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GM Crops Like Golden Rice Will Save the Lives of Hundreds of Thousands of Children
By Matt Ridley. Excerpts:
"Most people think the precautionary principle simply says “better safe
than sorry” and helps to prevent disasters like the release of
Thalidomide for pregnant women. In fact, it goes much further and is
often a barrier to innovation. As applied in practice, especially in the
European Union, it requires regulators to take into account all
possible hazards of a new technology, however implausible, to discount
all possible benefits, however plausible, and to ignore all the hazards
of existing technologies that might be replaced by the innovation. As Ed
Regis puts it in his new book Golden Rice: The Imperiled Birth of a GMO Superfood:
“The principle focuses on theoretical or potential risks, those that
are only possible or hypothetical, while ignoring the specific and
actual harms that restrictions or prohibitions are likely to produce.”
In this way, it creates obstacles to anything new.
Bizarrely, the Cartagena Protocol
applied this principle to crops bred by the precise insertion of
specific genes from other plants but not to the older technique of
random genetic scrambling with gamma rays, like Golden Promise barley,
even though the potential unknown risk of the latter is clearly greater.
The effect on Golden Rice was twofold. First, the requirement for
greater regulation tarnished all biotech crops as risky (if they’re
safe, how come they have to go through so much regulation?). Second, it
made the testing of different varieties impossibly expensive and
time-consuming, killing a key part of the innovation process: the trial
and error that is always necessary to turn a good idea into a practical
product. Thomas Edison tried 6,000 different materials for the filament
of a light bulb. Imagine if he had had to get separate regulatory
approval for each one.
The European Union’s directive
on the deliberate release of genetically modified crops includes the
statement that “the precautionary principle has been taken into account
in the drafting of this Directive and must be taken into account when
implementing it.” This effectively killed off biotechnology on the
continent, though Europe happily imports huge quantities of GM soybeans
from the Americas today. Since 2005, Canada (which did not sign the
Cartagena Protocol) has approved 70 different biotech crops, while the
European Union has approved just one—and that took 13 years, by which
time the crop was outdated.
To illustrate just how impenetrable the EU’s regulatory thicket is, take the biotech potato
developed by the German company BASF in 2005. The European Food Safety
Authority (EFSA) initially approved it, but the European Commission then
blocked it, citing the precautionary principle. BASF took the
Commission to the European Court of Justice, which ordered another
evaluation from the EFSA. This confirmed that the crop was safe and the
EU was instructed by the Court to approve its use, which it did. But
Hungary’s government then intervened on behalf of green pressure groups,
pointing out (Kafka-like) that the EU had based its approval on the
first EFSA ruling instead of the second one, even though the two rulings
were practically identical. In 2013, eight years after the first
approval, the EU General Court upheld Hungary’s complaint. By then BASF
had lost interest in banging its head against this precautionary wall,
so it withdrew the application, packed up its entire research into
biotechnology and moved it to the U.S., which has never signed the
Cartagena Protocol. Syngenta did the same."
"After a quarter of a century of growing biotech crops in North and South
America, Asia and parts of Africa, the evidence is now clear: they have
caused no human or animal illness, and have huge environmental benefit,
such as greatly reduced pesticide use, less ploughing, lower greenhouse
gas emissions, less land required to grow a given quantity of crop,
lower costs and higher yields. This is the environmental bounty Europe
has missed out on thanks to its over-zealous regulation of GM crops."
"By 2012, it was clear from studies in China that the latest version of
Golden Rice, grown in secure greenhouses, gave children sufficient beta
carotene to make them healthy but could not harm them, and did so far
more effectively than feeding them spinach. However, the research caused
a fuss. The US-based, Chinese-born researcher followed precisely the
approved protocols for the research, which did not describe Golden Rice
as a GMO-crop. Nevertheless, the same university which had approved the
protocols, then found that not describing Golden Rice as a GMO-crop was
an ethical omission. Overall, and without any credible analysis, the
university found insufficient evidence that the principle of ‘prior
informed consent’ from the subjects of the research had been properly
applied, handing the opponents of GM foods a huge propaganda victory at a
crucial time. Yet by this date, billions of meals of biotech crops had
been eaten all around the world, and three independent reviews of the
Chinese research concluded that the trial had been safe and effective.
Nevertheless, the reputational harm lingered."
"The International Rice Research Institute developed numerous
different Golden Rice strains back-crossed into commonly grown
varieties, behind tough security barriers because of constant threats
from activists encouraged by Greenpeace. Eventually, the Golden Rice
Humanitarian Board chose one of the varieties for field testing. They
would have liked to have chosen lots of different varieties, because in
plant breeding it is always necessary to weed out sports that have for
some reason acquired undesirable traits along the way. But the
precautionary principle made this impossibly expensive and laborious
since it required evaluation in advance of the potential risks of each
separate variety. So they had to pick one.
Disastrously, that one variety turned out to have a genetic flaw that
made it poor at yielding grain outside the greenhouse. Once again, the
environmentalists crowed that the project was doomed."
"In 2015, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and
the US Patents and Trademark Office rewarded Golden Rice with their Patents For Humanity Award. In 2017, a group of 134 Nobel-prize winners
(now expanded to 150) called on Greenpeace and the United Nations Food
and Agriculture Program to “cease and desist in its campaign against
Golden Rice specifically, and crops and foods improved through
biotechnology in general.”"
"By 2017, a new variety of Golden Rice, GR2E, had been tested in the
field in the Philippines and shown to be robust, true-breeding,
high-yielding and strong in its expression of beta carotene. The IRRI
submitted an application to release it to farmers, in the form of eight
hefty documents, one more than 800 pages long and detailing the many
tests of the physical, nutritional, allergenic, and toxicity done on the
plant to show that it could not conceivably be anything other than safe
to grow and eat."
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