Irrational Fears Overshadow Reasonable Criticism of Genetically Modified Crops

Seven years ago, golden rice — genetically modified to contain vitamin A  — was all the rage. It was supposed to prevent a million people from dying, and another half million from going blind, every single year. It was, writes Dick Taverne in The Prospect, the "flagship plant of biotechnology. No other scientific development in agriculture in recent times held out greater promise."

But for all that promise, it could be another five years — if not longer — before golden rice is commercially grown.

The promised benefits from other GM crops that should reduce hunger and disease have been equally elusive. GM crops should now be growing in areas where no crops can grow: drought-resistant crops in arid soil and salt-resistant crops in soil of high salinity. Plant-based oral vaccines should now be saving millions of deaths from diarrhoea and hepatitis B; they can be ingested in orange juice, bananas or tomatoes, avoiding the need for injection and for trained staff to administer them and refrigeration to store them.

None of these crops is yet on the market. What has gone wrong? Were the promises unrealistic, or is GM technology, as its opponents claim, flawed— because of possible harm to human safety or the environment or because it is ill-suited to the needs of poor farmers in the developing world?

Taverne makes a very good case against knee-jerk opposition to genetically modified crops. But he has one very large blind spot — one which hides the answer to his questions about golden rice, and reveals opposition to GM crops as more than superstition.

According to Greenpeace, an average adult would have to eat 20 pounds of cooked rice daily to meet their vitamin A requirements; a breast-feeding mother would need to eat double that.

Obviously, people aren’t supposed to get all their vitamin A from a single source — but even 10 or 20 percent would require enormous amounts of rice. When confronted with this critique, the inventor of golden rice, Ingo Potrykus, called it premature: rice lines in development contained even more vitamin A, he said, and the necessary experiments could only be conducted when modifications were made in locale-specific rice strains.

But how, exactly, were these locale-specific rice strains going to be developed? Potrykus didn’t throw his modifications into the public domain; he sold them to agricultural biotechnology giant Syngenta. The company later made the techniques freely available to academic researchers and farmers in developing countries, but the company still retains commercial rights. And while corporations are convenient bogeymen, the thought of any company owning a potentially global crop is upsetting.

Taverne’s right that genetically modified crops have fallen victim to overblown, sometimes unscientific fears. But once the public gets over those, they’ll have other, far more substantial concerns.

The Real GM Food Scandal [The Prospect]

Image: Macalester University

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