Wasting lives over food "purity"
Wednesday, February 20, 2013 at 8:39AM 
Bjorn Lomborg writing that 8m kids worldwide have died over the past 12 years because Western and local activists prevented the arrival of rice that is genetically modified to possess an abundance of Vitamin A:
Finally, after a 12-year delay caused by opponents of genetically modified foods, so-called “golden rice” with vitamin A will be grown in the Philippines. Over those 12 years, about 8 million children worldwide died from vitamin A deficiency. Are anti-GM advocates not partly responsible?
Golden rice is the most prominent example in the global controversy over GM foods, which pits a technology with some risks but incredible potential against the resistance of feel-good campaigning. Three billion people depend on rice as their staple food, with 10 percent at risk for vitamin A deficiency, which, according to the World Health Organization, causes 250,000 to 500,000 children to go blind each year. Of these, half die within a year. A study from the British medical journal the Lancet estimates that, in total, vitamin A deficiency kills 668,000 children under the age of 5 each year.
Yet, despite the cost in human lives, anti-GM campaigners—from Greenpeace to Naomi Klein—have derided efforts to use golden rice to avoid vitamin A deficiency.
Great piece by a brilliant guy.
These fights are like every other one in a developing environment: West wants South to avoid its own past
"mistakes" and demands they develop in "pure" fashion. Result is stunted development and wasted lives. Truth of history is this: if you want people to care about the environment, get them richer first and then they'll care. Until then, expect a local rise in pollutions and other things because there really aren't any magical short-cuts on development. Plus, quite frankly, the damage done while still poor vastly outranks the cumulative damage inflicted by the income/industrial rise. But basic point: don't be a hypocrit and expect the poor to atone for your past excesses.
On the GMO, the West's enviro case is far weaker. There is no evidence of substantial risk and plenty of evidence of substantial gain. This is simply rich people who can afford organic pretending they're doing good by telling the poor to hold out for it - or else.
Expect a lot more fights as climate change exacerbates droughts in food-vulnerable regions and well-meaning Northerners do their best to prevent the application of genuine solutions.
Reader Comments (6)
Ah..."Naomi Klein," the video below captures by current emotional response at her "work," after self therapy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ttDMGEme-k
Nothing like the road paved with good intentions.
In the late 90s I read a review of the international seed companies that produce heirloom seeds and F1 hybrids. Most of the larger seed companies are growing F1hybrids as they are disease resistant and are often manipulated for greater vitamin power... they are also non-reproducible - the seeds often don't grow a second generation requiring the purchasing of new seed. Heirloom seeds do have a very high rate of reproducibility but are not grown for commercial resale as it cuts into profits. Food sources are the new gold standard as I see the world's evolution - we all must eat.
Today I did a quick check and found some major U.S. seed firms are owned either by big pharama (international) or oil producers.
Control my food and control me!
Thomas say it ain't so!
Lomborg is wrong to say the delay was caused by opponents of GMOs. It wasn't.
In 2001, when Lomborg starts his clock, the technology was just a lab experiment. From then until 2006, the technology had been in development to increase its nutritional value, and could not have been successfully deployed. After that, and until 2010, the now-working technology had to be back-crossed from lab-optimized rice cultivars to rice cultivars suitable to local growing conditions. And, actually, that work—along with the pilot-scale work of making sure the crops are viable and of minimal production risk to farmers—is ongoing.
Irrespective of engineering’s pace, delay would have been significant due to ownership questions. There were more than 4 years of IP, stewardship, and licensing negotiations that needed to be settled between parties that claimed partial ownership of the technology. This is because it was developed in a university lab using funds from an EU public-private partnership program.
If we use Lomborg’s line of reasoning—that those who have prevented the arrival of golden rice are responsible for 8 million dead Filipino children—then the overwhelming portion of blame goes to the share-holders of companies who owned the technology and whose employees (officers, lawyers, scientists, planners) moved slowly and cautiously as part of an attempt to act in the best interests of those share-holders.
In this case, I do not think development struggle or cultural struggle narratives apply.
Not to nitpick, but it reads like 8 Mil children WORLDWIDE dead, not 8 Mil Filipino children dead. Staggering numbers, regardless.
I have to disagree with you and Lomborg on this. Golden Rice is not even a good solution to vitamin A deficiency, simply because there are so many other ways to add beta-carotene to the diet that are cheaper, more sustainable, and better for all-round nutritional health. We know what they are: leafy greens, orange fruits and vegetables, animal products for those who can afford them. Golden rice appeals because it is high tech and simple, even though the problem it purports to solve is complex. If just a little of the time and money that went into both sides of the golden rice "debate" had gone into improving childhood nutrition more generally, I reckon malnutrition -- and not just vitamin A deficiency -- could have been severely knocked back. See, for example, Michael Latham's The great vitamin A fiasco, in the May 2010 World Nutrition, www.wphna.org
Tom, you know how I feel about advice from someone like Lomborg who has a PhD in political science and a business background, that regularly delves into areas where he has no formal education. A man who has a checkered past when it comes to honesty in his publications.
Several environmental scientists filed complaints against Bjørn Lomborg with the Danish Committee for Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD) a decade ago in regard to his claims about climate change. They found grounds to investigate and in its decision the committee concluded Bjørn's book 'The Skeptical Environmentalist' to be scientifically dishonest. Bjørn himself was found to be not guilty on the specific grounds that he lacked expertise in the field in question. That really says it all.
So what we have here is someone writing, yet again, on a subject where he has no formal background or training. Excuse me for being deeply skeptical of someone who writes books, publications and creates movies in any areas where he has no degree or history of having his conclusions held up to peer review. It seems we now live in a world where anybody can claim to be an expert on anything, and find someone willing to pay them to publish if it's supportive of a specific political and/or economic agenda.
As to the subject at hand, no one knows what the long-term effects of consuming genetically modified grains will be on people, animals and insects, it's all one large experiment.
I notice that Bjørn mentions the farmers in India, and GM Indian cotton, which apparently most Indian farmers are using now, which means higher yields, but also means far higher costs to purchase the seeds and follow the very specific cultivation requirements necessary to get those higher yield results. These farmers have to go into debt to acquire the seeds fertilizer etc., and debt is no small thing in a poor country like India. Some claim that a quarter million farmers have committed suicide since the 90s, as a direct result of the debt incurred through modern cultivation methods.
I certainly don't have a complete understanding in this area, though I have tried to get my head around the genetically modified seed business, specifically in regard to what was happening in Haiti a few years ago. But anything resembling credible hard data appears extremely hard if not impossible to come by, I wonder why?
Hard to verify any of the allegations of things like 'Terminator Seeds' with concrete data. But in fact it's unnecessary for the creation of an actual Terminator seed (a seed that produces sterile next generation seed by design, which many countries have declared illegal) since all a savvy geneticist would have do is create a seed that loses a significant portion of its virility with each successive generation, thereby forcing farmers in poor countries to continue buying seeds every year in order to maintain yields.
Buying seed every year has been common practice in the US for decades, but the cost of those seeds for US farmers is offset by the higher yield, absorbed as a part of planting costs. It's significantly harder to make this model work in the developing world where return on crops is much lower and has fewer guarantees like government support and crop insurance to provide a safety net for these farmers when something goes wrong.
My farmer father has strong opinions on these subjects. He has nothing good to say about Monsanto, or the products they want him to use. He's been in the hybrid seed corn business for most of his life, selling it to friends and neighbors, and has watched with ever increasing skepticism, and in recent years open disgust and disdain, as the increasingly consolidated agribusiness has tightened its grip on farm economies around the world.
On the other side I have family who work for Monsanto, and I can't get word one out of them regarding these issues, I have tried. I suspect they've been advised by upper management not to speak about anything with anyone, apparently not even folks in their own family. Makes me wonder why.