The problem is not to do with safety in a human health sense, but rather genetic safety, ie, is it safe and wise to allow these modified plants to breed with other natural crops? I would prefer not, it’s something we cannot estimate the effect of. Also as the article rightly says, they have no need for this stuff from a large multinational corp, they can just grow other vegetables like tomatoes, squash, taro, etc. According to the article to get the right amount of Vitamin A, you’d have to eat 8 kg of rice in a day, whereas squash has significantly high concentrations of beta carotene (vit. A precursor). Don’t let the corporations control your food supply. Even though Syngenta has apparently donated this rice, they may pull other shady stuff. Letting a corp have a licence to the food you are growing is insanity.
Its a little strange to think about, but there’s nothing ‘natural’ about modern crops.
For millenia selective breeding was used to get desired traits, with who knows how many other mutations along the way.
More recently radiation has been used to induce mutations in crops to wider diversity.
GMOs are just the next step in more precisely editing a plants genome with only the changes we want.
Now the corpations making them like Monsanto can get fucked, they should still be treated like every other plant. If you have seeds you should be able to plant them.
Yeah, for me the issue with GMOs is less with the concepts of genetic engineering and more with the legal rights. Should be impossible to copyright or patent a fucking plant, and if that means that big corporations don’t want to do it anymore then that’s absolutely fine.
I probably shouldn’t have used the word natural, it’s too broad. I just feel there is a risk with allowing an artificial gene (for example the bacterial beta carotene gene) to spread through a population it never would have been in. Now I can’t think of any particular reason this might actually be bad, but we are still introducing a variable into a system we do not understand fully. When that system is what feeds us, I’d rather not mess with it without complete understanding.
Generally I agree with you, but in the case of Golden Rice the corporation has zero control over it. Now I’m not saying that the government of the Philippines should mandate it being grown, just that if a farmer wants to grow it, they should be free to do it, and there shouldn’t be any reason to protest against it. If you want to grow it, go ahead, if your neighbor wants to grow it, no one should care.
