YES I’M SURE THE THING HOLDING UP GOLDEN RICE IS GROWING CARROTS WOULD BE EASIER
The governments where this product is being tested, and attempts are being made to roll it out, are directly involved. As are UN groups and non-profits that work on food insecurity. There is no expensive tech here. The varietal was developed by publicly funded research at universities. The goal is to give the seeds out for free, or keep them costing the same as regular rice varieties.
As for why a product like golden rice is necessary: When your looking at projects like these you’re usually talking about incredibly poor nations/areas and people who survive by subsistence farming or otherwise on a very limited diet built around a single staple crop. They can’t afford to buy much in the way of supplemental food, or food produced outside their own economically depressed area. In terms of simply having them grow other crops that already have whatever nutrient is lacking locally there are tons of problems that have cropped up. Aside from acceptance issues @LDoBe mentions. Sometimes the soil or climate won’t allow other crops to grow. Rice is grown on swampy partially flooded land, carrots won’t grow there. Sometimes the seasons won’t line up, the soil chemistry is wrong, or the crop in question is just too finicky to grow. Sometimes specialized and expensive varietals and equipment are needed to get sufficient success with a particular crop. Additionally if your looking at a fixed amount of land, from which a minimum number of calories must be produced to keep everyone from starving. Deviating from a staple with [high caloric density] to one with a [lower caloric density] can mean not producing enough calories to keep a community sufficiently nurished. (Google)(Google)
Introducing new crops, handing out supplements, and fortifying other food products with missing nutrients, have all be tried (and still are being used) in these areas. They haven’t worked and aren’t working. These people are short of vitamin A because they a poor. They can only afford to grow or acquire a limited number of food stuffs in sufficient volume to keep themselves alive. What they can acquire or grow, given the land they occupy, equipment and knowledge they have lacks in vitamin A In Asia (and a few other areas) that food stuff is rice. Free, or cheap rice from Non-profits and global food security groups is not building it around expensive tech or tying it into a corrupt system. There’s no corporation involved here, or attempts to shift this stuff to an export market, or fertilizer/pesticide product its tied to. Its not a “product” you’ll be seeing on your store shelves, with a trademarked brand name and patent protections tying it to some wealthy group looking to make a killing. You could make these people more food secure overall by increasing the wealth of nations involved (often by a hell of a lot), and in a way that was egalitarian and focused on the poorest areas with the most food insecurity. But unless you can tell me some way to do that quickly enough to prevent millions more deaths, and a hell of a lot more illnesses and suffering. In multiple nations across the globe. Then products like Golden Rice remain one of the most promising tools in combating malnutrition problems.
Yeah no. That’s not how it works. And its actually a really, really, really, stock accusation thrown out by denialists of all sorts, based on rote misunderstandings about how science works. From the creationists and conspiracy theorists, and bigfoot guys (but especially the creationists). “Science is just another kind of religion, MAN!” boom Mind blown.
But the thing is we have plenty of evidence. In properly conducted science everything is transparent. Funding sources are traceable and stated. Data and work are shown. The peer review process involves other acknowledged experts in the field checking the work for obvious bias, errors, conflicts of interest and other problems. Then filing that information with the journal in question. Where it can be checked later if need be. The work is publicly published in places where other researchers will see it. Then those researchers repeat the study to see if the results are replicable, test the hypotheses with different levels of rigor, and experimental methods. All of those studies will go through the exact same process. Nothing becomes accepted as definitive, or even very likely until a clear consensus among the bulk of available information emerges. Big swaths of available information may even be surveyed and their results compared to identify what that consensus is (systemic review) or all that information may be collated together and re-examined to clarify findings (meta-analysis). Nothing is taken on “faith” simple because one, or several, groups or persons made a claim. Hell very little in science is ever claimed to 100% true. If you provide quality evidence that a consensus position or accepted explanation is untrue it follows the same process. If it doesn’t wash the consensus remains. If it works out it will (admittedly slowly) be replaced by all the new and better work.
We know the vast amount of science supporting climate change isn’t produced by scientists who are selling their credentials because we’ve got all that. We can go and check ourselves and see if their work passes the smell test. We know the denialists aren’t on the up and up, because when you trace back through all that information or try to re-test their claims it falls apart somewhere along the line. But they keep publishing anyway. More over its completely ridiculous to suspect that tens of thousands of scientists, over the course of nearly half a century were all (or even mostly) producing work that found the same effect because they were being bought off by special interests. Without anyone ever hearing about it. You can’t even make a movie these days without info being leaked, and there are at best a few thousand involved there over the course of a few years. And it makes even less sense when you realize any special interest that would be buying them off wouldn’t have existed until after scientist first discovered the issue.
As for this Greenpeace thing. Doesn’t surprise me. Because more credible journalistic sources have already found exactly this sort of thing going on. Also because given the associations of certain denial scientists, and the quality of work they produce, its pretty damned obvious. Greenpeace (and sadly many activist groups, in almost any issue) aren’t really a reliable source. Or really even a sensible group. And this sorts of “sting” investigation, though a favorite of activist groups, are something we should be really skeptical about. We’ve seen that with the ACORN bs, and now the Planned Parenthood Videos. But its always been an issue. Animal rights groups love the tactic, but it seldom works for them. And a lot of that sort of video I’ve seen has been deeply questionable. I’ve seen what’s clearly decades old video touted as something that happened just this month, or presented as something that still ongoing (even in reference to sites that no longer exist). I’ve seen the same video claimed to have been taken in multiple places at multiple times. I’ve seen video that was clearly taken outside the US claimed to be from US sites. And almost all of them lack the sort of contextual info and chain of evidence that would make them compelling or useful evidence.
So before I applaud Greenpeace for finally doing something useful I’d like to see some one credible vet their claims. At the very least until some one else picks this up it’ll probably go nowhere. Greenpeace is so controversial, and so damaged in terms of credibility that its very easy to shout them down or ignore them even should they be right.
