Golden Rice may or may not augur well

A group of Bangladeshi rice scientists, according to an English daily, have successfully completed lab trial of  the famous (and also debated) Golden Rice, a genetically engineered type of rice that would contain biosynthesised beta-carotene, an antecedent of vitamin A. The scientists are now preparing to conduct field tests of the rice variety.
Bangladesh Rice Research Institute (BRRI), according to the report, is taking their newly-cultured variety of the Golden Rice (dubbed 'GR-2 E BRRI dhan29') to limited field trials in the coming Boro season this November before starting its production and marketing phases. The new variety that promises to have been endowed with Vitamin A has been engineered from three existing varieties: one variety of Bangladesh, one of IRRI and one of the Philippines.
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation sanctioned a grant of over US$10 million to IRRI to fund, develop and evaluate Golden Rice varieties for Bangladesh and the Philippines.
This is a great event and the initial success deserves to be celebrated. If the field trial of the variety turns out to be equally successful the scientific breakthrough may put Bangladesh on the threshold of starting a new agricultural revolution, especially for those rice-eaters who suffer from Vitamin A Deficiency (VAD).
Consumption of 150 gram of Golden Rice a day, as the experts say, is expected to supply half of the recommended daily intake of Vitamin A for an adult. It may be mentioned that Vitamin A builds our skin, teeth, bones and soft tissue and has anti-oxidant properties.
The hardcore poor in Bangladesh are deprived of essential vitamins including Vitamin A, as they cannot always afford to consume meat or fish or milk on regular basis. They take mainly rice with lentil and a little quantity of vegetables. Not everyday they can really afford vegetables. On occasions, they have to eat only rice soaked in water and to leave a good taste in mouth they take salt and green chilli as substitutes. They take rice whenever they are hungry, usually three times a day.
The urban poor, thanks to their a bit higher income, take rice, lentils, potatoes and vegetables more or less regularly and at times they also take meat and fish though the quality of those fish and meat are not always up to the mark.
The majority of the people in Bangladesh take rice in large quantities, much larger than is actually required for their dietary needs, only to meet their hunger. The percentage of the poor who do not eat fruits at all is also pretty high. No wonder people in Bangladesh suffer malnutrition due to their lesser intake of vitamins. Hence infusing Vitamin A into Golden Rice will make the rice supplant their vitamin A deficiency to a great extent.
Golden Rice grains are not pearly white, as ordinary rice is. Their pale yellow tinge - thanks to the presence of beta-carotene - and their nutrients to serve as a building block for Vitamin A, earned the rice the appropriate name 'Golden'.
Golden Rice, once it starts reaching our dining plates, will put an end to the deficiency of Vitamin A for the poor people of Bangladesh and elsewhere in the world, who are heavily dependent on rice. The rice they now take does not hold Vitamin A.
Deficiency of Vitamin A affects growth of people, especially of children and pregnant women. According to World Health Organisation (WHO) global database on vitamin A deficiency, one in every five pre-school children in Bangladesh is vitamin A-deficient and many of them never live to see their fifth birthday.
Among Bangladeshi pregnant women, 23.7 per cent suffer from Vitamin A deficiency. One can well perceive about the poor health of the babies these women would give birth to. Besides the direct sufferings of the mothers and the stunted growth of their babies the deficiency causes the lost human potential is enormous.
Good nutrition in fact starts before a baby is born, and most health experts believe it is the first 1,000 days-from conception through age two-that make the greatest difference in long-term physical and intellectual development.
The Vitamin A deficiency is the main cause of preventable blindness in children. Globally, some 6.7 million children die every year and another 350,000 go blind because they are vitamin A-deficient.
It was in the late 1980s, Ingo Potrykus, Professor Emeritus of Plant Sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) from which he retired in 1999, started to think about using genetic engineering to improve the nutritional qualities of rice. For decades, Potrykus and his chief collaborator Peter Beyer of the University of Freiburg in Germany had dreamed of creating a rice, a golden rice that would improve the lives of millions of the poorest people in the world. They saw Golden Rice as the modest start of a new green revolution, in which ancient food crops would acquire all manners of useful properties.
They perhaps pictured small Bangladeshi or Somali children consuming the golden gruel their mothers would make, knowing that it would sharpen their eyesight and strengthen their resistance to infectious diseases.
Potrykus understood what hunger was like. He knew more than most what it meant not to have enough to eat. As a child growing up in war-ravaged Germany, he and his brothers were often so desperately hungry that they ate what they could steal.
The long journey of Golden Rice has, however, been perilous since the two scientists had announced their achievement in the 1990s. Some critiques dubbed the grain a "Frankenfood", a product of genetic engineering that defies nature.
The Golden Rice has sparked an increasingly polarised public debate. At issue is the hot question of what genetically engineered crops represent. Is it a technological leap forward or a perilous step down a slippery slope that will lead to ecological and agricultural ruin?
A fierce international controversy has been raging over Golden Rice and other genetically modified varieties of rice for a long time. The hostility is understandable. Giant multinational corporations mainly fund researches on 'genetically engineered crops', with their open eyes only to profit and a blind eye to the environment.
Golden Rice, according to critics, is a transgenic crop that poses grave dangers on its future consumers. The proponents of Golden Rice are portrayed by the criticisers as having wildly exaggerated their claims on its benefits. The "Golden Rice Humanitarian Board" (supported by the Gates Foundation), they say, is far more interested in commercial aspirations than in solving the real problem of Vitamin A deficiency in developing countries.
In fact, there have always been enemies of any food genetically tailored. Tons of views against GMF (genetically modified food) espoused by scientists of various disciplines can be found on the Internet. Many scholars find tempering with genes equivalent to 'playing God' and many scientists firmly believe genetic engineering will result in disaster, if not immediately, surely in the long run when the present gene engineers will be long dead.
Dr. Mae-Wan Ho, head of the Bio-Electrodynamics laboratory at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, said: "Gene technology is driven by bad science. It may well ruin our food supply, destroy biodiversity and unleash pandemics of antibiotic resistant infectious diseases." More poignantly, Dr. Michael Antoniou, an English scientist on biotechnology, gazed at the ominous future from the perspective of the present-day genetic manipulations as he said: "Once released into the environment, unlike a Mad Cow Disease epidemic or chemical spill, genetic mistakes cannot be contained, recalled or cleaned up, but will be passed on to all future generations indefinitely".
The perception that everything a bunch of scientists theorises and experiments on is correct, straightforward and safe is totally naïve. We have to understand the dimensions of what we are embarking upon by introducing Golden Rice into our mouths. We, like many policy-makers, can't really make out the meaning of those fine prints as to how the genes are being infused into chromosomes, whether they are being supervised properly.
We have to ask ourselves some hard questions. Why have sacks of Golden Rice not yet filled the shelves of the grocery markets in the world after 40 years of tweaking the new grain? Is Bangladesh or the Philippines chosen by the giant multinational companies as fertile grounds of the Golden Rice experiments and their people experimental consumers? While the affluent are fortunate to take only organic foods, are genetically modified foods meant only for the poor to consume?
Shouldn't we Bangladeshis encourage our voracious rice-eaters to eat less rice and take more vegetables like tomatoes etc. that are replete with Vitamin A? Shouldn't we prioritise cultivation of those indigenous varieties of rice in organic ways? If we have to embrace gene technology for rice, isn't it better to concentrate on developing varieties that can grow during times of flooding than tinkering with Golden Rice?
The organic food we take is the evolutionary fruition that took thousands of years, while GM foods are being churned out in a matter of moments. Is it right for humans to race against the natural process of evolution of agriculture?
Our scientists have done a stupendous job of culturing a brand new variety of Golden Rice while the rest of the scientific world is still struggling to make a breakthrough in this regard. But, our scientists should bear it in their mind that they are pursuing the research with a humanistic goal in view and to serve the nation, not under a pressure of timely utilisation of any fund received, nor being influenced by cheap populism or by any other financial lures or incentives. Our policy-makers as well should have a long vision about the prospect of Golden Rice and weigh its real cost-not simply the present cost, but the future cost our posterities will have to bear.
There have always been and will always be voices against any invention, anything new. Throughout centuries great new thoughts were opposed and great new inventions were denounced. Anaesthesia was once looked upon as sinful. Vaccines are always frowned at. But creators always stood alone against the men of their time. They fought, they suffered and they ultimately won.
The biotech industry is going to stay and will probably see golden rice as a powerful ally in its struggle to win public acceptance. The critics will also see it as a cynical ploy.
Many of those concerned about the twin evils of poverty and hunger will look at Golden Rice to serve the greater public good and will convince the world that such crops have a critical role to play in feeding a world of more than six billion people.
What are direly needed for all of us are tight regulations-and a vigil eye. Former U.S President Jimmy Carter famously said: "Responsible biotechnology is not the enemy; starvation is." Please take note of the word "Responsible".
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