A rice that could prevent childhood blindness and death has been ready for two decades. It still isn't growing anywhere. The same technology is safely used in the U.S. on luxury pineapples.
Greenpeace's public statement on golden rice [1] is pretty pathetic (granted, it's from 2013); my favorite argument is that it "distracts" from "real" long-term solutions. Imagine a doctor refusing to provide antibiotics because it "detracts" from the real long-term solution: not getting infected in the first place.
This was so helpful, and honestly, heart-rending. Even knowing some of this story already, the scale of it makes me tear up. It didn't need to be that way and those families deserved better. Thank you for writing it.
I 100% agree that blocking golden rice is wrong, but I think it's still an extremely open question whether if it was widely available, it would have large impacts on vitamin A deficiency, let alone blindness or mortality. There haven't been sufficient trials of its efficacy under-controlled conditions to fully understand the bioavailability, and then its effectiveness—do people buy it, do they eat it, are they eating it with sufficient amounts of fat, etc.—haven't been studied at all.
So no disagreement on the principles, we should definitely have golden rice, but I think the impact of nutrition interventions, esp. whole-foods based interventions that require broad dietary and cultural changes and are not-single point delivery, is generally overstated.
Thanks Jake! I used the Tang et al. 2009 study on Golden Rice specifically for bioconversion figures, paired that only with the amount of beta carotene found in Bangladesh and Philippines field studies. So this does account for what you flagged already.
It's not possible to know whether people buy it or eat it because it was never allowed to grow. I wouldn't hold this point against Golden Rice.
NYtimes article clarifies that most children do eat the sufficient amount of fat.
Fortifying dietary staples with vitamins and minerals is well-supported, widely studied, and practiced across the developed world. (The US does it with vitamins A, B, C, D, and E, iodine, iron, zinc, folic acid, and calcium.) Golden rice is a novel delivery mechanism -- using GMOs to make the food "self-fortifying" rather than doing it industrially -- but otherwise the same basic idea. All the research that's been done indicates it should work well. Most of the remaining research gaps are because Greenpeace keeps blocking the pilot projects that could tell us how it works in the real world.
From a cultural perspective, it's not as big a change as it might seem. While GMO was required to create the "golden" trait originally, there's a straightforward conventional breeding process which lets you add that trait to most varieties of rice. So you aren't asking farmers to switch to a type of rice unsuited to their culture or environment; you're just tweaking the one they're already using.
Excellent piece. I am an avowed environmentalist and an avowed humanist, and it’s horrifying when those two goals are at odds. Greenpeace is truly a lamentable organization.
I fought a lot with Greenpeace over their use of vandalism tactics against GMO crops, but I'm pleased to say that they have abandoned this https://johnquiggin.com/2014/12/14/greenpeace-and-vandalism/ while unfortunately retaining an effectively unqualified opposition to GMOs including golden rice.
On the other hand, I'm unconvinced that Goldern Rice is the right answer to vitamin A defiency. The exisitng strategy based on supplements works well where delivery is effective. UNICEF reports that three quarters of childen are now receiving the recommended treatment. The effort and cost required to extend that to all or nearly all children is probably less than that required to ensure that golden rice becomes the dominant variety.
More generally, GMOs have been a disappointment as a technology. Apart from Golden Rice, there;s glyphosate (Roundup) resistance and Bt, but not much else. Admittedly, I hadn't heard about the pink pineapples so maybe I'm missing somethng
Thanks John! GMOs seem to me to have been pretty successful, they just are typically not talked about except by circles who hate them. See how quickly they’ve been adopted in LMICs, with some countries even reversing bans because a majority of some crops were already GMO: https://press.asimov.com/articles/nigeria-crops
To be clear, the figure is calculated as *only the countries Golden Rice could have helped*. E.g. high vitamin A deficiency levels, the poor rely on rice, and much rice is domestic. Vitamin A deficiency is so big that even reaching 75% of children still leads to figures like mine.
Great question - maybe I should have made that more clear. Greenpeace cares a lot about purity / stability / protection of the environment, and so the rise of GMOs was what they were trying to prevent. They were less prevalent at that time, so I think what they were doing (by stopping one of the first few) was a much bigger deal back then.
I feel like you fail to address some basic things.
1. It seems heavily contested even among scientists the effectiveness of the golden rice. In another comment you cite a ‘09 paper which means either you’re not up to date with current literature or the field has abandoned this project for whatever reason.
2. You don’t address the biodiversity issue. That GP raises. Is this a nonissue in your opinion? If so, why?
3. I’m not a Luddite but it seems wise to at least the financial implications of adopting the golden rice as the standard paradigm.
Again, let me re-emphasize the main criticism: there seems to be a lack of scientific consensus that your proposed solution would work. So what are we even doing here?
Thanks Bags - it doesn't seem heavily contested among scientists. Hence, the 100+ Nobel winners (mostly scientists) who got together to write a letter. The "appearance of lack of consensus" seems to be *somewhat* similar to vaccine skepticism, who claim that because a handful of scientists claim a link between autism and vaccines, that there is "no consensus".
Was there a specific aspect of the anti-GMO perspective that you find particularly convincing over the scientific consensus that GMOs are safe? Meta analysis in academic articles on the last decades of GMO have found no safety, wellness, or environmental harms. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21645698.2026.2634489#abstract
Harms have mostly been concerns about dependency, since sometimes you have to keep rebuying seeds and are tied to a corporate supplier. Golden Rice doesn't work that way, both because the seeds are free to LMICs farmers and because the rice isn't a hybrid so it can keep being replanted.
2. Greenpeace believed that an onslaught of GMOs would be very very bad for biodiversity. Since then, there has now been an onslaught of GMOs, and the type of things they predicted did not pan out. There are still issues around farmers' dependency on expensive seeds, which I believe is what they pivoted to now. Those concerns do not apply to Golden Rice. Biodiversity wasn't impacted. In sum, they'd prefer that we not have messed with the ecosystem, but it already happened with *other GMOs*.
3. I'm not sure what you mean about financial implications. This would have been an option for farmers to breed into their varieties and to sell enriched rice. It wouldn't have been forced. Do you mean standard paradigm on the "global health and development" aspect or standard paradigm on the "make it normal in rice markets"? For global health and development, other tools would still be used like Vitamin A supplementation. For rice markets, it would have been trial and error to see how to make consumers test it out.
Sorry for the delay in response. No mental bandwidth due to work.
Let me set the stage so you know where I'm coming from; you're a good enough writer to deserve a serious response. I'm not an expert in this space and very skeptical of grandiose claims. When there is apparent disagreement on the efficacy of the treatment (Is it noise or signal? I cannot tell as an outsider.) and the author fails to dispel this as noise with up-to-date literature, my faith in the thesis does not increase. Going forward, I'd encourage you to take this criticism into account; otherwise you'd be writing only to your sycophants.
Onto the specific claims:
Scientists - even nobel laureates - are not bastions of objectivity. Everyone is influenced by narrative. I actually find it quite difficult to locate the letter. I'm curious how many of these laureates work in / near GMOs. If there are many, I would take this as a positive signal of your thesis.
Due to my ignorance on the matter, I remain neutral until scientific consensus seems to be established. An article that would convince me is a detailed discussion of the controversy plus a corresponding literature review of the studies that put those controversies to rest. Your comments addressing the biodiversity go in this direction. As for financial implications, I was hoping you'd address some of the claims that GP made in their letter (you linked it in another comment).
1. The 2009 paper is a clinical trial demonstrating successful vitamin A conversion, the fact that 17 years have passed does not nullify this and not only has this field no been abandoned, but that also wouldn't nullify these results. These results have not been challenged: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?linkname=pubmed_pubmed_citedin&from_uid=19369372. If you are claiming these results are heavily contested, provide your citations, but more importantly, something counterveilling to these trial results. We have ample outcome data showing the preventative effects of vitamin A intake and blindness/mortality outcomes.
2. Whether or not weediness and gene transfer to wild relative species will negatively impact biodiversity is unclear, but what it clear is that even the most speculative outcomes are not even remotely as bad as 100k dead children and 500k blind children.
3. As long as we also account for the financial implications of 100k dead children, sure. Where is the analysis and why would this outweigh the harms?
Ignoring the fact that consensuses are not how public health initiatives work, where is the serious disagreement coming from, and what is the reasoning specifically? I hate when people vaguely gesture at dissenting opinions to muddy the waters. State clearly what the criticisms are.
As someone unfamiliar with this story, I would have liked some more detailed context: How exactly has Greenpeace blocked it? Are there reasons to assume it would have been successful otherwise? What would it take to unblock it now?
Greenpeace has chapters on the ground or funds local groups that will file appeals or court orders to block approval for this new type of seed variety. It's hard to tell how successful it would have been, because it was never allowed to grow anywhere. The next obstacle would have been finding ways to make the market demand it. To unblock it now, Greenpeace and its affiliates would withdraw court appeals.
Greenpeace and all the well-meaning nice people who follow it are responsible for so much pain and hardship. These well-fed white privileged elite, wringing their hands and weeping their tears in sorrow at people's suffering, whilst sticking absolutely to their righteous indignation that they must be the absolute arbiters of what change is allowed in the world. They would accept the total destruction of life on earth if the alternative was to allow GM crops on to the market for ordinary people.
Thank you! Interesting article, love that it covered the meta debate: “There were little to no integration efforts between the two branches, and highly polarized positions arose in the clusters on ‘advocacy’ and ‘equity and holism’. To explore this divide, we investigated the influences of disciplinary affiliations and personal values on the respective problem framings. We conclude that to move beyond a polarized debate, it may be fruitful to ground the Golden Rice discourse in facets and methods of sustainability science, with an emphasis on participation and integration of diverging interests.”
Of course. What is the courtroom, so to speak, that could adjudicate the diverging interests? It's not easy. I'd like to read your thoughts on that. With the golden rice issue, we had a bunch of economists -- many of them Nobel laureates -- and some utilitarians against poor farmers that had no reason to expect that global capital had their best interests in mind. They were genuinely illegible to one another. How could that be otherwise? As an American, I see an analogy to post-NAFTA realignment in the United States, and I have learned to be critical of high modernist social engineering.
ahhhh! the voices of white saviors pressing upon ‘poor’ brown people a desire to ‘save their lives’ good grief. gmo’s are NOT successful. they’re are disastrous for the real world and human health.
The blog was narrowly focused on vitamin A enriched GMO rice and well substantiated the coordinated, evidence-free efforts to block it. The consequences are the deaths of over 100,000 children and an additional fifteen deaths per day until this stops.
In your many comments, you have yet to provide any evidence to contradict these arguments. Nor has anyone else, so far.
Please explain how fifteen dead children a day is worth it to protect from 'disastrous' GMO rice. What is the disaster being prevented by keeping GMO rice from farmers who want to grow it, or from parents who want to feed it to their children? Why would you fight for a world that forces that to happen?
Greenpeace clearly started out believing what you believe, and advocated for their belief far and wide, as was their mission. I used to believe them too. I don't blame people for being skeptical at first. But we were wrong about GMOs. As it turns out, dead wrong. Lethally wrong.
It is not helpful, credible, or accurate to ignore the fact that the author of this piece often writes about growing up poor, isn't white, and writes from a perspective that understands that it takes a lot of skills to navigate the economy while low-income/poor (skills that, I'd add, many western activists do not have and don't understand). Your comment puts 'poor' in single quotes like it's a bad word, when poor families say they are poor with no derision or shame.
White saviorism that ignored consequences to the people they were trying to "help" seems to have been exactly the problem with the history of Golden Rice. Being dismissive about concrete, preventable, massive losses of life in communities impacted by these choices is taking a wrong turn. Greenpeace and anyone following in their footsteps on this issue should face the facts of this ongoing, misguided position with deep, searing regret and do better.
i am a black american raised in the ‘poor’ southern united states where gmo phood has systematically destroyed the health of the people there and enriched the coffers of drs for far too long.
There are a lot of problems in the food and phood systems in the south that unfairly impact black communities, yes. It is maddening. Reasonable people were skeptical of big companies making money from GMOs when they were untested. They’re tested now. We need to be able to change our minds and solve then right problems. We know better now. GMOs weren’t the problem. Now we know better and can do better. And we *should do* better the communities that could benefit from Golden Rice.
you should really do more homework on the long term effects of gmo seed on land animals and humans. look no further than the obesity epidemic and you’ll have a clue to reverse engineer from.
Thanks. :) I'd love to see your evidence linked obesity to GMOs? Obesity seems to have risen since the 1970s when fast food became more prevalent. Even when countries adopted more fast food, they became more obese. Food became more calorie-dense and heavily processed.
seed oils are gmo. gmo corn and soy is fed to CAFO animals. HFCS is derived from gmo sugar beets and put in EVERYTHING including wiped onto conventional meat. we are awash in corn and soy derivatives making us sicker and fatter and frankly lowering our intelligence by the day. so yes obesity is the inevitable outcome of a culture who has been seduced into abandoning healthy farming for corporate ag (gmo is corporate ag)growing cycles and synthetic inputs for higher yield on animals vegetables flowers anything you can name. if it’s mass produced it is done through slavery which is the underbelly of NAFTA and other free trade agreements. you should sincerely look into the excellent research c jeffry smith and dr vandana shiva.
If there was credible evidence you would have presented it. (And idea laundered propaganda and circular nonsense doesn’t meet evidentiary standards.)
All you want is self affirmation for advocating for “natural” food and opposing a fictional villain. You don’t care that your beliefs, when practiced, harm the weakest and most vulnerable people. You are rich and privileged enough to be insulated from the consequences of your beliefs.
none of these so called poor countries want genetically engineered food. quite possibly the people living in these countries would prefer to stop the continuous generational enslavement of their populations and the end of multi BILLION dollar corporate resource theft. gmo rice is solution to problems created by the west. good grief.
Actually, most of the land growing genetically modified plants is in low and middle-income countries. Genetically modified seeds have been smuggled by low income farmers (from low income countries!) so often that some countries, like Brazil, reversed their western-imposed GMO bans. (See https://www.asimov.press/p/nigeria-crops).
For context, while Europe and US markets use them for higher-margin items, poorer countries use them to prevent harms like crop failures and pests. Especially on low margin foods that the rich countries have no interest in growing.
I'd love to understand what you mean - what is the mechanism for how modern slavery and corporate theft? Rich countries don't make money off these low-margin crops. Nigeria is even developing its own GMOs in-house.
it’s monsanto and bayer. they are and have been for decades up against countries who actively refuse their frankenseed. the west especially america is one of the only countries who still grow gmo alfalfa corn and soy to the detriment of human and soil health. mexico has experienced untold damage to their own
corn stores,children born underweight and birth defects because of the glut of gmo american grown corn dumped on them since nafta.
i spent many years educating people up and down the coast of california during the mid 90’’s up until we lost the gmo
labeling initiative in california. monsanto and bayer have sued places like vermont and oregon for trying to refuse to grow gmo seed. this stuff has a long and sordid history. you certainly won’t find sod history on google either. now we are f course up against crispr gene editing which appears to be as bad if not dangerously worse than gmo. either way the tampering with and promise of saving human lives is the exact opposite result lab manipulating of life giving seed. it’s a money making life destroying scourge upon the planet.
The Vermont and Oregon lawsuits were about labeling, not for refusing to grow seeds. Maybe I'm missing something?
The children born underweight and with birth defects seems more linked to malnutrition and pesticides.
The WHO, FAO, and National Academies of Sciences have stated that no adverse health effects have been reported from the consumption of GM foods.
If anything, seems like GMOs decreased pesticide use: GMO cotton is 90 percent of all cotton grown in India, China, and the U.S. The same GM modification "bt", added to plants from tomato to soybean, reduced "the world’s chemical pesticide use by almost half a million tons from 1996 to 2016." https://press.asimov.com/articles/nigeria-crops
I see we're probably not going to agree on this but I'm grateful you explained it to me!
we do not need to agree. the fruit of gmo is poison. globally. they have promised to feed the world for decades. no one ever talks about the wars theft of resources and deliberate impoverishment of the countries now in need of genetically manipulated seeds. it’s absolute madness perpetrated by people and industries who actually don’t care a wit about the lives of brown people. check out vandana shiva. then we can at least know you’re looking at some other perspective than the WHO.
You might consider that "Dan Quail" is a bot. There probably are real humans who would write the comment above ("Smugly advocating…"), but the comment is so over-the-top that another explanation seem plausible.
Greenpeace's public statement on golden rice [1] is pretty pathetic (granted, it's from 2013); my favorite argument is that it "distracts" from "real" long-term solutions. Imagine a doctor refusing to provide antibiotics because it "detracts" from the real long-term solution: not getting infected in the first place.
[1] https://www.greenpeace.org/southeastasia/publication/1073/golden-rice/
Yeah, it's awful. I read the same letter excitedly, thinking that maybe they wrote something compelling that I was missing. No, there wasn't. :(
This was so helpful, and honestly, heart-rending. Even knowing some of this story already, the scale of it makes me tear up. It didn't need to be that way and those families deserved better. Thank you for writing it.
Thank you! :) 🙏
I 100% agree that blocking golden rice is wrong, but I think it's still an extremely open question whether if it was widely available, it would have large impacts on vitamin A deficiency, let alone blindness or mortality. There haven't been sufficient trials of its efficacy under-controlled conditions to fully understand the bioavailability, and then its effectiveness—do people buy it, do they eat it, are they eating it with sufficient amounts of fat, etc.—haven't been studied at all.
So no disagreement on the principles, we should definitely have golden rice, but I think the impact of nutrition interventions, esp. whole-foods based interventions that require broad dietary and cultural changes and are not-single point delivery, is generally overstated.
Thanks Jake! I used the Tang et al. 2009 study on Golden Rice specifically for bioconversion figures, paired that only with the amount of beta carotene found in Bangladesh and Philippines field studies. So this does account for what you flagged already.
It's not possible to know whether people buy it or eat it because it was never allowed to grow. I wouldn't hold this point against Golden Rice.
NYtimes article clarifies that most children do eat the sufficient amount of fat.
"only 5 g/d are sufficient, whereas even in the poorest quintile of households in India average fat intake per adult equivalent is 35 g/d, and e.g. on the Maldives the fat intake of children aged 1-3 years is 22 (±11) g/d," https://archive.nytimes.com/dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/27/from-mark-lynas-to-michael-pollan-agreement-that-golden-rice-trials-should-proceed/?eafs_enabled=false
I agree that it is unclear whether people would have minded the yellow color.
Fortifying dietary staples with vitamins and minerals is well-supported, widely studied, and practiced across the developed world. (The US does it with vitamins A, B, C, D, and E, iodine, iron, zinc, folic acid, and calcium.) Golden rice is a novel delivery mechanism -- using GMOs to make the food "self-fortifying" rather than doing it industrially -- but otherwise the same basic idea. All the research that's been done indicates it should work well. Most of the remaining research gaps are because Greenpeace keeps blocking the pilot projects that could tell us how it works in the real world.
From a cultural perspective, it's not as big a change as it might seem. While GMO was required to create the "golden" trait originally, there's a straightforward conventional breeding process which lets you add that trait to most varieties of rice. So you aren't asking farmers to switch to a type of rice unsuited to their culture or environment; you're just tweaking the one they're already using.
Kudos on posting your calculation, it's impressive work!
Thank you so so much Tyner! I'm self-teaching myself to do good back-of-the-envelope estimates. I'm so grateful that you checked it out! :)
Good piece, Abi.
It not only highlights an important topic, but some of the responses also reveal the level of discourse surrounding it.
Having been close to this issue for almost 30 years, I could have easily predicted some of them.
Excellent piece. I am an avowed environmentalist and an avowed humanist, and it’s horrifying when those two goals are at odds. Greenpeace is truly a lamentable organization.
I fought a lot with Greenpeace over their use of vandalism tactics against GMO crops, but I'm pleased to say that they have abandoned this https://johnquiggin.com/2014/12/14/greenpeace-and-vandalism/ while unfortunately retaining an effectively unqualified opposition to GMOs including golden rice.
On the other hand, I'm unconvinced that Goldern Rice is the right answer to vitamin A defiency. The exisitng strategy based on supplements works well where delivery is effective. UNICEF reports that three quarters of childen are now receiving the recommended treatment. The effort and cost required to extend that to all or nearly all children is probably less than that required to ensure that golden rice becomes the dominant variety.
https://data.unicef.org/topic/nutrition/vitamin-a-deficiency/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
More generally, GMOs have been a disappointment as a technology. Apart from Golden Rice, there;s glyphosate (Roundup) resistance and Bt, but not much else. Admittedly, I hadn't heard about the pink pineapples so maybe I'm missing somethng
Thanks John! GMOs seem to me to have been pretty successful, they just are typically not talked about except by circles who hate them. See how quickly they’ve been adopted in LMICs, with some countries even reversing bans because a majority of some crops were already GMO: https://press.asimov.com/articles/nigeria-crops
My figures already included a decrease in Vitamin A deficiency from supplementation in recent years. India is the biggest contributor to my figure, where 2 of 5 children are missed: https://www.news-medical.net/news/20220729/Vitamin-A-supplementation-is-missed-by-two-in-five-children-in-India-analysis-finds.aspx
To be clear, the figure is calculated as *only the countries Golden Rice could have helped*. E.g. high vitamin A deficiency levels, the poor rely on rice, and much rice is domestic. Vitamin A deficiency is so big that even reaching 75% of children still leads to figures like mine.
Tyranny of the majority is consistently an underrated issue
What’s in it for green peace to fight this?
Great question - maybe I should have made that more clear. Greenpeace cares a lot about purity / stability / protection of the environment, and so the rise of GMOs was what they were trying to prevent. They were less prevalent at that time, so I think what they were doing (by stopping one of the first few) was a much bigger deal back then.
I feel like you fail to address some basic things.
1. It seems heavily contested even among scientists the effectiveness of the golden rice. In another comment you cite a ‘09 paper which means either you’re not up to date with current literature or the field has abandoned this project for whatever reason.
2. You don’t address the biodiversity issue. That GP raises. Is this a nonissue in your opinion? If so, why?
3. I’m not a Luddite but it seems wise to at least the financial implications of adopting the golden rice as the standard paradigm.
Again, let me re-emphasize the main criticism: there seems to be a lack of scientific consensus that your proposed solution would work. So what are we even doing here?
Thanks Bags - it doesn't seem heavily contested among scientists. Hence, the 100+ Nobel winners (mostly scientists) who got together to write a letter. The "appearance of lack of consensus" seems to be *somewhat* similar to vaccine skepticism, who claim that because a handful of scientists claim a link between autism and vaccines, that there is "no consensus".
Was there a specific aspect of the anti-GMO perspective that you find particularly convincing over the scientific consensus that GMOs are safe? Meta analysis in academic articles on the last decades of GMO have found no safety, wellness, or environmental harms. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21645698.2026.2634489#abstract
Harms have mostly been concerns about dependency, since sometimes you have to keep rebuying seeds and are tied to a corporate supplier. Golden Rice doesn't work that way, both because the seeds are free to LMICs farmers and because the rice isn't a hybrid so it can keep being replanted.
2. Greenpeace believed that an onslaught of GMOs would be very very bad for biodiversity. Since then, there has now been an onslaught of GMOs, and the type of things they predicted did not pan out. There are still issues around farmers' dependency on expensive seeds, which I believe is what they pivoted to now. Those concerns do not apply to Golden Rice. Biodiversity wasn't impacted. In sum, they'd prefer that we not have messed with the ecosystem, but it already happened with *other GMOs*.
3. I'm not sure what you mean about financial implications. This would have been an option for farmers to breed into their varieties and to sell enriched rice. It wouldn't have been forced. Do you mean standard paradigm on the "global health and development" aspect or standard paradigm on the "make it normal in rice markets"? For global health and development, other tools would still be used like Vitamin A supplementation. For rice markets, it would have been trial and error to see how to make consumers test it out.
Sorry for the delay in response. No mental bandwidth due to work.
Let me set the stage so you know where I'm coming from; you're a good enough writer to deserve a serious response. I'm not an expert in this space and very skeptical of grandiose claims. When there is apparent disagreement on the efficacy of the treatment (Is it noise or signal? I cannot tell as an outsider.) and the author fails to dispel this as noise with up-to-date literature, my faith in the thesis does not increase. Going forward, I'd encourage you to take this criticism into account; otherwise you'd be writing only to your sycophants.
Onto the specific claims:
Scientists - even nobel laureates - are not bastions of objectivity. Everyone is influenced by narrative. I actually find it quite difficult to locate the letter. I'm curious how many of these laureates work in / near GMOs. If there are many, I would take this as a positive signal of your thesis.
Due to my ignorance on the matter, I remain neutral until scientific consensus seems to be established. An article that would convince me is a detailed discussion of the controversy plus a corresponding literature review of the studies that put those controversies to rest. Your comments addressing the biodiversity go in this direction. As for financial implications, I was hoping you'd address some of the claims that GP made in their letter (you linked it in another comment).
1. The 2009 paper is a clinical trial demonstrating successful vitamin A conversion, the fact that 17 years have passed does not nullify this and not only has this field no been abandoned, but that also wouldn't nullify these results. These results have not been challenged: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?linkname=pubmed_pubmed_citedin&from_uid=19369372. If you are claiming these results are heavily contested, provide your citations, but more importantly, something counterveilling to these trial results. We have ample outcome data showing the preventative effects of vitamin A intake and blindness/mortality outcomes.
2. Whether or not weediness and gene transfer to wild relative species will negatively impact biodiversity is unclear, but what it clear is that even the most speculative outcomes are not even remotely as bad as 100k dead children and 500k blind children.
3. As long as we also account for the financial implications of 100k dead children, sure. Where is the analysis and why would this outweigh the harms?
Ignoring the fact that consensuses are not how public health initiatives work, where is the serious disagreement coming from, and what is the reasoning specifically? I hate when people vaguely gesture at dissenting opinions to muddy the waters. State clearly what the criticisms are.
As someone unfamiliar with this story, I would have liked some more detailed context: How exactly has Greenpeace blocked it? Are there reasons to assume it would have been successful otherwise? What would it take to unblock it now?
Greenpeace has chapters on the ground or funds local groups that will file appeals or court orders to block approval for this new type of seed variety. It's hard to tell how successful it would have been, because it was never allowed to grow anywhere. The next obstacle would have been finding ways to make the market demand it. To unblock it now, Greenpeace and its affiliates would withdraw court appeals.
Thank you! That sounds surprisingly easy, if only Greenpeace could admit they made a mistake.
I agree :(
Greenpeace and all the well-meaning nice people who follow it are responsible for so much pain and hardship. These well-fed white privileged elite, wringing their hands and weeping their tears in sorrow at people's suffering, whilst sticking absolutely to their righteous indignation that they must be the absolute arbiters of what change is allowed in the world. They would accept the total destruction of life on earth if the alternative was to allow GM crops on to the market for ordinary people.
It's complicated. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6132390/
Thank you! Interesting article, love that it covered the meta debate: “There were little to no integration efforts between the two branches, and highly polarized positions arose in the clusters on ‘advocacy’ and ‘equity and holism’. To explore this divide, we investigated the influences of disciplinary affiliations and personal values on the respective problem framings. We conclude that to move beyond a polarized debate, it may be fruitful to ground the Golden Rice discourse in facets and methods of sustainability science, with an emphasis on participation and integration of diverging interests.”
Of course. What is the courtroom, so to speak, that could adjudicate the diverging interests? It's not easy. I'd like to read your thoughts on that. With the golden rice issue, we had a bunch of economists -- many of them Nobel laureates -- and some utilitarians against poor farmers that had no reason to expect that global capital had their best interests in mind. They were genuinely illegible to one another. How could that be otherwise? As an American, I see an analogy to post-NAFTA realignment in the United States, and I have learned to be critical of high modernist social engineering.
Vandana Shivahttps://share.google/FSQAuYqx0IBNSLLHc
ahhhh! the voices of white saviors pressing upon ‘poor’ brown people a desire to ‘save their lives’ good grief. gmo’s are NOT successful. they’re are disastrous for the real world and human health.
The blog was narrowly focused on vitamin A enriched GMO rice and well substantiated the coordinated, evidence-free efforts to block it. The consequences are the deaths of over 100,000 children and an additional fifteen deaths per day until this stops.
In your many comments, you have yet to provide any evidence to contradict these arguments. Nor has anyone else, so far.
Please explain how fifteen dead children a day is worth it to protect from 'disastrous' GMO rice. What is the disaster being prevented by keeping GMO rice from farmers who want to grow it, or from parents who want to feed it to their children? Why would you fight for a world that forces that to happen?
Greenpeace clearly started out believing what you believe, and advocated for their belief far and wide, as was their mission. I used to believe them too. I don't blame people for being skeptical at first. But we were wrong about GMOs. As it turns out, dead wrong. Lethally wrong.
It is not helpful, credible, or accurate to ignore the fact that the author of this piece often writes about growing up poor, isn't white, and writes from a perspective that understands that it takes a lot of skills to navigate the economy while low-income/poor (skills that, I'd add, many western activists do not have and don't understand). Your comment puts 'poor' in single quotes like it's a bad word, when poor families say they are poor with no derision or shame.
White saviorism that ignored consequences to the people they were trying to "help" seems to have been exactly the problem with the history of Golden Rice. Being dismissive about concrete, preventable, massive losses of life in communities impacted by these choices is taking a wrong turn. Greenpeace and anyone following in their footsteps on this issue should face the facts of this ongoing, misguided position with deep, searing regret and do better.
read dr vandana shiva’s work.
i am a black american raised in the ‘poor’ southern united states where gmo phood has systematically destroyed the health of the people there and enriched the coffers of drs for far too long.
There are a lot of problems in the food and phood systems in the south that unfairly impact black communities, yes. It is maddening. Reasonable people were skeptical of big companies making money from GMOs when they were untested. They’re tested now. We need to be able to change our minds and solve then right problems. We know better now. GMOs weren’t the problem. Now we know better and can do better. And we *should do* better the communities that could benefit from Golden Rice.
you should really do more homework on the long term effects of gmo seed on land animals and humans. look no further than the obesity epidemic and you’ll have a clue to reverse engineer from.
Thanks. :) I'd love to see your evidence linked obesity to GMOs? Obesity seems to have risen since the 1970s when fast food became more prevalent. Even when countries adopted more fast food, they became more obese. Food became more calorie-dense and heavily processed.
seed oils are gmo. gmo corn and soy is fed to CAFO animals. HFCS is derived from gmo sugar beets and put in EVERYTHING including wiped onto conventional meat. we are awash in corn and soy derivatives making us sicker and fatter and frankly lowering our intelligence by the day. so yes obesity is the inevitable outcome of a culture who has been seduced into abandoning healthy farming for corporate ag (gmo is corporate ag)growing cycles and synthetic inputs for higher yield on animals vegetables flowers anything you can name. if it’s mass produced it is done through slavery which is the underbelly of NAFTA and other free trade agreements. you should sincerely look into the excellent research c jeffry smith and dr vandana shiva.
read their books and study their works.
I’m wondering if something impacted your intelligence or you were just born this stupid.
“Slavery is the underbelly of NAFTA” is lunacy.
Clearly, you happy for kids to die for your luxury beliefs.
well,dang. you’ve just changed my mind👏🏽🙏🏽
If there was credible evidence you would have presented it. (And idea laundered propaganda and circular nonsense doesn’t meet evidentiary standards.)
All you want is self affirmation for advocating for “natural” food and opposing a fictional villain. You don’t care that your beliefs, when practiced, harm the weakest and most vulnerable people. You are rich and privileged enough to be insulated from the consequences of your beliefs.
:) I always try to assume best intentions. FWIW, I think credible evidence is often defined as the fact that people trust who it came from.
Even my AI model kept accidentally picking up anti-GMO sources. I then had to have it find the missing context for both itself and myself.
The trend towards increased obesity started long before GMOs were widely available.
none of these so called poor countries want genetically engineered food. quite possibly the people living in these countries would prefer to stop the continuous generational enslavement of their populations and the end of multi BILLION dollar corporate resource theft. gmo rice is solution to problems created by the west. good grief.
Actually, most of the land growing genetically modified plants is in low and middle-income countries. Genetically modified seeds have been smuggled by low income farmers (from low income countries!) so often that some countries, like Brazil, reversed their western-imposed GMO bans. (See https://www.asimov.press/p/nigeria-crops).
For context, while Europe and US markets use them for higher-margin items, poorer countries use them to prevent harms like crop failures and pests. Especially on low margin foods that the rich countries have no interest in growing.
I'd love to understand what you mean - what is the mechanism for how modern slavery and corporate theft? Rich countries don't make money off these low-margin crops. Nigeria is even developing its own GMOs in-house.
it’s monsanto and bayer. they are and have been for decades up against countries who actively refuse their frankenseed. the west especially america is one of the only countries who still grow gmo alfalfa corn and soy to the detriment of human and soil health. mexico has experienced untold damage to their own
corn stores,children born underweight and birth defects because of the glut of gmo american grown corn dumped on them since nafta.
i spent many years educating people up and down the coast of california during the mid 90’’s up until we lost the gmo
labeling initiative in california. monsanto and bayer have sued places like vermont and oregon for trying to refuse to grow gmo seed. this stuff has a long and sordid history. you certainly won’t find sod history on google either. now we are f course up against crispr gene editing which appears to be as bad if not dangerously worse than gmo. either way the tampering with and promise of saving human lives is the exact opposite result lab manipulating of life giving seed. it’s a money making life destroying scourge upon the planet.
The Vermont and Oregon lawsuits were about labeling, not for refusing to grow seeds. Maybe I'm missing something?
The children born underweight and with birth defects seems more linked to malnutrition and pesticides.
The WHO, FAO, and National Academies of Sciences have stated that no adverse health effects have been reported from the consumption of GM foods.
If anything, seems like GMOs decreased pesticide use: GMO cotton is 90 percent of all cotton grown in India, China, and the U.S. The same GM modification "bt", added to plants from tomato to soybean, reduced "the world’s chemical pesticide use by almost half a million tons from 1996 to 2016." https://press.asimov.com/articles/nigeria-crops
I see we're probably not going to agree on this but I'm grateful you explained it to me!
we do not need to agree. the fruit of gmo is poison. globally. they have promised to feed the world for decades. no one ever talks about the wars theft of resources and deliberate impoverishment of the countries now in need of genetically manipulated seeds. it’s absolute madness perpetrated by people and industries who actually don’t care a wit about the lives of brown people. check out vandana shiva. then we can at least know you’re looking at some other perspective than the WHO.
Vandana Shiva is a crank who has no idea what the fuck she is talking about.
All you anti-GMO fuckwits have is nothing but “it’s icky!” and other facile appeals to emotion.
Smugly advocating to steal food from starving babies and cackling along with Trump and Musk does not make you morally superior.
I always try to assume best intentions. :) I think in some environmental frameworks, people don't always get to see negative impacts of GM policies.
You might consider that "Dan Quail" is a bot. There probably are real humans who would write the comment above ("Smugly advocating…"), but the comment is so over-the-top that another explanation seem plausible.
Dan Quail is a pretty frequent commentator on Slow Boring and other Substacks I follow, so I know he’s not a bot
Thank you. Bots can comment frequently on multiple Substacks. But if a real person is generating comments like the one above…that is sad news.
LOL
Your entire stream of comments just makes it obvious to everyone that you are motivated by ideology, not a concern for developing nations or the poor.