The story of genetically modified "golden rice" is indeed shocking, as Dick Taverne says, but not, as he argues, because public reluctance to eat GM crops in Europe has somehow denied a life-saving technology to people in developing countries.
Golden rice was launched on the world with much fanfare in 1999, with claims that it could cure blindness in millions of children brought on by vitamin A deficiency. But the levels of beta-carotene in golden rice were far too low to make an impact on this deficiency. Although scientists have recently succeeded in increasing the levels of beta-carotene, there is still no scientific study that demonstrates that this technology can overcome vitamin A deficiency in humans. In contrast, other proven strategies exist, including supplementation, food fortification and increasing dietary diversity (ensuring that poor children have vegetables to eat as well as rice).
More broadly, the act of engineering enhanced levels of vitamins and nutrients into the food chain is deeply questionable because it does not target nutrients at the people most in need, and may cause harm to others in the population. Food fortification requires paying careful attention to the "non-target" population—people who are not suffering from the deficiency the fortification aims to address, and who may be harmed by unintended effects. GM crops introduce new dangers because the nutrients are engineered into the plant, rather then being added during processing. This makes it doubly difficult to track where the product will end up, to monitor adverse effects in the food chain or environment, and to withdraw the product should harmful effects be identified.
The value of GM crops in sustainable agriculture in both the developed and developing worlds will continue to be contested. However, there is no doubt that the interests of commodity crop farmers have been prioritised over those of poor, "low-input" farmers in decisions about crop development. Genetic modification has come to be the focus of crop and food research largely because knowledge about gene sequencing and its use in making GM crops has been patentable. This has driven agricultural research into the private domain, changing research priorities from public good to market potential.
Crop GM techniques arose at a time of changing political views on the purpose of science in British society. We have seen an increasing demand for basic science to meet the needs of business, and for greater links between public researchers and industry. Historically, plant breeding was conducted largely in the public sector, with several research institutes gaining revenue from plant variety sales. But over the past 20 years, plant breeding and associated research has gone private.
It is significant that only two GM traits (herbicide tolerance and Bt insect resistance) have lead to such large sales of seeds globally. Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, by 2002, the "big six" companies—Monsanto, Dow, Dupont, BASF, Bayer and Syngenta—owned 40 per cent of US agricultural biotechology patents on both key genes and transformation techniques. Through these they can limit the ability of other firms to enter the market. Therefore the economic benefits of biotech seed sales fall almost exclusively within the large corporate seed sector. This is being achieved not by revolutionary innovation and the marketing of new GM crops that meet farmer or consumer needs, but by establishing market control through patents and economic measures.
Public concerns about corporate control of agriculture and the food chain, and about the impacts of GM crops on health and the environment, should not be dismissed. In Britain, the farm-scale evaluations of GM crops a few years ago showed that the changed pattern of herbicide use associated with planting herbicide-tolerant GM crops had adverse effects on farmland wildlife. The health and environmental impacts of engineering pesticides into crops have never been properly evaluated.
In terms of new products, technical difficulties in plant GM place a limit what can be achieved because of the complexity of biological systems. This has proved a particular problem for the development of new traits such as disease resistance and drought tolerance.
There is no evidence that a "revolution" is just around the corner. The unfulfilled promises around genetic modification remain identical to those made when the first GM crop was produced 21 years ago.
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