High Tech or Slow Tech

Deficiency of vitamin A promotes a high rate of death from infectious disease. David R Murray’s book The Seeds of Concern, UNSW Press 2003, questions the need for vitamin A enhanced rice (Golden Rice), a new transgenic crop which is intended to benefit millions of people, mainly living in Asia who suffer from vitamin A deficiency. In chapter five of Murray's book we read:

[T]here are now plans to give the [Golden] rice free to growers, in the greatest public relations stunt of all time. Apart from the hail of self-congratulatory publicity, moral arguments have been raised in attempts to silence critics. A spokesperson from Nestle attending the World Economic Forum in Melbourne, Michael Garrett, stated that people in well-off nations have no right to deprive the Third World of benefits such as this rice represents. This is a converse kind of logic as, given the often-justified criticisms of some of its own marketing activities in the Third World, Nestle is hardly in a position to be critical of such people. The proposed gift of this golden rice sits incongruously with attempts by other Americans to patent basmati rice from India and jasmine rice from Thailand…The 'help the starving poor' justification for beta carotene-producing rice [Golden Rice] results from an extraordinarily narrow focus…The real solution to Third World starvation requires environmental repair, equitable land tenure, and the encouragement of ecologically sustainable systems of agriculture and horticulture (Chapter 8). Often these were present before the imposition of high-input Green Revolution agriculture. The aim should be to ensure that people under marginal or unpredictable circumstances everywhere have access to a balanced diet.

Current efforts to minimize the vitamin A deficiency do not meet David Murray’s standards either – they involve oral high-dose vitamin A supplementation using high tech chemicals provided by a Swiss drug company, hardly a sustainable solution to malnutrition, in the sense that Golden Rice is, being passable between farmers as seed at little of no cost.

(Go to The Full Monty for more on current high tech approaches to preventing vitamin A deficiency.)

It seems that David Murray would like to wait for an ideal solution to vitamin A deficiency, just as he would have liked an ecologically ideal solution to the desperate food shortages that triggered the Green Revolution in India. When it comes to crises affecting health of millions of people, such idealism needs to be reminded repeatedly of the devastating harm caused by not getting on with the job. His mention of both Nestle and Americans who are attempting to patent basmati rice, neither of whom have anything to do Golden Rice project, makes one wonder whether his opposition to Golden Rice is based on issues other than nutrition and ecology.

For me, the key question is, might Golden Rice work where other approaches fail ?