Blind to Reality

"Severe vitamin A deficiency results in blindness, and half of the roughly half-million children who are blinded by it die within a year. Vitamin A deficiency also compromises immune system function, exacerbating many kinds of illnesses. It is a disease of poverty and poor diet, responsible for 1.9 to 2.8 million preventable deaths annually mostly of children under 5 years old and women..."
"The rice has been ready for farmers to use since the turn of the 21st Century, yet it is still not available to them. Escalating requirements for testing have stalled its release for more than a decade..."
"New technologies often evoke rumours of hazard. These generally fade with time when, as in this case, no real hazards emerge. But the anti-GMO fever still burns brightly, fanned by electronic gossip and well-organized fearmongering that profits some individuals and organizations.
"We, and the thousands of other scientists who have signed the statement of protest, stand together in staunch opposition to the violent destruction of required tests on valuable advances such as Golden Rice that have the potential to save millions of impoverished fellow humans from needless suffering and death."
Journal Science editorial

Jes Aznar for The New York Times

Genetically engineered Golden Rice grown in a facility in Los Baños, Laguna Province, in the Philippines.

The journal Science is considered to be the foremost scientific journal in the developed world. Those scientific minds behind the publication are so alarmed at the gross ignorance that is characterizing the rejection of genetically modified foods that they have decided the issue must be met head on, to counteract the harmful effects of a public believing the scare stories of "frankenfood" that have been circulating on the Internet by unscrupulous NGOs portraying themselves as science food experts.

Eleven eminent scientists put together the recently published editorial in Science. They include the current and past presidents of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world's most influential science society; two past editors-in-chief of Science; Martin Rees of Britain's Royal Society; two Nobel Prize winners, along with a number of others high on the professional expertise scale of scientific research and knowledge.

Protesters destroy GM crops. Photograph: David Hoffman Photo Library / Al/Alamy

Their alarm has been raised over the refusal of farmers to have any truck with genetically modified grains. Despite the proliferation of evidence that those grains are not harmful to human health, but rather on the contrary are hugely beneficial to human health. And that activists whose 'public conscience' has been raised to shrieking level have undertaken to destroy Golden Rice, engineered to include beta-carotene, converted to vitamin A by the human body, and whose use in poverty-stricken areas of the world would combat dangerous deficiencies in vulnerable children.

A crowd breaking through a fence to destroy an experimental field of genetically modified golden rice in the Philippines, Aug. 8.   Photo courtesy Philippine Department of Agriculture Regional Field Unit 5


Research on the safety and effectiveness of GM foods has been carried out by universities or groups such as the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Others from sources like Ghent University in Belgium, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which publishes only studies that have been checked by independent outside experts to ensure scientific trustworthiness.

Summaries and abstracts of over 600 studies are freely obtainable at GENERA, an online database of studies in genetic research at Washington D.C.'s George Mason University. No industry funding is accepted to further research capabilities. Whereas research purporting to dispute the legitimacy of such findings is nowhere to be found. There is no reliable research that concludes the use of GMO foods is harmful to human health. There are shrill claims aplenty, though.

The threat of crop failures due to environmental conditions, leading to mass hunger, starvation in many under-developed countries of the world all can be met with the judicious use of many types of GMO grains. Quite aside from the issue of mendacious marketing programs led by producers like Monsanto whose ferocious greed and manipulation of the market give a black name to any types of GMO products, all the more so when seeds will respond only to the herbicides and pesticides that they alone produce.

And their practise of strictly disallowing through a signed contract with seed purchasers, the extraction of seeds from the food product for next year's sowing represents a travesty of crude capitalist criminality.