GM crops don't kill kids; opposing them does

by Matt Ridley

It was over harlequin ducks that we bonded. Ten years ago, at a meeting in Monterey, California, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the structure of DNA, I bumped into the German biologist Ingo Potrykus watching harlequin ducks in the harbour before breakfast. Shared enthusiasm for bird watching broke the ice.

I knew of him, of course. He had been on the cover of Time magazine for potentially solving one of the world’s great humanitarian challenges. Four years before, with his colleague Peter Beyer, he had added three genes to the 30,000 in rice to help to prevent vitamin A deficiency, one of the most preventable causes of morbidity and mortality in poor countries with rice-dominated diets. They had done it for nothing, persuading companies to waive their patents, so that they could give the rice seeds away free. It was a purely humanitarian impulse.

Had Ingo or I known that ten years later this rice would still not be available to the poor, that a systematic campaign of denigration against it by the behemoths of the environmental movement, especially Greenpeace, would be consuming lawyers’ fees while perhaps 20 million children had died in the meantime through vitamin A deficiency, he and I would have felt sick with horror that morning...

The agri-business Syngenta improved Professor Potrykus’s “golden rice” by adding two genes instead of three (one from maize, one from a common soil bacterium) until it produced good yields while providing 60 per cent of a child’s vitamin A daily requirements from only 50 grams of rice. So for all those poor people who couldn’t afford, and would never be offered, supplements, who had nowhere to grow spinach, but who lived largely on rice, simply substituting golden rice for normal rice would save lives.

Again and again, remedying nutrient deficiency comes top when humanitarian priorities are ranked according to cost benefit analyses. The World Health Organisation estimates that 170 million to 230 million children and 20 million pregnant women are vitamin-A deficient and, as it weakens the immune system, that 1.9 million to 2.7 milllion die of it each year, more than from Aids, TB and malaria. We hear a lot about risk assessments; well, here’s a benefit assessment.

Then came the backlash. Greenpeace and its pals lobbied governments to slow down the project and drive up its costs.

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