Expert: Blaming Greenpeace for blocking Golden Rice is “sleazy sleight of hand”

With the recent Philippines court decision blocking the further planting of GM Golden Rice in the country, pro-GMO advocates have renewed their attacks on Greenpeace, which, with the farmer-scientist network MASIPAG and others, brought the lawsuit.

The Observer’s science editor Robin McKie has published an article accusing Greenpeace of causing “a catastrophe” by its role in the court case. GM Golden Rice is engineered to contain the vitamin A precursor beta-carotene and is targeted at poor people, especially children, suffering from vitamin A deficiency (VAD).

The Observer also chimed in with an editorial headlined, “When modified rice could save thousands of lives, it is wrong to oppose it”, and subtitled, “The green movement’s attempts to block the cultivation of a grain enhanced with vitamin A is misguided”.

However, experts on Golden Rice have roundly debunked the claims, with one pointing out that blaming Greenpeace for blocking the GM crop is “a sleazy sleight of hand to hide the fact that after 30 years of development, Golden Rice is still not ready”. Prof Glenn Davis Stone also points out that there is no evidence that Golden Rice can actually improve vitamin levels in its target population and that farmers may not be prepared to even plant it without special inducements to do so.

Prof Stone also notes that while Golden Rice has been under development, big strides have been made globally in cutting vitamin A deficiency by conventional means – in the Philippines itself, for instance, it has been cut in half. This, of course, raises the question: Why all the hype around unproven Golden Rice when other means of reducing this form of malnutrition are already proving successful?

Nothing new

The revived hype around Golden Rice will not be new to long-time GMWatch readers. Pro-GMO advocates have made wild claims about Golden Rice’s ability to solve the problem of vitamin A deficiency in poorer countries since the year 2000. The advocates – including the signatories of a much hyped Nobel Laureates’ letter – paint well-fed anti-GM activists and excessive regulations around GMOs as the villains preventing the use of Golden Rice to save the poor and hungry – even claiming that they are guilty of causing the mass deaths of children.

McKie's piece is squarely in this tradition. He calls GM Golden Rice “lifesaving” and subtitles his article, “Thousands of children could die after court backs campaign group over GM crop in Philippines, scientists warn”.

Unproven and unready

But Glenn Davis Stone, Research Professor of Environmental Science at Sweet Briar College, rejects claims that Greenpeace was responsible for the failure to deploy Golden Rice. He said, “I have closely followed the progress of Golden Rice for 25 years. My first peer-reviewed article on it in 2002 chided Golden Rice critics and urged it be given a chance to be improved and readied for release. But today it is still not ready for release; it is still being bred at PhilRice [Philippine Rice Research Institute] to the level of ‘certified’ seed. The shrill claim that Greenpeace has blocked a life-saving crop is a sleazy sleight of hand to hide the fact that after 30 years of development, Golden Rice is still not ready. Meanwhile Vitamin A deficiency rates are being reduced in many areas of the world without the enormous cost of Golden Rice.”

Prof Stone has previously noted that “based on numerous scientific studies” it’s clear that the delays in the development of Golden Rice are largely down to numerous technical problems and “have little to do with activists”.

In his recent comments on the Observer article, Prof Stone pointed out that even “The claim that Golden Rice will remedy vitamin A deficiency remains unproven. IRRI [International Rice Research Institute, the body tasked with the rollout of the rice] scientists themselves have stressed that ‘It has not yet been determined whether daily consumption of Golden Rice does improve the vitamin A status of people who are vitamin A deficient.’”

Prof Stone added, “Golden Rice has never been tested in the target population of severely malnourished children who often suffer from gut parasites, infections, and low levels of dietary fats – all of which make it harder to convert beta carotene to vitamin A.

“The 2012 study that is cited to show that Golden Rice would raise children’s vitamin A levels was done on children fed balanced meals that included fats. It demonstrated only that Golden Rice worked in children who did not need it.”

This study, incidentally, was retracted due to ethical issues – neither the children that were fed GM Golden Rice nor their parents were informed that the rice was a GMO – and the authors reportedly failed to get ethical approval in China in a manner consistent with US National Institutes of Health guidelines.

Prof Stone continued, “Even the latest analysis of Golden Rice’s safety points out that research has yet to show that it will mitigate vitamin A deficiency. And by the time Golden Rice gets to undernourished children, its beta carotene level may be very low, since the compound deteriorates fairly quickly.”

Not ready?

Readers of the Observer article, having been told Golden Rice was approved for commercial cultivation back in 2021, may be somewhat taken aback that Prof Stone says Golden Rice is not just still unproven to work but is not even ready for prime time.

But the reality is that Golden Rice is very much a pilot project. It has been reported that “Malusog Rice”, as GM golden Rice has been named in the Philippines, “expanded from 47 hectares (116 acres) in the 2023 dry season to 227 hectares (560 acres) in the 2023 wet cropping season across 10 regions in the Philippines”. But there are 5 million rice hectares in the Philippines, so 227 hectares is a tiny percentage – 0.0045% – of that planting area.

Golden Rice still has a long way to go

And Golden Rice still has a long way to go before it can be generally distributed to farmers. According to Prof Stone on Twitter/X, the plan, which he learned of during his last trip to PhilRice, was for the Philippines government to pay for seeds to be given out to farmers once they had bred certified seeds.

Distribution would doubtless occur via the government’s Rice Competitiveness Enhancement Program (RCEP), which gives out rice seed free to farmers – just as the developers have always claimed would happen with Golden Rice.

But the RCEP only distributes certified seed. Malusog Rice is registered in the Philippines, but it isn’t yet certified. Certification is a long and involved process, with requirements for special field cultivations, conducted under prescribed conditions. The fields are inspected by officials, who take and test samples. This process is not a special requirement for GMOs – all seeds that are submitted for certification have to go through it.

Certification is voluntary, but it seems that the organisations behind Golden Rice want to pursue it. According to PhilRice, as of November 2023, seed certification guidelines for Golden Rice were “being finalised”. It is not clear how long the whole process will take, but it won't be quick.

Will farmers plant it?

Then there is the question of whether farmers will plant GM Golden Rice. Malusog Rice is a transgenic version of Rc82 “Peñaranda” (renamed Rc682). Rc82 was a popular variety when IRRI first started developing Golden Rice around two decades ago. But by 2020, when Prof Stone and colleagues published the results of their survey of Filipino farmers, it was an “aging” variety that was “no longer competitive in yield”, having been overtaken by newer and better performing varieties. They concluded that farmers would not plant the rice “unless they are offered specific inducements to do so”.

Interestingly, the Philippines’ farmer-led network MASIPAG recently published an article that argued that low yields had cast a shadow over the pilot deployment of Golden Rice and that if it were ever grown at the scale its backers hoped, it would be damaging to national rice productivity.

No meaningful safety testing

Even if the technical and logistical problems are solved and Golden Rice finally makes it to full commercialisation, the developers have failed to address an even more fundamental question – whether this GMO is safe to eat over the long term.

MASIPAG and Greenpeace won their lawsuit on the grounds that the Philippines government had failed to follow its own risk assessment rules and had not shown it is safe to eat. Golden Rice may prove to be toxic over the long term, since derivatives of beta-carotene are known to cause birth defects. The rice has not been tested in long-term animal feeding studies. Instead, the developers looked at three newly expressed proteins in Golden Rice and stated that they are not similar to any known toxins or allergens, so the rice is safe to eat.

The problem with this approach is that it considers the proteins in their natural, native form, ignoring the fact that when expressed in a non-native transgenic plant, they can be fundamentally changed. Proteins such as these can undergo a process called post-translational modification, which can unexpectedly make them toxic or allergenic. The developers should have tested the whole cooked rice fed to rodents over at least two years.

As is typical in GM crop development, the widescale mutagenic (DNA damaging) effects of the GM transformation process and its consequences on plant composition have been ignored. The developers should have undertaken comprehensive “omics” molecular profiling analyses (protein and metabolite profiling) to assess whether potentially toxic mutant proteins and/or toxic metabolites have inadvertently been produced – but they did not.

In the absence of such basic data, no one can claim that Golden Rice can be consumed over the long term without damaging people's health. And a cloud of suspicion will linger over the crop.

Meanwhile, as Prof Stone has noted, vitamin A deficiency (VAD) rates are being successfully reduced in many areas of the world “WITHOUT any Golden Rice”. This leads him to the damning conclusion that, “Anyone who actually cares about malnourished kids instead of just promoting GM crops would be more interested in how the world has actually been mitigating VAD.”


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