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Rockefeller Foundation support for Golden Rice
Posted: Thursday, October 23, 2008 2:22 pm
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After funding the development of Golden Rice, and seeing the 15-year-old project languish due to regulatory overkill, the Rockefeller Foundation says it will be providing funding to "shepherd Golden Rice through national, regulatory approval processes in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines". The announcement, made at this year's World Food Prize event, comes two months after Greenpeace warned those very same governments not to conduct field trials of this promising crop -- and Greenpeace has never quite promised not to destroy the field trials if they occur. 

The Rockefeller grant to the International Rice Research Institute was announced by the foundation's president, Judith Rodin, in the course of her keynote address to the World Food Prize' Borlaug Dialogue.

"Golden rice promises to alleviate the suffering of malnourished children and the debilitating effects of beta-carotene and vitamin A deficiencies – blindness and measles – in particular", Rodin said. "Its widespread distribution could save almost 3 million children’s lives, while nourishing as many as 300 million more – 40 percent of children under age five, in the developing world, according to the World Health Organization."

Even though millions of lives are at stake, Greenpeace continues to announce its opposition.

"Greenpeace has warned the governments in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam not to allow such risky trials", wrote Noemie Bisserbe in the Aug. 22, 2008 edition of Businessworld, and quoted Jai Krishna, a campaigner with Greenpeace in India, as saying: “There is no evidence that this rice is safe".

Already in 2001, Greenpeace was forced to consider whether it would attack field trials of Golden Rice in the name of the environment, or refrain from attacking them, for the sake of those threatened by blindness and death.

The result was a curious compromise: "Although we do not have any immediate plans to take direct action against 'golden rice' field trials", said Benedikt Haerlin, then Greenpeace international coordinator, "we reserve the right to take direct, non-violent actions against any releases of GMOs into the environment.

That position was also taken by Von Hernandez, campaigns director of Greenpeace South-East Asia, who said that plans for attacks on trials "are something I would neither confirm nor deny". He added: "Greenpeace is against any open releases of GMOs into the environment. This applies to golden rice as well and, as always, we reserve the right to take direct, non-violent action on any threats to the environment."

A morally reprehensible position to maintain, to be sure -- but regulatory overkill is just as culpable. Varieties of Golden Rice could have been available to farmers as early as 2002, yet none are available today.

Will the Rockefeller grant to "shepherd" Golden Rice through the approval process gain results worthy of the urgency normally attached to the value of human lives?

Possibly not. The Philippine Rice Research Institute has been working on Golden Rice since 2004. Field tests are expected to start before the end of 2008, and commercial release is anticipated four years from now.

In the US, final approval for a new biotech crop variety can take as little as nine months.

Meanwhile, the Rockefeller Foundation hasn't announced how much support it will provide to get the Golden Rice project moving again. Perhaps it's mindful of the experience in Britain, where the biggest cost of conducting field trials is protecting them from attackers.
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Member Opinions:
By: Russttu on 11/6/08
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I have always suspected Green"peace" of directly supporting policies that exacerbate human misery. We shall see if they prove themselves to be the harbingers of death that many think they are.


 

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