Ziggurat said:
Vitamin A deficiency kills a lot of people, but it hurts orders of magnitude more.
Non-GMO food causes Vitamin A deficiency!
Garrison said:
There is also the question of whether it's moral to withhold the Golden Rice from people
Eating non-GMO food is immoral!
It's a classic, even literal, example of people biting the hand that feeds them.
Nobody grows GMO's around here, yet Vitamin A deficiency doesn't seem to be problem. Why would that be? It's because where I live we have more to eat than just rice.
Golden Rice: Controversy
Vandana Shiva, an Indian anti-GMO activist, argued the problem was not the plant per se, but potential problems with poverty and loss of biodiversity. Shiva claimed these problems could be amplified by the corporate control of agriculture. By focusing on a narrow problem (vitamin A deficiency), Shiva argued, golden rice proponents were obscuring the limited availability of diverse and nutritionally adequate food... Keith West of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has stated that foodstuffs containing vitamin A are often unavailable, only available at certain seasons, or too expensive for poor families in underdeveloped countries.
A simple solution can fix a simple problem - but complex problems are usually harder to solve. The real causes of vitamin A deficiency in third world countries are cultural and political - and that won't go away by planting Golden rice. Scientists may understand the
science, but that doesn't mean they understand the
problem.
eerok said:
Science is the single human activity that can claim a degree of objectivity,
Objective facts, but chosen
subjectively. scientists don't usually study a field just to broaden our knowledge - they choose areas that have
possibilities. Things to make the world a better place, or (in reality) to pique their personal curiosity and enhance their wealth and reputation.
So some scientists hacked an organism to make it produce more vitamin A. Cool! And they think their invention could fix vitamin A deficiency. Well done! But now some westerners are insisting that third World countries change to it whether they want to or not. Why?
Distribution
Monsanto Company was one of the first companies to grant free licences.
The cutoff between humanitarian and commercial use was set at US$10,000. Therefore, as long as a farmer or subsequent user of golden rice genetics does not make more than $10,000 per year, no royalties need to be paid. In addition, farmers are permitted to keep and replant seed.
Monsanto owns your rice, but you can grow it for free so long as you stay poor... You can see where this is going. First they get us hooked on 'free' GMO's. Then, when we can't survive without it...
This isn't about the
science, it's about how we
use it. History has shown that adoption of a new technology often has unintended consequences...
400 years ago we were running out of wood. Not to worry, we found something that works better - coal! That lead to the invention of the steam engine, and pollution on a massive scale. 200 years later chemists figured out how to make an even more potent fuel - petroleum. Surely there's nothing that science can't make better! What could possibly go wrong?
Global warming
Anticipated effects include warming global temperature, rising sea levels, changing precipitation, and expansion of deserts in the subtropics.[21] Warming is expected to be greater over land than over the oceans and greatest in the Arctic, with the continuing retreat of glaciers, permafrost and sea ice. Other likely changes include more frequent extreme weather events including heat waves, droughts, heavy rainfall with floods and heavy snowfall;[22] ocean acidification; and species extinctions due to shifting temperature regimes. Effects significant to humans include the threat to food security from decreasing crop yields and the abandonment of populated areas due to rising sea levels.[23][24] Because the climate system has a large "inertia" and CO2 will stay in the atmosphere for a long time, many of these effects will not only exist for decades or centuries, but will persist for tens of thousands of years.
Like all science, genetics is morally neutral. But what we choose to do with it isn't. GMO has enormous potential, but nobody can say that it is or isn't safe - that depends on
what we make with it. A particular organism can pass or fail whatever tests we apply to it, but that tells us
nothing about GMO in general. 400 years ago nobody thought we would be facing catastrophic climate change. Today, nobody has any idea what the consequences of widespread GMO use will be.
Many people are scared of GMO
because of its enormous potential - to screw up. And if our past record is anything to go by, they have every right to be scared.
