Sometimes the enemies of biotechnology utterly puzzle me. I’m so mystified by their motives that I’m forced to a simple conclusion: These people aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, or the brightest crayons in the box. No, these are the kind of people who need an hour to make minute rice.
As it happens, rice has been on my mind lately. And not just any rice, but a specific kind called Golden Rice. Introduced for the first time five years ago, it currently represents one of the most promising varieties of biotech food found anywhere because it’s fortified with vitamin A. Vitamin A deficiency is responsible for half a million cases of infant blindness and more than a million deaths each year.
We call it Golden Rice because of its color--but Golden Rice also offers a golden opportunity to feed the world. Most of the suffering associated with vitamin A deficiency takes place in developing countries. It is also largely preventable, because the root cause is malnutrition. If the victims merely were to eat a properly balanced diet that included sufficient amounts of vitamin A, far fewer of them would lose their sight or die.
Golden Rice is an affordable biotech solution to this frustrating problem.
So what does Greenpeace think of it? Well, last month this radical organization of anti-biotech extremists condemned Golden Rice as “a technical failure.” Moreover, said Greenpeace, this innovative food will “exacerbate malnutrition and undermine food security because it encourages a diet based on a single industrial staple food.”
Do you follow that logic? Golden Rice improves the nutritional value of a staple crop--and so Greenpeace says that it will make malnutrition worse. Think about that for a minute, while I go cook up a batch of rice.
Okay, I’m back. And guess what: Greenpeace’s logic still doesn’t make any sense. And if we keep on calling it “logic,” we’re going to give logic a bad name.
What we have here is an example of Orwellian thinking. The three most notorious slogans from George Orwell’s book 1984, after all, are: “war is peace,” “freedom is slavery,” and “ignorance is strength.”
Now Greenpeace wants to add a new one: “Golden Rice is malnutrition.” It makes about as much sense, and as a slogan it probably would bring a smile to the scowling face of Big Brother.
In fairness, Greenpeace has based its illogic on yesterday’s news. The early versions of Golden Rice were no panacea because they merely would have raised levels of vitamin A to about 20 percent of their recommended daily allowance. That’s certainly no cure for the global problem of vitamin A deficiency, but it’s a very good start. If you were a major-league baseball player, would you rather hit one out of every five pitches thrown to you or none at all?
But now there’s Golden Rice 2, an upgraded form of the crop that makes it possible for people to get half of the recommended levels of vitamin A from a single source. This isn’t going to wipe out malnutrition, but it’s going to make a big dent--lives will be saved and children will see.
That’s not the only good news. Syngenta, the company that has developed Golden Rice 2, is working with the Humanitarian Golden Rice Network to make its product available in local varieties all over the world--and it’s letting poor farmers resow their seeds without having to pay fees.
The highly respected magazine Nature recently editorialized strongly in favor of this decision: “Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and their political allies in European governments and nongovernmental organizations will not welcome Golden Rice 2. They will continue to reject and stall biotech products at the mere hint of a transgene, no matter what the humanitarian value of the crop and no matter how spurious the environmental concerns. But there comes a time when arguments against a GM product that could help prevent blindness in hundreds of thousands and death in millions each year should be seen for what they are: ideological bigotry.”
That’s well put, though I’m more inclined to label it ideological stupidity. I hope someone comes up with a biotech cure for that.
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Sometimes the enemies of biotechnology utterly puzzle me. I’m so mystified by their motives that I’m forced to a simple conclusion: These people aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, or the brightest crayons in the box. No, these are the kind of people who need an hour to make minute rice.
