Golden Rice: Biotech's Big Illusion?

A team from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich has constructed a transgenic rice containing provitamin A.

Vitamin A deficiency (VAD) is known to cause partial or full blindness and to exacerbate ill-nesses such as diarrhea or measles in children. VAD is asso-ciated with and afflicts primarily the very poor in Asia, Africa and Latin America. “We can help these people in the future,” says Ingo Potrykus, leader of the team that developed the Vitamin A rice. He and his colleagues are deter-mined to give the transgenic rice free of charge and without restrictions to “the poor farmers in developing countries.”

Currently, the three strategies commonly used to fight VAD are:

1. Food fortification (e.g., margarine containing vitamin A in the Philippines; sugar fortified with vitamin A in some Latin American countries);

2. Supplementation — administration of high dose vita-min-A capsules twice a year; and

3. Food-based projects or dietary approaches, information on nutrition and eating habits. Vitamin A is found in meat, fish, eggs or milk products. Provitamin A is found in plants, especially in green leafy vegetables and fruit.

In most countries the first two strategies have priority. They are easy to administer and show fast results. The third strategy, though complex, was neglected for a long time, but it is becoming increasingly important.

In Bangladesh there is a very high prevalence of VAD. The FAO started a food-based project (concentrating on home gardens) in 1993, together with Helen Keller International (HKI) and 14 NGOs: introduction of small home-gardens with vitamin-rich vegetables and fruits, taking up and improvement of traditional cultivation methods, discussion-rounds, education programs, etc.

Families without any land were helped to grow vines up the sides of their houses and plant beans, pumpkins and bottle-gourds. Women, having experienced improvements in their children’s health, started to work for the project, which snowballed. From the very beginning the projects were integrated in the communities and supported by NGOs. Around 600,000 households (or over 3 million persons) were part of the project as of 1998.

The project was monitored scientifically by UN and the HKI, and while there were drawbacks, the HKI team showed:

(1) Health conditions improved;

(2) Only small plots of land are needed to provide sufficient vitamin A;

(3) Surprisingly, the greater variety of fruits and vegetables a person eats, the better is the uptake of provitamin A;

(4) Families with scattered gardens (mainly the very poor families who cannot afford their own home-garden) most often plant the most varie-ties and had a better uptake of provitamin A.

Biology
The genetically altered pro-vitamin A rice exists only in a laboratory. There is no experience if the plant shows the expected properties in different ecosystems (it is a common observation that transgenic plants, performing well in laboratories, fail in nature, especially if they contain not one, but three added gene-constructs as does vitamin A rice). Furthermore, the uptake of provitamin A depends on many factors. It has to be absorbed by the gut and then built up to vitamin A in the body.

This only functions in the presence of fat or oil, because provitamin A is only fat-soluble. Poor people’s diet is often missing fat, so they would excrete the provitamin A undigested; also worm infections or diarrhea can lead to vitamin A deficiency. The bioavailability of provitamin A is still poorly under-stood (e.g., carrots produce pro-vitamin A in a hardly digestible crystal form; they should be cooked, and some oil added, to allow the uptake. Provitamin A absorption is much easier from oranges.) Furthermore, evidence is growing that the health conse-quences of malnutrition often also extends to iodine, iron (the main factors), and to vitamins C and D, folate, riboflavin, selenium and calcium.

Patents
Ingo Potrykus plans on mak-ing the transgenic rice available to poor farmers for free, without any patent-claims. He even pub-licly denounced patenting: “So many fields of research are blocked by corporate patents. I had to ignore them or I couldn’t move at all. Scientists should start now by simply breaking the law,” he says. “What company wants the negative publicity of putting me in jail for fighting poverty?” (The Progressive Populist, St. Louis USA, August 1999).

But there is another Ingo Potrykus who once worked at the Novartis owned Research Institute FMI and still has very close connections to this company. A data-base search revealed that Ingo Potrykus is named as “inventor” and thus has interest in 30 plant-related patents, most of them belonging to Novartis; the latest Novartis patent with Potrykus as inventor was issued in February 1999.

Furthermore, Potrykus himself admits that they filed a patent-application for the trans-genic rice (“before others do it”) and that his group used some patented processes to construct the rice (possibly with himself as inventor). It could be that Novartis promises to give up all claims; however, Novartis has merged its agro-division with the Swedish-British company Astra Zeneca to create the new agro-giant Syngenta. Does this Swedish-British-Swiss Company also give up all patent-claims? Say, in seven years, when Thai farmers want to use it in their crops?

Culture
The transgenic provitamin A rice has a deep yellow color. But for decades, Southern people “learned” that “whiter than white” (for bread and rice) was the symbol for progress, quality and Western superiority. Now, all at once, scientists expect them to prefer the yellow color. FAO’s experiences with VAD programs show that a key to any success of such programs is a careful appreciation of cultural habits, traditions and beliefs. They cannot be changed overnight.

In genetically engineered and patented ‘golden rice,’ we once again encounter the typical Northern attempt to solve the problems of the South with a technocratic “magic bullet.” But we know from the experience of the last 50 years that this kind of isolated and one-dimensional approach hardly ever works. The original of this article can be found at: www.blauen-institut.ch (‘topics’, then ‘vitamin-A-documents’).