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Transgenic Golden Rice, once hailed as a dietary breakthrough
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dudeinjapan 2y ago[flagged]
- xvilka 2y agoThey are. Also responsible for anti-nuclear stance of clueless public. They do more harm overall than help.
- _yb2s 2y agoThey are such a disgrace… spreading fear and misinformation that does nothing to help the environment, and causing serious environmentalists that know what they are doing to have a difficult job, because they will also be branded as idiots.
- dudeinjapan 2y agoHuman prosperity--including, you know, properly nourishing infants--is the single best way to protect the environment. Poor societies exploit and devastate the environment for subsistence. When societies become rich, they begin to view the environment as a luxury good worthy of preserving, and largely forestall short term exploitation. Case-in-point, most of the developed world has experienced net reforestation in recent decades.
- eropple 2y ago> Case-in-point, most of the developed world has experienced net reforestation in recent decades. Kind of, and only if you care about quantity as a leading metric. As a woodworker and someone interested in silviculture, I do not; the tree balance has often shifted radically and for example much of the United States's reforestation is fast-growing but fairly homogeneous conifers. American hardwoods are ever more limited. At the same time, the demand for exotics largely by rich markets (think non-plantation teak, mahogany and substitutes, etc.) has caused CITES warnings and bans to circle the world, pointing to poorer countries in various stages of exploitation. Rich societies also get to outsource their nature damage, and are not expected to account for those externalities.
- dudeinjapan 2y agoQuantity should be positive first. When we get even richer, we can improve the quality.
- 7734128 2y agoWeird to have a professional article start five sentences with "But..." in such a short article. I do sometimes too, but it's a bit grating when done so many times.
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- dudeinjapan 2y ago[flagged]
- mikhailfranco 2y agoThe Economist loves to do this. And at the start of paragraphs too.
- Beijinger 2y ago"Greenpeace Southeast Asia campaigner Wilhelmina Pelegrina said in a statement. Greenpeace joined MASIPAG, a farmers’ association, and other organizations and individuals in challenging the planting permit. “GM crops have never been proven safe,” Pelegrina asserted." Well, you can't prove a negative. I actually wonder how high the acceptance rate for this rice in Asia is. White rice is one of the foundations of their culture. And this rice is not white!
- ndsipa_pomu 2y agoI'd usually be in favour of the various antics of Greenpeace, but this ruling strikes me as odd. There's very little safety testing of traditionally produced crops and there's typically no problem with producing new varieties of existing produce. I could understand it more if it was a push-back against varieties that are engineered to not produce seed so that farmers are continually having to purchase from the company.
- frostburg 2y agoThat's also (mostly) propaganda. Farmers are very busy without having to deal with the side business of inefficiently growing their seeds and would buy anyway.
- ndsipa_pomu 2y agoIf farmers would buy seed anyway, then why are companies putting effort into forcing them to do so?
- kwere 2y ago[flagged]
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- mikhailfranco 2y agoPhilippine (sic) ... if you must use the country name as an adjective, but usually it is better to choose one of the following: Filipino for male person, the language (if you do not know it is called Tagalog ), and as a default adjective for most other nouns. Filipina for female person.
- hhshhhhjjjd 2y agoBut what if it is a court, not a male or female person? Still maybe better to say "Court in Philippines..."
- xk3 2y agoEven better use the actual court name: "Philippine Court of Appeals revokes sale permit of GM crop Golden Rice"
- mikhailfranco 2y agoThe correct spelling is in the linked article: What a Philippine court ruling means for transgenic Golden Rice, once hailed as a dietary breakthrough My comment was an appeal to just copy the actual link title. Perhaps people who did not click through and see the actual title are downvoting for some strange reason. The quoted title should be as close to the original as possible, within the HN title size limit, and should certainly copy correctly spelled words.
- pvg 2y agoIt's probably because it's a pedantipoint, more than anything else. The more important thing is the title is rewritten badly not just in spelling and grammar (a court can ban the cultivation or growing of something, not its 'growth') but in meaning (court revoked a previously granted license). But either way, if you think the title needs fixing, just email hn@ycombinator.com and the mods will likely sort it out.
- Symmetry 2y agoThat's Spanish, but wouldn't it be better to use the more common lanugage, Tagalog, to render it "hukuman ng Pilipinas"? If one were to insist in talking about foreign courts in foreign languages, rather than the language of the readers.
- littlestymaar 2y agoAFAIK vitamin A deficiency is a recent issue, due to the increased consumption of white rice at the expense of brown rice, which was the traditional way of eating rice for centuries (except among the elite, which had other sources of vitamin A thanks to a more diversified food supply than subsistence farmers). Golden rice is yet another technological “solution” to a social problem, and unsurprisingly it's also failing for other social issues (fear of GMOs)…
- connorgutman 2y agoYou’re not wrong but this is akin to saying that we shouldn’t treat gunshot wounds because we need better gun control. We can do both.
- littlestymaar 2y agoIt's not a treatment here (vitamin A supplementation for people with deficiency is, and nobody argues against that), it's more like bulletproof vest in your example. Sure we could generalize bulletproof vest at the same time we're pushing for gun control, but it's not necessarily a desirable thing to do.
- icambron 2y agoAllowing people access to bullet proof vests sure seems desirable to me! But also I think the "treating the gunshot wound" analogy is a better fit. A crop that produces vitamin A is a treatment for population suffering from vitamin A deficiency. And "let people grow this crop" is a much smaller social problem than "dramatically reduce poverty".
- littlestymaar 2y ago> Allowing people access to bullet proof vests sure seems desirable to me! Maybe, but I'm not sure law enforcement would agree with you, for their own very good reasons. > But also I think the "treating the gunshot wound" analogy is a better fit. A crop that produces vitamin A is a treatment for population suffering from vitamin A deficiency. No, it's not a treatment, it's a prevention measure, and its effect is very slow (the population must accept the reinforced food, and incorporate it in sufficient fashion in their diet, and it can take decades before the entire population is positively affected). “letting people grow this crop” is only the very beginning of a very complex social process that you are oversimplifying. I don't have a particular opinion on the use of Golden Rice nor on GMOs in general, but believing that it will instantly solve the social problem at stake is delusional, and such delusion is exactly part of the lobbying campaign from GMOs industrial, which, unlike GMOs themselves, is a problem. The only way for such a technological solution to be as effective as advertised, is with strong political support and regulation allowing its very quick generalization (that's what we did with iodized salt) but one must be careful with such an approach, because its effectiveness itself is a danger if things have hidden side effect (see the adverse effects of added fluorine in tap water to prevent dental cavities).
- adrian_b 2y agoThe solution for any nutritional deficiencies is not the "fortification" of the staple foods. I believe that the future of food sources is in genetically-engineered organisms, but I am dismayed by the fact that all the current attempts of genetic modifications have stupid goals. The "fortification" of staple foods is extremely stupid, because the amount of staple food that is consumed varies widely with sex, size, age and physical activity and it is not proportional to the daily requirements for various vitamins or minerals. The amount of vitamins ingested from "fortified" food is always either insufficient or wasted as excessive. The staple foods are required to provide only proteins and/or fats and/or carbohydrates. For everything else there are specific sources that are needed only in small quantities, so they usually do not add up to a major part of the cost of the food. The daily intake of vitamin A can be obtained for instance from 100 grams of carrots, which in Europe, where I live, cost much less than 10 cents, so they can be afforded by anyone. In other parts of the world, where carrots are less common, there are various vegetables with similar properties, e.g. sweet potatoes and many others. If they have vitamin A deficiency in their population, the solution is not buying more expensive yellow rice, but teaching everyone which is the amount of the cheapest locally available vegetable that is a suitable source of beta-carotene, which must be eaten daily.
- newsclues 2y agoDiversity of nutrition sources rather than centralized nutrition from a single staple makes a lot of sense.
- connorgutman 2y agoYou are philosophically correct but the flaw with this argument is time and $$$. With each passing year millions of people around the world die or go blind from vitamin A deficiency. Most of these cases are due to an over-reliance on white rice in particular, making golden rice essentially a drop-in solution for much of the world’s poorest. The goal is (or should be) to stop the bleeding with golden rice while also investing in and providing education around more diverse agricultural production.
- adrian_b 2y ago
- connorgutman 2y agoBeen furious about this one for years. When the alternative is death and/or going blind who the fuck cares if there’s side effects? No one is saying it should end up in American grocery stores without proper testing but it could save and improve millions of lives around the world. For those who don’t know Greenpeace is essentially leading the campaign against GR via millions in “Zero GMO” funding. That kind of mindset won’t last long once wealthy nations start experiencing crop shortages caused by CC. Maize production will be first.
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- imtringued 2y agoI don't know about you, but there is significant competition in the vitamin A space. Carrots, sweet potatoes, spinach, etc. Nothing prevents anyone from promoting those today. The fact that you are myopically focusing on a single solution really tells me that the people going blind are just a side show for you.
- connorgutman 2y agoThat’s an odd and hurtful statement to make towards a stranger online. Trust me none of this is a side show for me. I’m an agricultural scientist who deeply cares about global food security and part of that is going to have to be GMOs. The fact that we can’t even try supplementing certain developing markets with golden rice because of a NGO in America where food security is mostly an afterthought is criminal.
- admissionsguy 2y ago> required the government to follow the so-called precautionary principle Someone should make a version of the meme with the death going door to door with a bloodied scythe but with the figure of nassim taleb instead.
- MrBuddyCasino 2y agoThe precautionary principle also lead him horribly astray during covid.
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- manicdee 2y agoI wonder if the actual issues with this rice are similar to the miracle rice programs of the '70s where western aid programs introduced commercial strains of rice to traditional farmers in Indonesia and other SE Asian countries. These strains promised higher yield but at the cost of buying in commercial fertilisers and herbicides. The side effect of higher rice yield was disappearance of fish and companion/accidental crops that would typically grow in the rice paddies, along with poisoning of rivers downstream due to excess nutrients from fertilised rice paddies.
- AdmiralAsshat 2y agoDon't forget that they didn't have the natural drought resistance that the indigenous strains of rice had developed over thousands of years.
- HarryHirsch 2y agoI understand that the deal is that "golden rice" is a low-maintenance GMO crop whose purpose is to get a foot in the door for other GMO crops, with all the issues that you mentioned.
- DrDroop 2y agoLets stop a good thing from happening and then congratulate ourselves we have stopped bad thing from happening.
- achow 2y agoOn the other hand in 50-60s... ..The Government of India signed an agreement with the Rockefeller Foundation to carry out research to achieve higher food production. The program started with research for the development of suitable hybrids of maize followed by hybrids of sorghum and pearl millet. The dwarf wheat bred by Dr. Borlaug in Mexico, named Sonaro 4 and Larmarojo, were introduced. These efforts created an agricultural revolution. I consider myself a farmer and used to grow wheat on 80 acres. I was very happy to harvest about 500 quintals every year – about six quintals (600 kg) for every acre. The planting of Sonaro 64, with the agronomic practices recommended, led to a harvest of 20 quintals (2000 kg) an acre, which was more than three times the previous yield. I remember three to four years after the introduction of those seeds, India’s wheat production expanded significantly, and quite rapidly India became self-sufficient in food. https://www.worldfoodprize.org/index.cfm/88533/18096/when_the_green_revolution_came_to_india https://www.worldfoodprize.org/index.cfm/88533/18096/when_th...
- noobermin 2y agoWas this entirely about the safety of the rice and not the intellectual property issues? That always seemed like a more serious issue with these.
- ericyd 2y agoI was scared of GM crops when they first started getting news attention, but I've flipped now. Quoting a Greenpeace representative, the article writes: > “GM crops have never been proven safe,” Pelegrina asserted. This might be true in some way, but what kind of proof are they looking for? What evidence has been presented that GM crops are unsafe? Proving the absence of something (health risk) is quite hard. On the other hand, GM crops have been consumed by many people for many years now and haven't found any large scale deleterious effects.
- jeremiahbuckley 2y ago“You can't build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery.” - Norman Bourlag
- consumer451 2y ago> I was scared of GM crops when they first started getting news attention, but I've flipped now. I think putting this into binary options, of pro-GM, anti-GM, is not ideal. It's like saying "I am pro-chemistry," or "I am anti-chemistry." Just as with chemistry, various GM products can have largely positive or largely negative outcomes. The question which needs to be asked on each and every GMO product introduction is along the lines of: is this new product like creating fertilizer from natural gas, or like adding lead to gasoline?
- ericyd 2y agoGood point, I appreciate the nuance. I guess I meant that I no longer have a blanket anti stance, and now I'm open to asessing more openly
- Rexxar 2y ago>> “GM crops have never been proven safe,” Pelegrina asserted. This argument is always funny as we can also say "Traditional crops have never been proven safe"
- BurningFrog 2y agoSince you can never be 100.0% sure about anything, the Precautionary Principal always results in deciding not to do something. This is why people only apply it to things they don't want to do.
- Hizonner 2y agoYou can also never be 100 percent sure that not doing something is safe, so the "hard" form of the Precautionary Principal is simply obvious stupid garbage.
- rootsudo 2y agoI find it ironic that people here assume the country is acting in good faith. For when you read the article in question and know some cultural background of the country - more stock of rice would decrease the price of rice hurting the current rice farmers and decreasing the value of farm land, rice brokers, etc. it’s a real complicated issue where even if you go get milled rice you’ll get rocks thrown in as it increases the weight by 5-15%. This isn’t any fear of gmo risks, but an act to protect the status quo.
- eynsham 2y agoAnd I find it odd that you write of ‘the country’ simpliciter when this is a court ruling against a scheme with the support of the government.
- rootsudo 2y agoThat’s the poiht, it’s from the country, from the government and different sides of the government are arguing it. One side wants it and one side doesn’t. It isn’t odd, it’s politics.
- eynsham 2y agoFirst, you wrote about ‘the country’ as if it’s a monolith. Second, working out what you mean more precisely is hard when you fail to give even the slightest explanation of why it’s the judiciary specifically that wants to preserve the status quo.
- gruez 2y ago>more stock of rice would [...] Does golden rice have better yields? Or is it just like any other rice but with more vitamin A?
- greatgib 2y agoI'm not really sure if it applies to this case, but the worse thing with GMO is that when you start using them, you are not free anymore. Like using a SaaS software. Usually you can use your own seeds from your production for your next batch. But GMO plants are supposed to produce sterile seeds that you can't reuse. And in fact you wouldn't even be allowed to, as it is the intellectual property of the chemical company producer. So, farmers will have to buy and depend on a company for the seeds that they have to use at every season...
- boomboomsubban 2y agoTo be fair to the GMO's, it's not that they try to create sterile plants, it's that much of their benefit comes from hybrid vigor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis
- Turing_Machine 2y ago> Usually you can use your own seeds from your production for your next batch. I'm sorry, that is simply not true. Yes, there are so-called "heirloom" varieties that come true from seed, but commercial farming in the United States has been relying on hybrid seed for well over a hundred years now, and hybrids in general do not come true from seed. Seed production is a highly specialized form of farming. No large-scale farmer saves seed for replanting.