Genetically Modified Life-Savers

"Do you think I should show pictures of blind babies in my slide shows?
"I therefore hold the regulation of genetic engineering responsible for the death and blindness of thousands of children and young mothers."
German biologist Ingo Potrykus, Nature magazine

Half a million, perhaps two million children die each year from preventable vitamin A deficiency in the developing world. Vitamin A deficiency in developing countries is one of the most pervasive and preventable causes of morbidity and mortality in poor countries whose major nutritional source is derived from rice. Concerned with this solvable loss of human life, the German biologist Ingo Potrykus set out to do something about the situation.

He set out to solve a huge humanitarian challenge. He and a colleague, Peter Beyer, manipulated rice to introduce three genes to the already-existing 30,000 contained in rice. The purpose was to prevent vitamin A deficiency. They produced a rice called golden rice. They took no steps to themselves profit by this genetic modification technique and persuaded companies that produced it to waive patents, so the rice could be made freely available.

Golden rice, now capable of ensuring that vulnerable children and pregnant women have adequate vitamin A in their diets when they consume the most abundant food available to them in their countries of origin, has had no uptake. Even though Britain's agriculture minister endorsed GM crops, no one took any steps to investigate the promise of golden rice, and it has since languished, unused.

The agri-business Syngenta began producing Professor Potrykus's golden rice, adding two genes, one from maize, the other from a common soil bacterium, producing good yields that provide 60% of a child's daily vitamin A requirements from a mere 50 grams of rice. It was logically anticipated that the use of ordinary, vitamin A-deficient rice would be substituted for golden rice. It never happened.

Greenpeace campaigns stridently and strenuously against GM crops. The World Health Organization estimates 170-million to 230-million children, along with 20 million pregnant women are deficient in vitamin-A in their diets. That deficiency weakens the immune system to the extent that 1.9-million to 2.7-million people die each year from lack of vitamin A. Those are numbers far in excess of people dying yearly from AIDS, TB and malaria.

Greenpeace claims that golden rice represents a corporate plot, that it doesn't produce enough vitamin A, that it might cause health problems, might upset ecosystems, and that capsules of vitamin A represent a better source of vitamin A. And it lobbies governments with these arguments. Its claims are specious -- and vitamin A capsules are not readily available for most people living in indigent circumstances.

Result: the two researchers at Syngenta who improved golden rice have had to look elsewhere for employment, the company has left Britain, unable to sustain itself against the Greenpeace assaults. Critics of Greenpeace claim that if they accept the usefulness of one genetically modified grain, it will undermine their campaign in total against all GM crops.

One truth in all of this is that the non-profit, free, nutrition-enhanced rice is of estimable value to the poor. Or it would be if it were used, as it should be.

People in India and Burkina Faso grow cotton without the use of insecticides; a GM crop. A crop that boosts yields, cuts pesticide use and has allowed wildlife to return to nature. In contrast to a system of agriculture that is soil-exhausting, must use more land for comparable production results and licenses toxic sprays of manure that often results in fatal food poisoning; that system is termed 'organic', its reputation high and its supposed virtues unchallenged.

Organic farming benefits the wealthy who can pay more for the products. It has lower yields, uses double the land as inorganic farming to produce a similar quantity of produce, and using manure, risks outbreaks of fatal food poisoning. It permits fungicide chemicals, not hailed by some critics as a safe and useful alternative to commercially produced pesticides. Food scientists have ascertained organically-grown food offers no greater nutritional benefits.

Seems like a classic case of vested interests representing passionately sanctimonious environmental campaigners duping the hysterically gullible, at a simply dreadful cost to the vulnerable.