August 2000
“This rice could save a million kids a year.” That was the arresting headline on the cover of last week’s Time magazine. It referred to golden rice, a newly market-ready variety of genetically engineered grain that contains extra beta carotene, which helps the body produce vitamin A. All over Asia, millions of malnourished children suffer from vitamin A deficiency, which can lead to blindness and death.
To get their supposed miracle cure off the ground, AstraZeneca, the company that owns marketing rights for golden rice, has offered to donate the grains to poor farmers in countries such as India, where genetically engineered crops have so far met fierce resistance.
It’s possible that golden rice could improve the health of millions of children. The problem is that there is no way to separate that powerful emotional claim (and the limited science attached to it) from the overheated political context in which the promise is being made.
GE foods, originally greeted with rubber stamps from governments and indifference from the public, have rapidly become an international repository for anxiety about everything from food safety to corporate-financed science to privatized culture. Opponents argue that the current testing standards fail to take into account the complex web of interrelations that exists among living things. Altered soybeans, for example, may appear safe in a controlled test environment, but how, once grown in nature, will they affect the weeds around them, the insects that feed on them and the crops that cross-pollinate with them?
What has blindsided the agribusiness companies is that the fight has been a battle of the brands as much as one of warring scientific studies. Early on, activists decided to aim their criticism not at agribusiness itself but at the brand-name supermarkets and packaged-food companies that sold products containing “Frankenfoods.”
Their brand images tarnished, British supermarkets began pulling products off their shelves, and companies such as Gerber and Frito-Lay went GE-free. In the United States and Canada, environmentalists have set their sights on Kellogg’s and Campbell’s Soup, parodying their carefully nurtured logos and costly ad campaigns.
At first, the agribusiness companies couldn’t figure out how to respond. Even if they could claim that their altered foods had no harmful effects, they couldn’t point to direct nutritional benefits either. So that raised the question, Why take a risk? Which is where golden rice comes in. AstraZeneca now has a benefit to point to—not to mention a powerful brand of its own to fight the brand wars with.
Golden rice has all the feel-good ingredients of a strong brand. First, it’s golden, as in golden retrievers and gold cards and golden sunsets. Second, unlike other genetically engineered foods, it isn’t spliced with ghastly fish genes but rather melded with sunny daffodils. But before we embrace genetic engineering as the saviour of the world’s poor, it seems wise to sort out what problem is being solved here. Is it the crisis of malnutrition, or is it the crisis of credibility plaguing biotech?
The boring truth is that we already have the tools to save many more than a million kids a year—all without irrevocably changing the genetic makeup of food staples. What we lack is the political will to mobilize those resources. That was the clear message that emerged from the recent Group of Eight summit in Okinawa. One after another, the largest industrial nations shot down concrete proposals aimed at reducing poverty in the developing world. As The Globe and Mail reported, they nixed “a Canadian proposal to boost development aid by up to 10 percent, turned down Japan’s idea to set up a G8 fund to fight infectious diseases, and backed away from opening their markets to farm goods from developing countries within four years.” They also “said no to a new plan to accelerate US$100 billion in debt relief for the poorest countries.” [Even more telling was the June 2002 summit of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. The ambitious goal of the gathering was to reduce the number of hungry people by half; from 800 million to 400 million by 2015. Yet of the 29 richest countries, only two sent their heads of state to Rome, and one of those was Italy, whose leader was already in town.]
There are also plenty of low-tech solutions to vitamin A deficiency that have been similarly passed over. Programs already exist to encourage the growth of diverse, vitamin-rich vegetables on small plots, yet the irony of these programs (which receive little international support) is that their task is not to invent a sexy new sci-fi food source. It’s to undo some of the damage created the last time Western companies and governments sold an agricultural panacea to the developing world.
During the so-called Green Revolution, small-scale peasant farmers, growing a wide variety of crops to feed their families and local communities, were pushed to shift to industrial, export-oriented agriculture. That meant single, high-yield crops, produced on a large scale. Many peasants, now at the mercy of volatile commodity prices and deep in debt to the seed companies, lost their farms and headed for the cities. In the countryside, meanwhile, severe malnutrition exists alongside flourishing “cash crops” such as bananas, coffee and rice. Why? Because in children’s diets, as in the farm fields, diverse foods have been replaced with monotony. A bowl of white rice is lunch and dinner.
The solution being proposed by the agribusiness giants? Not to rethink mono-crop farming and fill that bowl with protein and vitamins. They want to wave another magic wand and paint the white bowl golden.