Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety (29 page)

TABLE 12.
Research steps required to genetically engineer and to produce and use Golden Rice containing beta-carotene, a precursor of vitamin A

The degree of acceptance by consumers is also a matter of concern.
Preliminary surveys suggested that some people found the yellow color unattractive; they thought someone might have urinated on the rice. Scientists can remove the undesirable color by inserting the genes for the additional enzymes in the pathway to vitamin A (which is colorless), but these steps only add to the technical difficulties.
Table 12
explains why promotion of Golden Rice as a means to prevent vitamin A deficiency is premature. At best several more years of work will be needed to bring it to market.

White rice is the principal source of energy (calories) for one-third or more of the world’s population, but it is not a source of vitamin A. Only animals make vitamin A; plants make beta-carotene, its precursor. The lack of vitamin A is the single most important cause of blindness among children in developing countries and a major contributor to deaths among malnourished children and adults. Children who are even mildly deficient in vitamin A are at increased risk for early death, but health authorities can prevent an astonishing proportion of such deaths—more than half—with supplements of vitamin A (
not
beta-carotene). Supplements are relatively inexpensive and need to be taken once every six months or so, but because they cannot always be obtained by the people who need them most, fortification of a commonly consumed food might be another way to solve a serious world health problem.
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Since 1984, the Rockefeller Foundation has dispensed about $4 million annually to fund genetics projects to improve one characteristic or another of rice plants, and it considers Golden Rice to be the greatest achievement of this program. Moving Golden Rice beyond the research stage, however, unexpectedly encountered political problems. Ironically, one of the difficulties was a confrontation with patent rights, as a “thicket of intellectual property claims” governed use of the technology. The companies most likely to benefit from the public relations generated by Golden Rice, among them Monsanto and AstraZeneca, hold proprietary patent rights to as many as 70 of the materials or DNA segments needed for its construction. To solve the legal problems connected with using the technology, Dr. Potrykus and his colleagues contracted with AstraZeneca to market the rice in the United States and other industrial markets. In return, AstraZeneca agreed to help make the technology available to the developing world. It gave the technology to the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines where scientists are
crossing Golden Rice with locally grown varieties. AstraZeneca also said it would give the Golden Rice seeds to farmers earning less than $10,000 a year (a figure that includes most farmers in developing countries) and allow farmers to save the seeds to plant in future years. Monsanto also agreed to give up its intellectual property rights for this rice.
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These concessions appear exceedingly generous, but Golden Rice is unlikely to have much commercial potential in developing countries. Its public relations value, however, is enormous. In July 2000, the cover of
Time
displayed a photograph of Dr. Potrykus with the headline “This rice could save a million kids a year . . . but protesters believe such genetically modified foods are bad for us and our planet. Here’s why.” The story noted that it was “no wonder the biotech industry sees Golden Rice as a powerful ally in its struggle to win public acceptance. No wonder its critics see it as a cynical ploy.”
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Cynics might indeed raise eyebrows at the advertisement shown in
figure 14
, a component of the biotechnology industry’s public relations campaign in 2001. The advertisement features a photograph of a child of indeterminate ethnicity eating a “vitamin-enriched” breakfast cereal presumably made from Golden Rice. It says, “Thanks to biotechnology, researchers are developing a new kind of rice with beta-carotene. . . . In the future it could help prevent serious illnesses, such as blindness or anemia, for many people in developing parts of the world.”

Dr. Potrykus—frustrated by the encumbrances of industry patent rights on the one hand and objections by antibiotechnology advocates on the other—emphasizes the humanitarian benefits of his research. He told the Tufts University conference that the 40,000 people dying from malnutrition every day need the technology just to survive. Malnutrition, he said,

pose[s] immense medical problems for developing countries. Traditional interventions are helpful, but require additional and complementary actions. . . . Applied in “humanitarian projects” they could substantially and sustainably improve the health and life of the poor. Whether the poor will benefit, does neither depend upon scientific, patent right, or economic problems, nor upon socioeconomic, consumer health, or environmental risks. It depends mainly upon the political “success” of radical anti-GMO organizations. Those who try to prevent careful exploitation in humanitarian projects must be taken responsible for their damage.
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By “those,” Dr. Potrykus meant Greenpeace: “Is there any problem left that could interfere with the exploitation of ‘Golden Rice’ to the benefit of the poor and disadvantaged in developing countries? It is unfortunate that the answer is yes: Greenpeace . . . and associated GMO opponents regard ‘Golden Rice’ as a ‘Trojan Horse.’. . . By their singular logic, the success of ‘Golden Rice’ has to be prevented under all circumstances, irrespective of the damage to those for whose interest Greenpeace pretends to act.”
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Dr. Potrykus is correct in his assessment of the motivations of Greenpeace. From that organization’s standpoint, Golden Rice obscures fundamental issues of societal values—in this case, poverty and control over resources—and is a techno-fix imposed by corporations and scientists without consulting recipients about whether they want it or not. Greenpeace says that the true purpose of Golden Rice is to convince people to accept genetically modified foods.

FIGURE 14
. This biotechnology industry advertisement appeared late in 2001 inside the front cover of
Food Safety
, a publication of the National Restaurant Association’s Educational Foundation. The text suggests that Golden Rice could help prevent nutritional deficiencies among people in the developing world, presumably by replacing the current vitamin-enriched breakfast cereals.

If Greenpeace frustrates scientists and biotechnology industry officials, it is in part because its tactics are so effective. For one thing, Greenpeace fights science with science. In February 2001, the group challenged the fundamental premise (and promise) of Golden Rice. Greenpeace calculated that adults would have to eat at least 20
pounds
(9 kilograms) of Golden Rice to meet daily vitamin A recommendations. Greenpeace called Golden Rice nothing but “fool’s gold” and said, “It is shameful that the biotech industry is using starving children to promote a dubious product. . . . This isn’t about solving childhood blindness, it’s about solving biotech’s public relations problem.”
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Greenpeace did its homework. It took at face value the scientists’ own estimate that a daily intake of 300 grams (nearly 11 ounces) of Golden Rice should provide the
equivalent
of 100 units of vitamin A. As noted earlier, beta-carotene must be converted to vitamin A in the body. This process is usually incomplete, however, and the amount that is converted into vitamin A is a matter of sharp debate. The scientists who developed Golden Rice assumed that 6 molecules of beta-carotene would yield 1 of vitamin A, whereas U.S. estimates suggest a conversion ratio of 12 to 1.

Greenpeace took the scientists’ figures and compared them to recommended levels of vitamin A intake for the U.S. population. By U.S. standards, 300 grams (11 ounces) of Golden Rice provides one-third the recommended level of daily intake of vitamin A for a child aged one to three years, one-seventh the level recommended for an adult woman, and one-ninth the level for an adult man. By such standards, young children would need to eat nearly 33 ounces of raw rice per day, which, when cooked, would amount to 99 ounces, or about 6 pounds—an absurdly large amount. If the Golden Rice scientists had used the higher U.S. conversion ratio, that quantity doubles to an even more absurd 12 pounds.
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It must be understood that the U.S. standard is deliberately set high
to meet the nutritional needs of about 98% of the population; people with average requirements can prevent vitamin A deficiency at much lower levels of intake.
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Nevertheless, to meet just 10% of the U.S. standard, young children would still need to eat more than a pound of cooked rice a day. The Greenpeace analysis made it clear that on quantitative grounds alone, Golden Rice would constitute—at best—a partial solution to health problems caused by vitamin A deficiency.

As might be anticipated, the Greenpeace estimations elicited outraged arguments from scientists and the industry. As a nutritionist, I particularly appreciated the arguments because they raged around the kinds of basic questions my colleagues and I like to discuss in nutrition science courses: What standards are appropriate for the intake of nutrients by individuals and populations? How much beta-carotene is converted to vitamin A in the body? How much vitamin A is required to prevent or alleviate the symptoms or consequences of deficiency? The arguments also dealt with an important question in
applied
nutrition: Should nutritional standards for developing countries be the same as or lower than those for industrialized countries? This question is political rather than scientific because of its implications: lower nutrient standards make populations appear to be better nourished. They also make Golden Rice appear to be more effective.

Dr. Potrykus acknowledged: “Greenpeace has identified a weak point in the strategy of using Golden Rice for reducing vitamin A deficiency.” He then countered with new calculations based on standards less “luxurious” than those of the United States—those of India, for example. He said, “Golden Rice is not supposed to provide 100% of the vitamin A–supply, but to . . . [be] complementing other dietary components.” On this basis, he estimated that 50% of the standard for a child in India could be met by about 100 grams of Golden Rice per day (a quite reasonable 9 ounces, cooked), and that this amount could be reduced even further if his group could bioengineer the rice to contain higher levels of beta-carotene. Although he still viewed the Greenpeace objections as morally irresponsible, he said he shared “Greenpeace’s disgrace about the heavy PR campaign of some agbiotech [agricultural biotechnology] companies using results from our experiments. . . . I stressed, however, also, that I am grateful to all those companies, which donated free licenses . . . to allow for the humanitarian use of Golden Rice in developing countries.”
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The president of the Rockefeller Foundation, Gordon Conway, also agreed that the industry was overselling the promise of Golden Rice:

The food industry . . . has featured the golden grains as part of a $50 [million] campaign to promote GM foods. The message is that GM is not just about profits, it can save children’s lives. All of this hype is premature and dangerous. The science that led us to Golden Rice is at a very early stage. Until the product is fully developed and tested, no one can be sure how well it will work. . . . But some anti-GM activists would like the work to be stopped before we know its real value.
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