Does rice really need to be genetically modified?
Posted by christian on 16 April 2009.
The Philippine rice terraces, a UNESCO Living Cultural
Heritage site, has been declared a genetically-modified organism (GMO)
free zone
In the world of food staples, rice has a pretty iconic status. Over half of the global population eat it every day. It has been grown around the world for over 10,000 years. It's cultivated in 113 countries. If rice was a pop group, it would be the Beatles.
As well as being a fairly versatile accompaniment to many more interesting foods, rice is also a key ingredient in a wide variety of processed foods, ranging from baby food to more obvious things like rice noodles.
Of course, it's precisely that iconic status that makes rice a target for the 'If it ain't broke, let's break it' enthusiasm of the genetic engineering corporates. Because if you could cook up a version of rice that was patented to your company, you'd be raking it in.
The German chemical giant Bayer is trying to so just that - it wants to sell a herbicide resistant variety of GE rice to countries for commercial planting. The theory is that it will make it easier to blitz crops with the herbicide glufosinate without killing them. But that just means two things - first, that pesticide use is going to go waaaaay up, and second, that 'conventional rice' - (also known as 'rice') - is at risk of being contaminated by GM strains. Funnily enough, Bayer also manufacture glufosinate, so they'd get to work both ends of the deal quite nicely.
Quite apart from the fact that glufosinate is considered to be so dangerous to humans and the environment that it will soon be banned in Europe, rice traders and producers worldwide have up until this point avoided GM rice, because of high economic risks. The global rice industry lost some 1.2 billion dollars in 2006, when another GEMrice variety from Bayer contaminated global food supplies.
Our colleagues at Greenpeace International are hosting a petition calling on governments to protect consumers, farmers, crops and fields from potential contamination by GM rice.
There are some links with more information here, or you can sign the petition below.
- Find out about GM crops in more detail
- Find out how sustainable rice production can be achieved without genetic engineering
- Read more about Bayer's GM rice
The Petition
We ask all governments around the world to protect consumers and farmers, their crops and fields by rejecting Bayer’s GE rice, and to stop GE rice field trials.
GM food
It's pretty sad to see yet another unbalanced article on this site slating GM, and again linking to "fact sheets" all of which are authored by...Greenpeace. Why no links to the best independent studies done - eg the Royal Society? I suspect the reason may be that most of the big studies have come out showing that GM is generally pretty safe. Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have consistently sought to mislead the public on this issue - cherry picking of evidence and scare tactics. The main "evidence" they frequently quote is a poor survey from 2003 which showed that most people were opposed to GM foods at that time. Now, surveys at different times can show a lot of different things, but considering that Greenpeace are one of the principal scare-mongerers on this, it's pretty rich to keep harping back to one survey on public opinion, and giving this more priority than any actual scientific studies done before or since. Is it just possible that the public's fears were not that well informed?
I don't trust biotech companies, but sadly I'm starting to trust Greenpeace even less.
Open your eyes and read the evidence for yourself.
Re: GM food
Interesting that you should choose the Royal Society as the best example of an "independent" study - as you know so much about the situation you'll be well aware that for the last decade there have existed highly questionable links between it, Monsanto and the "Sense about Science" group set up to promote pro-biotech interests in 2002.
SAS's head, former MP Dick Tavern, also helped set up the biotech-industry supported Science Media Centre, which claimed to be "an independent venture working to promote the voices, stories and views of the scientific community". But its funders include Dupont, Merlin Biosciences, Pfizer, PowderJet and Smith-Nephew. Its press releases are full of quotes from the pro-biotech brigade.
The RS has subsequently proved itself keen to publish non-peer reviewed results showing GM poses no threat in its house journal, while rubbishing peer-reviewed research like that of Dr Arpad Pusztai, whose 1998 findings indicated that GM potatoes appeared to damage the health of rats.
In fact, anyone who wants to see how this process of systematic bias by the RS in favour of GM should read Dr Putzai's (himself a fellow of the RS of Edinburgh) recent account of how his research was sidelined. He worries that, over a decade later, "less than three dozen peer-reviewed scientific papers have been published describing the results of work relating to GM safety that could actually be regarded as being of an academic standard; and the majority of even these is from industry-supported labs."
In 1999 the RS themselves agreed that more work was needed to confirm or refute Putzai's findings - something they are easily capable of funding, but have chosen not to.
Last word from Dr Putzai: (in 1998) "I asked for a credible GM testing protocol to be established that would be acceptable to the majority of scientists and to people in general. 10 years on we still haven't got one. Instead, in Europe we have an unelected EFSA GMO Panel with no clear responsibility to European consumers, which invariably underwrites the safety of whatever product the GM biotech industry is pushing onto us."
Which to me at least suggests that NGOs campaigning on GM are right to be wary of the motives and behaviour of the RS on this issue.