The Poor, Malnutrition, Biofortification, and Biotechnology - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 162

engineering.10 Most commonly Golden Rice is simply disparaged as a “Trojan horse”
of the biotech lobby (Potrykus 2001), suggesting that the latter wants to use the social
appeal of this project to make GM crops in general more acceptable. This ignores the
fact that Golden Rice was conceived by public scientists and funded as a humanitarian
project (Toenniessen 2009).
To further rationalize a rejection of Golden Rice, its effectiveness is often challenged
by alleging that an impossible amount of rice would have to be consumed to prevent
vitamin A deficiency. (Or the reverse, that too much vitamin A could be consumed and
have a toxic effect.) Indeed, the first line of Golden Rice contained only limited amounts
of carotene (provitamin A), but it merely represented a proof-of-concept study that
showed that rice can be engineered to express carotenes in the endosperm (Enserink
2008). And while using data from such early R&D stages to discard a technology may
be disingenuous in the first place, since peer-reviewed studies showed early on that
even small amounts of carotene could have a beneficial effect and make Golden Rice
an economic intervention (Zimmermann and Qaim 2004). Stein (2006) showed more
explicitly that the activists' calculations were biased and unfounded. Moreover, sub-
sequent research succeeded in increasing the levels of carotene in Golden Rice (Paine
et al. 2005), and new, more detailed calculations confirmed the potential impact and
cost-effectiveness of Golden Rice (Stein, Sachdev, and Qaim 2006). Over time new
research also answered other questions, including those regarding the bioavailability of
the carotenes in Golden Rice (Tang et al. 2009).
Further, detractors also claim that farmers will have to pay royalties on the seeds or
cannot save them for resowing. Yet, also in this case, the issue had been solved early
on, paving the way for the humanitarian use of Golden Rice and its dissemination to
farmers in developing countries free of added charges (Potrykus 2001). Finally, the need
for a new micronutrient intervention is often questioned by maintaining that current
interventions can address micronutrient deficiencies. As discussed above, biofortifica-
tion had been developed exactly to counter the shortcomings and weaknesses of exist-
ing interventions in eradicating micronutrient malnutrition.
As in the wider discussion of GM crops, in the case of Golden Rice it also seems
that many opponents are not concerned with factual information or the validity and
consistency of their arguments but, in opposing Golden Rice, rather follow another,
wider agenda (Potrykus 2001). This is not to say that all conditions for the distribu-
tion of Golden Rice to farmers have already been fulfilled—not least, the food safety
and biosafety of Golden Rice still need to be formally established, which is fully
acknowledged by the developers (IRRI 2011b). Steps like the final safety assessment
of a new product prior to its commercialization form part of any product develop-
ment. Criticizing the lack of such an assessment while the rice is still in the R&D
phase is not sincere.
Another facet of the controversy surrounding GM crops is that current regulations
for their approval have become so demanding that only the biggest companies have
the know-how and the financial standing to carry out the safety tests and compile the
required dossiers—and that even for them doing so only pays off for major commercial