from an acre of land, you'll pull 20,000 pounds of sweet potatoes and 34,000 pounds of carrots. There's scads of other crops that will similarly outproduce rice. But neither those nor golden rice helps the 45% of people who can't uptake beta carotene, for them you need to feed fish which has vitamin a already metabolized.
reason.com
