Opposition to biotech crops,
and the subsequent failure to adopt safe, healthy genetically
modified crop variants, is causing mass human suffering all over
the world.
The most obvious example of this is Golden Rice, which has been
available since the early part of the last decade, but is not in
regular use in any country. Golden Rice is a genetically altered
rice strain built to address Vitamin A deficiency, which affects
about 10 percent of the 3 billion people for whom rice is a staple
food. That deficiency
causes blindness in between 250,000 and 500,000 children each
year, half of whom die within 12 months, according to the World
Health Organization.
Golden Rice is cost effective and perfectly safe. But
environmentalist groups like Greenpeace continue to oppose it. Over
the years since its development, radical anti-biotech activists
have waged
violent crop-burning campaigns intended to wipe it out. Back in
2000, the threat was so fierce that the strain was being stored
in a grenade-proof greenhouse for protection.
The sheer physical misery—misery that could have and should have
been prevented—that has resulted from opposition to the rice has
been immense, but also difficult to quantify. But this year, two
agricultural economists attempted to estimate exactly how much it’s
cost, both in economic terms and in healthy lives lost. The results
are pretty grim.
“Results show the annual perceived costs have to be at least
US$199 million per year approximately for the last decade to
explain the delay in approval of the technology,”
writes Justus Wesseler of Technische Universität
München, Center of Life and Food Sciences in Freising Germany and
David Zilberman of UC Berkeley. “This is an indicator of the
economic power of the opposition towards Golden Rice resulting in
about 1.4 million life years lost over the past decade in
India.”
What does the study’s authors mean by “life
years?” David
Ropeik of Scientific American explains:
That odd sounding metric – not just lives but ‘life years’ –
accounts not only for those who died, but also for the blindness
and other health disabilities that Vitamin A deficiency causes. The
majority of those who went blind or died because they did not have
access to Golden Rice were children.
Ropeik argues that at this point we need to do more than tally
the suffering. We need to assign blame, and hold those who have
opposed Golden Rice so adamantly, for so long, on such flimsy
justifications, accountable:
These are real deaths, real disability, real suffering, not the
phantom fears about the human health effects of Golden Rice thrown
around by opponents, none of which have held up to objective
scientific scrutiny. It is absolutely fair to charge that
opposition to this particular application of genetically modified
food has contributed to the deaths of and injuries to millions of
people. The opponents of Golden Rice who have caused this harm
should be held accountable.That includes Greenpeace, which in its values
statement promises, “we are committed to nonviolence.” Only
their non-violent opposition to Golden Rice
contributes directly to real human death and
suffering. It includes the European Network of Scientists for
Social and Environmental Responsibility, which claims the
credibility of scientific expertise, and then denies or distorts
scientific evidence in order to oppose GMOs. It includes the
U.S. Center for Food Safety and the Sierra
Club and several environmental groups who deny and distort the
scientific evidence on GM foods every bit as much as they complain
the deniers of climate change science do. It includes
the Non-GMO Project, started by natural food retailers who
oppose a technology that just happens to threaten their
profits.
Reason’s Ron Bailey has been writing about the
“homicidal
activism”
of anti-biotech fanatics for
years.
(Link via CEI’s
Greg Conko.)
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