Allow Golden Rice Now!

Allow Golden Rice Now!

Media Release -  October 1, 2013

Former Greenpeace leader Patrick Moore to lead demonstration against Greenpeace's crime against humanity, their anti-Golden Rice campaign that perpetuates blindness and death among millions of children.
www.allowgoldenricenow.org

At 10 AM on October 2 the global campaign Allow Golden Rice Now! will be launched in front of the Greenpeace office at 33 Cecil Street. Dr. Patrick Moore will lead the demonstration with a banner that reads:
'Greenpeace's Crime Against Humanity' ' Eight Million Children Dead' 'AllowGoldenRiceNow.org'

Details of the campaign and the demonstration will be released at an information session to be held tonight, October 1, at 7 PM at the Pauper's Pub at 539 Bloor Street West.

The aim of the campaign is to convince Greenpeace that they should make an exception to their zero-tolerance position on genetic modification in the case of Golden Rice, on humanitarian grounds. The World Health Organization estimates that up to 500,000 children become blind each year due to vitamin A deficiency, half of whom die within a year of becoming blind. About 250 million preschool children suffer from vitamin A deficiency among the nearly 3 billion people who depend on rice as their staple food.

Conventional rice has no beta-carotene, the nutrient that humans need to produce vitamin A. In 1999 Dr. Ingo Potrykus and Dr. Peter Beyer, both science professors who were aware of this humanitarian crisis, invented Golden Rice after a nine-year effort. By inserting genes from corn they were able to cause rice plants to produce beta-carotene in the rice kernel. It is beta-carotene that makes corn golden and carrots orange. Golden Rice can end the blindness, suffering and death caused by vitamin A deficiency.

Field trials in Louisiana, the Philippines, and Bangladesh have proven that Golden Rice can be grown successfully. Clinical nutritional trials with animals, adult humans, and vitamin A deficient children have proven that Golden Rice will deliver sufficient vitamin A to cure this affliction. Yet Greenpeace continues to support the violent destruction of the field trials and trashes the peer-reviewed science that proves Golden Rice is effective and safe. We demand that they end these activities, stop fundraising on this issue, and declare that they are not opposed to Golden Rice. We believe that their continued actions to block Golden Rice constitute a crime against humanity as defined by the United Nations.

The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines is coordinating the research and development of Golden Rice. The IRRI is supported by The Rockefeller Foundation, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Helen Keller International, USAID, and many agricultural research organizations. Golden Rice is controlled by non-profit organizations, and it produces viable Golden Rice seeds, so farmers are not dependent on any particular supplier.

"The Allow Golden Rice Now! campaign will carry this protest to Greenpeace offices around the world," stated Dr. Moore. "Eight million children have died unnecessarily since Golden Rice was invented. How many more million can Greenpeace carry on its conscience?"

Allow Golden Rice Now!
www.allowgoldenricenow.org

Contact:
Patrick Moore    778-995-4122               
Michael Moore   250-888-7762
info@allowgoldenricenow.org

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.

Debunking Golden Rice myths: A geneticist's perspective

By DR. MICHAEL PURUGGANAN, New York UniversityAugust 12, 2013 9:34pm

It all started in 1984 in Los Baños, Laguna. Scientists had begun to develop an exciting new approach to breeding crops—genetic engineering—and everyone wondered how it could be used to help the world.  

 

In the sala of a house in this college town in Laguna sat several breeders who were dreaming of what they could do with this exciting new technology.  Increase yields?  Develop crops to survive droughts?  Protect rice against pests?

 

Finding answers to global malnutrition

 

One breeder, who developed many of the Green Revolution crops that had saved hundreds of millions from famine, gave a startling answer: yellow rice.  Why?  Because, he said, vitamin A deficiency afflicts millions of people around the world. 

 

How bad is vitamin A deficiency?  In 2005, for example, the devastating effects of lacking this one vitamin affected 190 million children and 19 million pregnant women in 122 countries. Each year, it is responsible for up to 2 million deaths and 500,000 cases of irreversible blindness. 

 

Rice could substantially reduce the devastating impact of vitamin A deficiency because in many developing countries—the Philippines among them—the poorest families lack the means to eat the vegetables and fruits that contain this crucial nutrient.  They can afford nothing more than plain white rice. 

 

There is only one problem.  Rice cannot make vitamin A.  While many fruits and vegetables have genes to make this vitamin, neither rice nor any of its close wild relatives had these genes.  Traditional breeding in rice is useless in the fight against this deadly vitamin deficiency.  It would take genetic engineering to help solve the problem of making rice produce vitamin A. 

 

Golden Rice, from dream to reality

 

Today, we are there.  The dream of yellow rice—now dubbed Golden Rice—has gone from a rice breeder's dream to an actual variety that can be planted in rice fields.

 

It promises to help poor communities around the world reduce the deaths and blindness that comes with not getting enough vitamin A.  As we try to increase the nutrition of poor families across the country, Golden Rice can help alleviate the health scourge of vitamin A deficiency.  Studies have shown that one cup of Golden Rice gives someone 60% of the recommended vitamin A they need for the day.

 

We are there—that is, if we are not misguided enough to turn our backs on this important technology.

 

Last week, activists stormed a research field in Bicol and destroyed one of several trials of Golden Rice, potentially setting back the delivery of this humanitarian crop.  It was a criminal act against a project whose only goal is to help elevate the health of the world's poorest people.

 

There are many misconceptions about Golden Rice—too many, really, to list them all here.  But as a plant scientist who works on rice, although not GMO rice, let me talk about three of them:

 

Myth 1: Golden Rice is 'unnatural'

 

First is the notion that Golden Rice is some sort of unnatural, monster rice. The truth is, in developing Golden Rice, geneticists have inserted only three genes into rice DNA to allow it to make vitamin A. Three genes out of the more than 30,000 genes present in a rice plant.  And the genes they inserted to make the vitamin are not some weird manufactured material, but are also found in squash, carrots and melons. 

 

So there is nothing unnatural about the process—scientists just figured out how to take a gene from one species and add it to another's DNA.  Plants do this in the wild all the time.  It is called horizontal gene transfer, and plants, animals and bacteria have been shown to get many genes from each other as they evolve.  

 

Breeders actually do much more radical things to the rice genome and the rice plant by traditional breeding methods, and with much less information about what exactly they are doing to the rice plant's genes.  We know a great deal more about the genes that were inserted by the Golden Rice geneticists - what they do, how they act - than we know about thousands of genes and millions of mutations that rice contains. 

 

Myth 2: GMOs are unsafe and risky

 

Second is the idea that GMOs are unsafe, causes cancer or other major health risks, or poses serious environmental problems.  Let me be clear here - the safety issue has been studied and discussed by scientists around the world, and the conclusion is that there is no evidence that GMOs are inherently unsafe.  Let me repeat again. The most prominent scientific bodies in the world - among them, the US National Academy of Science, the American Medical Association, the World Health Organization, and the Philippine National Academy of Science and Technology - have publicly concluded that GMOs are safe.  

 

Now, it is true that we still have to test the safety of every new GMO plant variety that is developed—that is just common sense.  In fact, GMOs are probably the most intensely tested and studied crop varieties in the world.   Much more so than the seed you buy from your local garden or farm store, which are released with no health or safety analysis.  

 

But, you ask, haven’t I read stories about scientists that have supposedly linked health problems—even cancer—to eating GMO foods?  Well, the overwhelming majority of reputable scientists who have examined these claims have shown that the conclusions they draw are simply wrong. These stories are based on research that was poorly designed and analyzed, and other scientists have strongly criticized these studies. 

 

Myth 3: Golden Rice is Big Business

 

Finally, there is the idea that Golden Rice is being developed to be sold by big biotechnology companies to profit from poor Filipino famers.  Again, let us be clear here:Golden Rice is a public project.  While the company Syngenta produced the original Golden Rice, they have given it to the International Rice Research Institute for free - no costs, no fees, no royalties. 

 

The breeding of Golden Rice in now being done by the very public IRRI, in cooperation with the government research institute PhilRice, and other public breeders around the world.  The varieties that are developed will be turned over to government agricultural agencies in developing countries, who will then determine how to distribute it to farmers in their countries. IRRI is not selling Golden Rice, and no big biotech company will make money from it.

 

Critical juncture for the Philippines

 

Our country, and the world, is now at a critical point.  The population of the planet will hit 9 billion people by 2050.  The Philippines already has more than 100 million people. In the face of reduced land for farming, a growing population and increasingly erratic climates, we in the Philippines need to use every tool we have, including agricultural biotechnology, to help our farmers and our people to survive and thrive   Our scientists have helped develop Golden Rice varieties, as well as other genetically engineered crops, to increase our food security.  Let us not turn our backs on this technology for the 21st century, and find ourselves once again at a technological and economic disadvantage from the rest of the world. 

 

Nearly 30 years ago, some of the best rice breeders in the world gathered at Los Baños and discussed harnessing biotechnology to help feed the world. What they dreamed up is now poised to become a reality that will help farmers produce a more nutritious rice that can save lives. 

 

Let us make sure that those who need it most can, for once, put gold on their plates. — TJD, GMA News

---

Dr. Michael Purugganan is a Filipino plant geneticist and the Dean of Science at New York University. 

SOURCE

Unaware of the gold in the golden rice.

GM food off the menu in Parliament's restaurants despite ministers telling the public to drop their opposition

• Genetically modified food banned from Houses of Parliament
• Environment Secretary Owen Paterson launched pro-GM campaign

By SEAN POULTER

GM foods are banned from restaurants in the Houses of Parliament despite government claims it is ‘probably safer’ than other meals.

Government ministers are demanding that ordinary families should abandon their reluctance to eat genetically modified food, however they are banned from MPs’ plates.

This week the food and farming secretary, Owen Paterson, launched an extraordinary propaganda campaign to encourage the nation to accept GM crops and farming.

Menu: Genetically modified food is banned in the Houses of Parliament, despite ministers insisting it is safe

He bolstered his campaign with claims that some seven million children in the Far East could have been saved from blindness or  death in the last 15 years if only people had opened the door to a new form of GM ‘Golden Rice’.

However, his efforts were unravelling today amid evidence that GM food is banned from the dinner tables of MPs, while his claims for the GM rice proved to be bogus.

The House of Commons Catering service today confirmed that the ban on GM ingredients which dates back to 1998 remains in place as a matter of ‘customer choice’.

It said: ‘In line with its procurement policy, the House of Commons Catering Service avoids, wherever identifiable, the procurement of foods that contain genetically modified organisms. 

Speech: Environment Secretary Owen Paterson this week urged Brits to eat GM

‘To this end, as part of the tendering process, food suppliers are required to work to a strict GM organisms policy and give assurances that goods supplied be free from genetically modified materials.’

It added: ‘The decision to avoid GMs is seen as largely a matter of customer choice.’

Mr Paterson has set himself up as the chief cheerleader for so-called Frankenstein Foods, however it appears that he has been unable to convince fellow MPs to accept them in their restaurants.

As a result, the minister and fellow MPs leave themselves open to accusations of hypocrisy and complaints that they are telling people to ‘do as I say, not as I do’.

Speaking earlier this week, Mr Paterson said: ‘The use of more precise technology and greater regulatory scrutiny probably makes GM organisms even safer than conventional plants and food.

‘There is no substantiated case of any adverse impact on human health…An enormous amount of material has been eaten, not a single case has been brought to my attention.’

Mr Paterson’s most powerful argument for accepting GM was the development of Golden Rice, which has been genetically modified to boost levels of beta carotene and Vitamin A, which can protect eyesight.

In an extraordinary statement, he said: ‘Over the last 15 years, despite offering the seeds for free to those who would need them, every attempt to deploy this golden rice has been thwarted.

‘In that time seven million children have gone blind or died.’

Restaurant: MPs, staff, officials and journalists can dine in several restaurants including in Portcullis House, across the road from the main Parliament building

It emerged today that these seeds have not been offered free to communities in the Far East who might need them because they have not yet been through a safety checking and approval system.

Neither have any tests been carried out to establish whether they contain sufficient nutrients to make any difference to the eyesight of children, let alone save millions of lives.

Golden Rice has not been available to farmers and consumers for the past 15 years and is only now going through crop growing trials in the Philippines.

If these prove successful, the rice will be sold for profit just like any other agricultural commodity and will not be given away free.

The International Rice Research Institute has issued a statement which makes clear that Mr Paterson’s claims that Golden Rice could have prevented millions of youngsters from going blind or dying over the past 15 years are also bogus.

This states that: ‘It has not yet been determined whether daily consumption of Golden Rice does improve the vitamin A status of people who are vitamin A deficient and could therefore reduce related conditions such as night blindness.’

Al fresco: Food is also served in the pavilion buffet, a tented restaurant for MPs on the terrace at the House of Commons

It said tests will be needed to establish whether the rice would be useful, but this process could take another two years.

The Channel 4 News FactCheck blog concluded: ‘Mr Paterson has been misleading on a number of counts.

‘There haven’t been attempts to give golden rice out for free. The leading exponent of it says it will cost ‘about the same’ as ordinary rice.

‘To then claim that seven million children have gone blind or died as a result of such attempts being thwarted doesn’t follow either. The numbers are a large and inaccurate extrapolation.’

A spokesman for Mr Paterson’s department, DEFRA, said: ‘We have only just started the discussion on the potential benefits of using GM products here in the UK. 

'Other governments wouldn’t licence these technologies if they didn’t recognise the economic, environmental and public benefits.’

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2345937/GM-food-menu-Parliaments-restaurant-despite-ministers-telling-public-drop-opposition.html#ixzz2Wv3vu0xi
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