I find the whole debate about Golden Rice pretty boring. Not because I don’t think the subject — GR in and of itself, and as a symbol of something bigger — is important. Rather, because I think it’s very important to have a debate, but the way this is being conducted at the moment is just not likely, it seems to me, to lead to anything more than the further entrenchment of fixed positions.
For example, if you want a good encapsulation of (one side of) the wider argument, you could do a lot worse than this, from Richard Manning in Mother Earth News:
…the industrial ag folks and the Green Revolutionaries challenge us: “Yeah. Diversity is nice, but can sustainable agriculture feed the world’s population?” And then they rig the game by defining “feed” in just the same way they define agriculture — a narrow, linear process of input, throughput, output, yield per acre, calories per bushel, calories per person.
Now that’s hip and engaging, and makes its point in accessible, pithy fashion; but look at the tone — that disdainful “yeah” — and the loaded words used — words like “rig.” A couple of days ago, even before I’d seen this article, I was sort of indirectly accused on Twitter of not caring if children go blind from Vitamin A deficiency, because I had said that the debate — if it can even be called that — had become sterile: it’s not so sterile if you have VAD, was the counter. Right. That’s the reductio ad absurdum of the sort of the tone and language of the Manning article.
So it’s very welcome to see that Michael Pollan and Pamela Ronald, poster children for the two sides of the argument, have recently engaged in what has been described as a “respectful dialogue.” Hopefully more details will emerge, and a precedent will have been set, and we can move on from the boring — there’s really no other word for it — spectacle of people talking past each other.
LATER: And here it is, all two hours of it.
That this could be a long-term sustainable policy to find a certain deficiency in some peoples’ nutrition is doubtful to me. Just come up with a genetically modified plant and make this the panacea seems far-fetched. For millions of years humankind has relied on a mix of nutrients, foodstuffs, crops, name what you wish. I don’t really see why rice needs to be vitamin-enriched instead of adding e.g. carrots to the diet. Chinese cuisine says that a good meal always has to have “a green, a yellow and a red” in it – only then comes rice into it, like bread in our culture. To me this whole discussion is as skewed as forcing people to drink fluoridized water.
Colm: Golden rice is golden – easily recognized and avoidable. You eat it if you want and need it. Fluoridized water is water – not avoidable if you don’t want to drink it or cook things in it.
For me the major problem with dietary uniformity is the risk of breakdown of the staple crop. The main lesson of the Irish potato famine was not just the blight problem from varietal uniformity and monoculture – no potatoes at that time and few since have been blight immune. The big problems were almost total dependence on one crop – the potato – coupled with a serious over-population. I think Ireland is the only country to have had a greater population in the 1800s than now. We may be heading that way with rice in S.E. Asia.
I dont see why these arguments always turn into such a dichotomy. I think most (if not all) people will agree that the ideal situation is a balanced diet where all of the necessary nutrients are there in optimal amounts. However, the reality is that many people are forced to live off of a sub-optimal rice based diet. If golden rice can help improve the lives of people in this situation, then I think the benefits are plain, but there will always be a need to promote a diverse and balanced diet for a variety of reasons.