GM crops don't kill kids; opposing them does

Belated posting of my recent Times column on golden rice with links:

It was over harlequin ducks that we bonded. Ten years ago, at a meeting in Monterey, California, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the structure of DNA, I bumped into the German biologist Ingo Potrykus watching harlequin ducks in the harbour before breakfast. Shared enthusiasm for bird watching broke the ice.

I knew of him, of course. He had been on the cover of Time magazine for potentially solving one of the world’s great humanitarian challenges. Four years before, with his colleague Peter Beyer, he had added three genes to the 30,000 in rice to help to prevent vitamin A deficiency, one of the most preventable causes of morbidity and mortality in poor countries with rice-dominated diets. They had done it for nothing, persuading companies to waive their patents, so that they could give the rice seeds away free. It was a purely humanitarian impulse.

Had Ingo or I known that ten years later this rice would still not be available to the poor, that a systematic campaign of denigration against it by the behemoths of the environmental movement, especially Greenpeace, would be consuming lawyers’ fees while perhaps 20 million children had died in the meantime through vitamin A deficiency, he and I would have felt sick with horror that morning.

In the debate over genetically modified food that has bubbled since Owen Paterson (yes, he’s my brother-in-law, get over it) became the first European Agriculture Minister enthusiastically to endorse GM crops a few weeks ago, not a single British journalist or blogger to my knowledge has bothered to research the facts about golden rice, which featured so prominently in his speech. Surely, I thought, some newshound would get out to the Philippines and China and Switzerland and find out what’s actually going on. But no. Just as with fracking, it’s easier to report the controversy.

Well, I will pick up the story myself. The agri-business Syngenta improved Professor Potrykus’s “golden rice” by adding two genes instead of three (one from maize, one from a common soil bacterium) until it produced good yields while providing 60 per cent of a child’s vitamin A daily requirements from only 50 grams of rice. So for all those poor people who couldn’t afford, and would never be offered, supplements, who had nowhere to grow spinach, but who lived largely on rice, simply substituting golden rice for normal rice would save lives.

Again and again, remedying nutrient deficiency comes top when humanitarian priorities are ranked according to cost benefit analyses. The World Health Organisation estimates that 170 million to 230 million children and 20 million pregnant women are vitamin-A deficient and, as it weakens the immune system, that 1.9 million to 2.7 milllion die of it each year, more than from Aids, TB and malaria. We hear a lot about risk assessments; well, here’s a benefit assessment.

Then came the backlash. Greenpeace and its pals lobbied governments to slow down the project and drive up its costs. Their objections have been, variously, that golden rice was a corporate plot (untrue), did not produce enough vitamin A (not true), might cause health problems (a vitamin enriched bowl of rice?), might upset ecosystems (unlikely for a domesticated crop) and that capsules of vitamin A were a better bet (after 20 years at nearly $1 billion a year, vitamin A capsules still reach too few people).

Despite Professor Potrykus, or Adrian Dubock, who now runs the Golden Rice Project, meeting every objection, the greens were implacable. One incoming head of Greenpeace briefly said he would look at it again, whereupon he was slapped down. The two researchers at Syngenta who had improved golden rice lost their jobs when the company pulled out of Britain thanks to the Frankenfoods hysteria.

“Do you think I should show pictures of blind babies in my slide shows?” Professor Potrykus once asked me. In 2010 he could take it no more. “I therefore hold the regulation of genetic engineering responsible for the death and blindness of thousands of children and young mothers,” he wrote in Nature magazine.

Recently three groups of 24 Chinese children were fed golden rice, spinach or beta-carotene capsules in a scientific test. The organiser, in agreement with the ethical review boards involved and US government guidance, but in hindsight foolishly, did not tell their parents that GM food was involved. All hell broke loose; the scientists were arrested, then fired. Greenpeace had just what it wanted: a scandal about golden rice. No matter that no harm had been done, or could possibly have been done — perception is all.

Pressing home its advantage, Greenpeace brought a court case in the Philippines against insect-resistant aubergines. As a result, genetic modification may have to cease in the Philippines, where golden rice is being field-tested. The greens are frantic to stop golden rice because it undermines all their criticisms of GM crops. It is non-profit, free, nutrition-enhancing, and of more value to the poor than the rich: only farmers earning less than $10,000 a year will be allowed to sell the seed on. The truth is, GM crops have already proved a friend of the poor: they have enabled people in India and Burkina Faso to grow cotton almost without insecticides, for example. The crop has boosted yields, cut pesticide use and brought back farmland wildlife.

Imagine instead an agricultural system that often exhausts the soil, uses extra land, occasionally kills people through contaminated food, uses scrambled and unseen genetic changes caused by gamma rays and licences old-fashioned and toxic sprays. We’d ban it, wouldn’t we?

Well, that’s organic farming. Because it refuses inorganic fertiliser, it exhausts soil fertility unless a farmer is wealthy enough to have the luxury of dung from elsewhere. Because its yields are lower, it uses about twice as much land as inorganic farming to produce the same quantity of food. Because it uses manure, it risks outbreaks of fatal food poisoning such as the one in which organic German bean sprouts killed 53 people in 2011. Because it happily uses varieties of crops like “golden promise” barley whose genes were deliberately scrambled by gamma rays in a nuclear facility, it has no scruples about random genetic changes, only precise ones. And because it allows prewar pesticides, it is happy to licence copper-based fungicide chemicals.

Meanwhile at least half a million, perhaps two million, children die each year from preventable vitamin A deficiency. On your conscience, Greenpeace.