Golden Rice: To Combat Vitamin A Deficiency for Public Health

Abstract

Vitamin A deficiency (VAD) has been recognised as a significant public health problem continuously for more than 30 years, despite current interventions. The problem is particularly severe in populations where rice is the staple food and diversity of diet is limited, as white rice contains no micronutrients. Golden Rice is a public-sector product designed as an additional intervention for VAD. There will be no charge for the nutritional trait, which has been donated by its inventors for use in public-sector rice varieties to assist the resource poor, and no limitations on what small farmers can do with the crop-saving and replanting seed, selling seed and selling grain are all possible. Because Golden Rice had to be created by introducing two new genes-one from maize and the other from a very commonly ingested soil bacterium-it has taken a long time to get from the laboratory to the field. Now it has been formally registered as safe as food, feed, or in processed form by four industrialised counties, and applications are pending in developing countries. The data are summarised here, and criticisms addressed, for a public health professional audience: is it needed, will it work, is it safe and is it economic? Adoption of Golden Rice, the next step after in-country registration, requires strategic and tactical cooperation across professions, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and government departments often not used to working together. Public health professionals need to play a prominent role.

New Plant Breeding Technologies: An Assessment of the Political Economy of the Regulatory Environment and Implications for Sustainability

“…The problem with that outcome is that new technologies, which have the potential to increase global production using fewer chemical inputs, less land and generating lower levels of carbon emissions, will not be developed. Firms and governments also have substantially reduced incentives to invest in NPBT R&D programs and, as a result, agricultural productivity growth atrophies, as for many years has been the case with golden rice [48], and for wheat [49].…”

Reassessing the Cost-Effectiveness of High-Provitamin A Bananas to Reduce Vitamin A Deficiency in Uganda

“…Anti-GMO laws and sentiment have blocked this cultivar's dissemination, causing 20 years of money and time to be spent on Golden Rice with zero improvement in VAD (Potrykus, 2010;Stokstad, 2019). Dubock (2019) writes that very substantial investments of time and resources are needed to convince scientists, governments, and consumers that cultivars like Golden Rice will be beneficial, contradicting the assertion that biofortification programs are more financially and temporally efficient than traditional approaches. Indeed, the red tape and investment costs surrounding GM cultivars, underpinning producers' and consumers' heavy reservations, remain significant limitations for current and future nutrition programs that include them (Borlaug, 2000;Saltzman et al, 2013;Tohme and Beyer, 2014;Garg et al, 2018;Qaim, 2020).…”

23. Gentechnische Anwendungen im Spiegel der nachhaltigen Entwicklung

“…Ein prominentes Beispiel ist die Vitamin-A-Anreicherung beim sog. "Golden Rice" (Tang et al, 2009;Dubock, 2019; siehe auch van den Daele/ Broer, Kap. 21).…”