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| Golden rice. Photo Creative Commons |
In Greiner's experience,
"rice-consuming populations were extremely picky about their rice and unwilling to accept even the tiniest changes in its appearance, taste or smell".
There's a good reason for this.
Several of the common fungi produce
toxins, and some of these can produce a wide range of symptoms
similar to 'beriberi', a serious and sometimes fatal condition caused
by vitamin B1 deficiency. These toxins turn the rice yellow.
Rice-eating populations know not
to eat yellow rice. Failure to be picky about their rice could kill
them.
How easy will it be
to sell these people the idea that the high-tech yellow GM rice called
'golden rice' is good for them?
In a
typically low-income, low-schooled population, how easy will it be to
educate them to distinguish safely between stored GM rice which is
yellow because it generates carotene (vitamin A precursor) and stored
non-GM or GM
rice which is yellow because
it's toxic?
Two decades ago, as
a communication NGO for the Worldview International Foundation, Prof.
Greiner worked with 10 million people in Bangladesh, convincing them
to grow and eat high-carotene foods.
Operating,
for example, through a network of women recruited from the villages,
through schools, and through the provision of seeds and gardening
advice, the project promoted the growing of 15 vitamin A-rich and
oil-containing plants for smallholders and
the landless. This was along with nutrition education aimed at
children and the women who feed them.
A subsequent
large-scale evaluation of their success concluded the project had
worked. It cost $0.15 per person and had the added benefit of
supplying other important nutrients in the fresh vegetables.
About
the same time as the evaluation was published, the development of GM
golden rice got underway, ostensibly to solve the problem of vitamin
A deficiency in developing countries. The GM industry had soon spent
over $50 million promoting golden rice. They did this "well
before the technology was completely worked out, let alone tested.
Let alone consumer acceptability tested. Let alone subjecting it to
standard phase 2 and 3 trials to see if it could ever solve problems
in the real world".
Convincing people
that yellow-hued rice is safe to eat may never happen, but if it does
it will require a huge investment to overcome consumer resistance.
As Prof. Greiner points out, at 15 cents a head, all this PR cash
injection could achieve a great deal more in terms of human health if
it were devoted to convincing people to add low-cost plant foods to
their diets.
Interestingly,
several organisations including the Worldview International
Foundation have been working on another simple, low-tech, remedy for
child-hood vitamin A deficiency. Breast milk and, in particular, the
colostrum produced during the first few days after birth, provides
all the vitamin A a baby requires, generating long-term benefits for
eye health. The problem has been to overcome cultural barriers to
early breast-feeding, and to promote the continuance of
breast-feeding up to age two years.
OUR COMMENT
Targeting the most
vulnerable people with a sustainable supply of natural, fresh,
varied, high vitamin A foods plus the oil-rich foods needed to absorb
the vitamin A has been proven possible, effective and cheap.
Ultra Rice has been
improving health in multiple countries since 2005, but although the
first golden rice trials were underway in 2004, the high-tech crop
has yet to leave the starting gate.
It's obvious that
the multiple micronutrients in Ultra Rice or in home-grown veg are
what's needed to improve health in impoverished rice-eating areas.
Why then has so much money, time and scientific expertise been thrown
year-after-year at a single-nutrient fortified GM crop?
Proof, if you ever
needed it, that GM golden rice has no altruistic agenda whatsoever,
and was never anything more than a PR stunt for GM foods whose
creators knew from the word go wouldn't be popular, even without the
added hurdle of a funny colour indicative of toxic mould.
Just remember this
next time golden rice is trotted out of the PR cupboard for its
annual blame-the-greens stunt [1].
Background:
[1] THE REALGOLDEN RICE STORY - August 2016
Utra Rice
First made generally available in 2005, the fortified grains produced
using Ultra Rice technology are made with rice flour and
micronutrients - including iron, thiamin, zinc, vitamin A, folic acid
and other B vitamins - that can be varied to match local dietary
needs. This mixture is extruded through pasta-making equipment and
formed into the shape of rice grains. Nutritional integrity is
preserved throughout transport, storage, washing, rinsing and
cooking.
Ultra Rice grains can usually be manufactured locally, and are
blended with traditional rice (typically at a ratio of 1:100), so
that the meal is nearly identical to the conventional diet in
preparation, appearance, aroma, taste and texture.
The market for Ultra Rice has been expanded to India, Brazil,
Burundi, Cambodia, Mali, Myanmar, and Vietnam.
Funding for the Ultra Rice Project came from the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation, the US Department of Agriculture, and the National
Institute of Food and Agriculture.
SOURCES:
- Ted Greiner, Don't eat the yellow rice: The danger of deploying vitamin A golden rice, Independent Science News, 11.07.16
- Addressing hidden hunger - rice fortification adds needed nutrients to a staple food, www.path.org/projects/ultra_rice.php
- Ultra Rice, Wikipedia
- C. A. R. Rosa, et al., 2009, Production of citreoviridin by Penicilium citreonigrum strains associated with rice consumption and beriberi cases in the Maranhรขo State, Brazil, Food Additives & Contaminants: Part A
- Ted Greiner and S. NM. Mitra, 1995, Evaluation of the impact of a food-based approach to solving vitamin A deficiency in Bangladesh, Food and Nutrition Bulletin 16:3 The United Nations University
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