Ultimately we need to stop funding third world countries. No money, no food. Socialism doesn’t work. Those in power are living well off of our charity while their subjects perish. The people in these countries at some point must revolt like our founders did, and then there will be no need for golden rice, or any other type of social service.
The selling of GMO rice is all about money.
Monsanto and other transnational corporations seek to open foreign markets for their products to expand their revenues.
This is not about starving children, it is about greedy, liberal American businessmen.
Nations have every right to decide if they wish to accept GMO food.
Vitamin A precursors are found in many many vegetables. Why aren’t they able to grow any of these vegetables there?
My kids love squash. It takes 40-50d to grow a squash plant to maturity. Then it bears for several months. In tropical Africa, they could bear for months and months and months because there aren’t any freezes.
Lots of vegs have vitamin A precursors. Why must they only get it via GMO rice?
Is the problem lack of GMO rice, or political instability? Because GMO rice won’t do anything to help political instability, the same warlords that are stealing the rice now will just steal the new rice.
This is more about marketing than about actually helping people. Yes, golden rice has beta carotene, and yes, the human body can convert beta carotene into vitamin A, but that does not mean that that golden rice will have any significant impact if added to the diet of people who are vitamin A deficient.
See, here’s the thing. A is a fat-soluble vitamin. It doesn’t process or absorb in the absence of fat, and the beta carotene conversion also depends on the presence of fat. That’s why most vegans are A-deficient, even when they are eating plenty of carrots and kale - they’re eating too low-fat a diet for the conversion to happen at any meaningful rate.
Same thing with the poverty-stricken who can afford nothing but rice - their diets are generally very low in healthy animal fats, and their deficiencies in A is driven more by that than by any shortage of beta carotene in their diets.
And for that, there’s no easy fix.
Golden rice! Followed by the Golden Rice Famine, when one GMO strain monopolizes and then fails.
The rice with human genes
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-440302/The-rice-human-genes.html
March 2007
Human genes engineered into experimental GMO rice being grown in Kansas
http://www.naturalnews.com/035745_GMO_rice_human_genes_Kansas.html
May 2012
Pharmed Rice
http://www.alive.com/articles/view/21722/pharmed_rice
January 2008
I’ve been saying this for 30 years. The whole environmental movement is about depopulation... well, ego first. Of course, “they” are superior and deserve to live but the rest of us are definitely disposable.
Actually, you are correct. The people who back those opposed to GM food are and have long been opposed to the great Norman Borlaug’s “Green Revolution”. They do not just want the death of millions, however, they want the death of billions.
In past they have even proposed poisoning food aid with drugs that induce permanent sterility, or that would slowly kill those who ate the food, perhaps in a similar way to how the bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis kills some insects.
B. thuringiensis produces crystals that when ingested breaks down and paralyzes a small part of the digestive tract. When enough of its digestive tract is paralyzed, its host stops eating and starves to death.
However, luckily for billions of human beings, these monsters have never found a bacillus that would do this in humans.
Impatient monsters, one of them (Dr. Eric Pianka) proposed using an airborne ebola to kill nine out of every ten people in the world. If Hell exists, these are the kind of people who belong there.
Yeah because natural rice, which has been grown for millennia, somehow suddenly cannot grow without screwing around with its DNA.
Pure propaganda right there in the second sentence of the article.
Who are the real racists? Little black and brown children can just die.
We’d hate to harm them with vitamin A enriched rice. DDT is too harmful to nothing, so we let children die of malaria. Why don’t we have these kinds of debates in America?