Bjørn Lomborg: India’s GM crop success

Bjørn Lomborg, National Post | March 20, 2014 | Last Updated: Mar 19 6:15 PM ET

Sam Panthaky/AFP/Getty Images


Despite sensationalist headlines, genetically modified crops have been a great boon to Indian farmers.


Too often, we let emotion crowd out the facts of a news story. We base our opinions on the most attention-generating headlines, and deeply held convictions are shaped by only a few highly publicized stories. Recently, I was at a major New England university discussing the state of the world when we touched on nutrition. I made the point that the Green Revolution from the 1970s was a technological solution which has reaped huge benefits for both mankind and the environment.
First a bit of history: Spearheaded by Norman Borlaug, the Green Revolution found ways to make the yield of staple crops much higher, so we could grow much more food on the same agricultural land. The Green Revolution made food cheaper, and allowed countries like India to shift from imminent starvation to surplus food production. Higher yields also reaped environmental benefits, as there was less need to cut down forests and intrude on nature. For his work, Borlaug earned the nickname “The Man Who Saved a Billion Lives” and was awarded with the Nobel Peace Prize.
And yet, at this discussion, a college professor remarked that is was debatable whether the Green Revolution had been an overall good for India, since “there are so many suicides.”
The Indian farmer suicides the professor alluded to tie into the controversy around genetically modified (GM) crops. While not part of the original Green Revolution, the advent of GM crops became possible because of the legacy of agricultural technological innovation. In recent years these stories have generated numerous headlines and follow a now-familiar pattern.
Opponents claim that the proliferation of GM crops like Bt cotton has placed enormous financial strain on India’s smallholder farmers, driving them to suicide. A popular proponent of this narrative is Vandana Shiva, a prominent Indian environmentalist. Shiva and others argue that “corporate seeds” were foisted upon Indian farmers during India’s liberalization in the 1990s. Whereas farmers had once saved seeds from season to season, the need to buy new seeds every year, plus the additional costs of fertilizers and pesticides, drove impoverished Indian farmers into a spiral of debt. This eventually has led to an epidemic in which a quarter million of them have taken their own lives since the mid-1990s.
No one wants to trivialize the tragedy of families who have lost loved ones, but this narrative doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Several academics have undertaken studies to get to the heart of the suicide “epidemic,” and their findings paint a far different picture.
It’s best two dissect two separate strains of the argument: first, that there is a wave of farmer suicides and second that GM cotton has been a failure for India.
Perhaps the most comprehensive study on Indian suicides was published by the medical journal The Lancet. It found that although most suicide deaths do occur in rural areas, the prevalence of suicide is not any higher among agricultural workers than any other sector of Indian society. And in fact, the researchers found that more suicide deaths occurred in richer areas and among more highly educated individuals than among those with only a basic education.

These needlessly provocative stories make us lose sight of the fact that better crops both give more food and higher incomes while using less land
Meanwhile political economist Anoop Sadanadan shows that new banking practices implemented in the same period of reforms, rather than a GMO crop failure, was a far greater contributor to suicides. And indeed, The New York Times cites part of the problem as greater reliance on village money lenders, who can charge upwards of 24% interest on their loans. The Lancet piece supports this notion, citing a combination of social factors including family problems and financial difficulties as the most common triggers of suicide in India.
As for Bt cotton, detailed studies on the ground indicate that, far from failure, it has been a boon for Indian farmers, raising yields per acre by nearly one-quarter and raising smallholder profits by one-half, and lowering health-care costs by helping avoid millions of cases of pesticide poisoning.
And other GM crops like golden rice, also opposed by Shiva, have potential to help millions more in India, giving poor citizens better nutrition and staving off the effects of hunger and vitamin A deficiencies. Two recent studies show that just 50g (2oz) golden rice can provide 60% of daily vitamin A. Golden rice would cost just $100 for every life saved from vitamin A deficiency compared to over $4,000 for supplementation programs.

‘Bt’ cotton has raised yields by nearly one-quarter and small farm profits by one-half. Millions of cases of pesticide poisoning have been prevented

Although it’s brought sustainable social and economic benefits to India, Bt cotton, or any other GM crop, is not a panacea. None of this should detract from the very real problems facing India’s smallholder farmers, nor does it suggest that green technologies can’t lead to their own set of problems. But we need to look at the hard evidence and decouple the stories of farmer suicides and GM crops. These needlessly provocative stories make us lose sight of the fact that better crops both give more food and higher incomes while using less land.
Before the Green Revolution, India faced the very real prospect of mass famine. Today, millions have been pulled back from the brink of starvation and generational cycles of poverty through the advent and spread of green technologies. Let’s not let sensational headlines cloud this reality.
National Post

Bjørn Lomborg is director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School.

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Thinking Outside The GMO Box

Genetically Modified Organisms.  Some argue they are the way to “feed the world” and that an exploding population will require them.  Others see GMO technology as part of a corporate plot to take over fields and drive farmers into debt, while everything from pesticide use to allergies are on the rise because of them.

And while that discussion is one we must have, the GMO debate is also distracting us from less sexy interventions which have worked to dramatically reduce hunger and malnutrition over the last fifty years, and are today in desperate need of our continued support.

These successful programs had a remarkable impact on the number in need today because they made small scale farmers more profitable and families more self reliant, diets more diverse and children and adults better educated.

“Success [is] not simply about increasing the physical supply of food,” states “Millions Fed,” a report by the International Food Policy Research Institute. “Rather, [successes] are about reductions in hunger that result…from a change in an individual’s ability to secure quality food.”

“Nutrition is multifaceted – it involves access to food, water and sanitation, hygiene, disease and infection, poverty,” says Nancy Haselow, Vice President of the Helen Keller International (HKI), and Regional Director for Asia Pacific. “There is no single solution to solve malnutrition, so we need to provide multiple and synergistic interventions, a combination of approaches is best.  Sustainable solutions that can be left in the community, are owned by the community, and put tools and knowledge and skills in the hands of mothers and fathers are important to addressing the problem.”

A myriad of initiatives, non-reliant on GMO technology, have already proven successful in reducing hunger.  For example, Helen Keller International has successfully impacted more than five million people with long lasting nutritional, economic and educational changes through their Homestead Food Program.  Another example is BRAC (formerly the Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee) which now has 97,000 women “shasthya shebika” (health workers) in Bangladesh alone, working to bring micronutrient powders and basic health care services (including education on critical topics like breastfeeding) to extremely rural communities.

And by using already-available, proven, and cost effective storage methods, African small-scale farmers are able to safely store food, like cowpeas – a staple food high in iron and protein – and to therefore benefit from their consumption and sale.  Likewise in India and Tanzania, farmers are now using Zero Energy Cool Chamber technology to ensure valuable food is not wasted.

Perhaps most importantly, holistic, community based solutions like home gardens, diet diversification and better food storage (which means less waste of precious resources) are critical elements in creating a better future in a climate-changing world.

A new report released by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) found that “international policy discussions remain heavily focused on increasing industrial agricultural production, mostly under the slogan “growing more food at less cost to the environment.”  But, the study found, hunger is not caused by a lack of food but by “a lack of purchasing power and/or the inability of the rural poor to be self-sufficient.”

“The world needs a paradigm shift in agricultural development from a “green revolution” to an “ecological intensification” approach.  This implies a rapid and significant shift from conventional, monoculture-based and input-dependent industrial production towards…sustainable, regenerative production systems.”

Yet unlike “GMOs” – which do continue to promote conventional, monoculture-based, input dependent agriculture – most of us have never heard of “dietary diversification” projects.  We know nothing of the shasthya shebika health workers or of a system of crop intensification that increases rice, wheat and other crop yields while using less water and seed.  And that lack of discussion and knowledge is exemplified in a lack of support for these critical programs.

“It has been excruciatingly difficult to get funding for the Homestead Food Program.” says Nancy Haselow of HKI.  “For me, it’s a no brainer – you see a family growing vegetables, their kids looking chubby and healthy, and they have a sense of doing it themselves.  But over the past 10-15 years, we have raised only about $25-28 million for all our Homestead Food Production Programs in Asia Pacific.”

Instead, donors have been seduced by talk of “easy,” high tech solutions and despite the proven successes of these alternative programs, the drive to increase production via improved seeds and fertilizer, charges on.

SOURCE:  Forbes

Golden Rice: Lifesaver?

By AMY HARMON

Published: August 24, 2013

ONE bright morning this month, 400 protesters smashed down the high fences surrounding a field in the Bicol region of the Philippines and uprooted the genetically modified rice plants growing inside.

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Jes Aznar for The New York Times

Genetically engineered Golden Rice grown in a facility in Los Baños, Laguna Province, in the Philippines.

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Erik De Castro/Reuters

Mothers with masks made from baby bathtubs protested Golden Rice in Quezon City, the Philippines, in June.

Had the plants survived long enough to flower, they would have betrayed a distinctly yellow tint in the otherwise white part of the grain. That is because the rice is endowed with a gene from corn and another from a bacterium, making it the only variety in existence to produce beta carotene, the source of vitamin A. Its developers call it “Golden Rice.”

The concerns voiced by the participants in the Aug. 8 act of vandalism — that Golden Rice could pose unforeseen risks to human health and the environment, that it would ultimately profit big agrochemical companies — are a familiar refrain in the long-running controversy over the merits of genetically engineered crops. They are driving the desire among some Americans for mandatory “G.M.O.” labels on food with ingredients made from crops whose DNA has been altered in a laboratory. And they have motivated similar attacks on trials of other genetically modified crops in recent years: grapes designed to fight off a deadly virus in France, wheat designed to have a lower glycemic index in Australia,sugar beets in Oregon designed to tolerate a herbicide, to name a few.

“We do not want our people, especially our children, to be used in these experiments,” a farmer who was a leader of the protest told the Philippine newspaper Remate.

But Golden Rice, which appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in 2000 before it was quite ready for prime time, is unlike any of the genetically engineered crops in wide use today, designed to either withstand herbicides sold by Monsanto and other chemical companies or resist insect attacks, with benefits for farmers but not directly for consumers.

And a looming decision by the Philippine government about whether to allow Golden Rice to be grown beyond its four remaining field trials has added a new dimension to the debate over the technology’s merits.

Not owned by any company, Golden Rice is being developed by a nonprofit group called the International Rice Research Institute with the aim of providing a new source of vitamin A to people both in the Philippines, where most households get most of their calories from rice, and eventually in many other places in a world where rice is eaten every day by half the population. Lack of the vital nutrient causes blindness in a quarter-million to a half-million children each year. It affects millions of people in Asia and Africa and so weakens the immune system that some two million die each year of diseases they would otherwise survive.

The destruction of the field trial, and the reasons given for it, touched a nerve among scientists around the world, spurring them to counter assertions of the technology’s health and environmental risks. On a petition supporting Golden Rice circulated among scientists and signed by several thousand, many vented a simmering frustration with activist organizations like Greenpeace, which they see as playing on misplaced fears of genetic engineering in both the developing and the developed worlds. Some took to other channels to convey to American foodies and Filipino farmers alike the broadscientific consensus that G.M.O.’s are not intrinsically more risky than other crops and can be reliably tested. 

At stake, they say, is not just the future of biofortified rice but also a rational means to evaluate a technology whose potential to improve nutrition in developing countries, and developed ones, may otherwise go unrealized.

“There’s so much misinformation floating around about G.M.O.’s that is taken as fact by people,” said Michael D. Purugganan, a professor of genomics and biology and the dean for science at New York University, who sought to calm health-risk concerns in a primeron GMA News Online, a media outlet in the Philippines: “The genes they inserted to make the vitamin are not some weird manufactured material,” he wrote, “but are also found in squash, carrots and melons.” 

Mr. Purugganan, who studies plant evolution, does not work on genetically engineered crops, and until recently had not participated in the public debates over the risks and benefits of G.M.O.’s. But having been raised in a middle-class family in Manila, he felt compelled to weigh in on Golden Rice. “A lot of the criticism of G.M.O.’s in the Western world suffers from a lack of understanding of how really dire the situation is in developing countries,” he said.

Some proponents of G.M.O.’s say that more critical questions, like where biotechnology should fall as a priority in the efforts to address the root causes of hunger and malnutrition and how to prevent a few companies from controlling it, would be easier to address were they not lumped together with unfounded fears by those who oppose G.M.O.’s.

“It is long past time for scientists to stand up and shout, ‘No more lies — no more fear-mongering,’ ” said Nina V. Fedoroff, a professor at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia and a former science adviser to the American secretary of state, who helped spearhead the petition. “We’re talking about saving millions of lives here.”

Precisely because of its seemingly high-minded purpose, Golden Rice has drawn suspicion from biotechnology skeptics beyond the demonstrators who forced their way into the field trial. Many countries ban the cultivation of all genetically modified crops, and after the rice’s media debut early in the last decade, Vandana Shiva, an Indian environmentalist, called it a “Trojan horse” whose purpose was to gain public support for all manner of genetically modified crops that would benefit multinational corporations at the expense of poor farmers and consumers.

In a 2001 article, “The Great Yellow Hype,” the author Michael Pollan, a critic of industrial agriculture, suggested that it might have been developed to “win an argument rather than solve a public-health problem.” He cited biotechnology industry advertisements that featured the virtues of the rice, which at the time had to be ingested in large quantities to deliver a meaningful dose of vitamin A.

But the rice has since been retooled: a bowl now provides 60 percent of the daily requirement of vitamin A for healthy children. And Gerard Barry, the Golden Rice project leader at the International Rice Research Institute — and, it must be said, a former senior scientist and executive at Monsanto — suggests that attempts to discredit Golden Rice discount the suffering it could alleviate if successful. He said, too, that critics who suggest encouraging poor families to simply eat fruits and vegetables that contain beta carotene disregard the expense and logistical difficulties that would thwart such efforts.

Identified in the infancy of genetic engineering as having the potential for the biggest impact for the world’s poor, beta-carotene-producing rice was initially funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the European Union. In a decade of work culminating in 1999, two academic scientists, Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer, finally switched on the production of beta carotene by adding daffodil and bacteria DNA to the rice’s genome. They licensed their patent rights to the agribusiness company that later became Syngenta, on the condition that the technology and any improvements to it would be made freely available to poor farmers in the developing world. With the company retaining the right to use it in developed countries, potentially as an alternative to vitamin supplements, Syngenta scientists later improved the amount of beta carotene produced by substituting a gene from corn for the one from daffodil.

If the rice gains the Philippine government’s approval, it will cost no more than other rice for poor farmers, who will be free to save seeds and replant them, Dr. Barry said. It has no known allergens or toxins, and the new proteins produced by the rice have been shown to break down quickly in simulated gastric fluid, as required by World Health Organization guidelines. A mouse feeding study is under way in a laboratory in the United States. The potential that the Golden Rice would cross-pollinate with other varieties, sometimes called “genetic contamination,” has been studied and found to be limited, because rice is typically self-pollinated. And its production of beta carotene does not appear to provide a competitive advantage — or disadvantage — that could affect the survival of wild varieties with which it might mix.

If Golden Rice is a Trojan horse, it now has some company. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is supporting the final testing of Golden Rice, is also underwriting the development of crops tailored for sub-Saharan Africa, like cassava that can resist the viruses that routinely wipe out a third of the harvest, bananas that contain higher levels of iron and corn that uses nitrogen more efficiently. Other groups are developing a pest-resistant black-eyed pea and a “Golden Banana” that would also deliver vitamin A.

Beyond the fear of corporate control of agriculture, perhaps the most cited objection to G.M.O.’s is that they may hold risks that may not be understood. The decision to grow or eat them relies, like many other decisions, on a cost-benefit analysis.

How food consumers around the world weigh that calculation will probably have far-reaching consequences. Such crops, Scientific American declared in an editorial last week, will make it to people’s plates “only with public support.”

Greenpeace, for one, dismisses the benefits of vitamin supplementation through G.M.O.’s and has said it will continue to oppose all uses of biotechnology in agriculture. As Daniel Ocampo, a campaigner for the organization in the Philippines, put it, “We would rather err on the side of caution.”

For others, the potential of crops like Golden Rice to alleviate suffering is all that matters. “This technology can save lives,” one of the petition’s signers, Javier Delgado of Mexico, wrote. “But false fears can destroy it.”

Amy Harmon is a national correspondent for The New York Times.