GMO Produce Could Save Millions of Lives
Is organic produce actually healthier than GMO produce? What if GMO produce could be saving millions of lives around the world?
When you walk through the produce section of the supermarket, you’ll generally see two sections: general produce and organic produce. They look exactly the same, but organic costs twice as much. If you’re like me, you must wonder: is there a difference? If so, does it matter?
There’s sort of a difference.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), organic food is grown without synthetic pesticides, uses natural fertilizers and is not genetically modified (GMO). In short, the process of growing an organic crop might be different from the conventional version, but the end result is pretty much the same. So why are people willing to pay extra for organic?
One reason that people buy organic food is that they perceive it as healthier. According to Pew Research Center, more than half of Americans believe that organic food is better for them than conventionally grown food. There are a few reasons for this. One is the perception that organic produce uses less pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers than conventionally grown foods. However, organic produce just uses different chemicals. Provided the product was grown with only non-synthetic sprays, it qualifies as organic. So you still need to wash organic produce.
Another reason people think organic food is healthier is because it is guaranteed non-GMO (please note, however, that non-organic does not automatically mean GMO). More than a third of Americans think that GMO foods are less healthy than non-GMO options. That’s not the case. GMOs have the same nutritional value as any organic produce and can actually be made more nutritionally dense, which we’ll discuss later.
The final reason people will buy organic foods is because of the misconception that they’re better for the environment. While this has to do with the requirement that organic produce use non-synthetic herbicides, the misconception also springs from the idea that GMO crops are inherently bad for the environment. Greenpeace, a famously anti-GMO organization, claims that GMOs lead to “more and more polluted waterways, clear-cut forests, inhumane treatment of livestock, and megatons of greenhouse gasses.”
There’s no evidence for this. In fact, the opposite can be true. Think about how destructive agriculture can be. Humans go into an ecosystem, raze it to the ground, and then replant with a foreign monoculture. Conventionally, in order to grow more food, we have to bring more land into production, thus destroying more ecosystems. Using genetic engineering, we can instead grow more food on a smaller plot of land, allowing us to preserve more natural ecosystems. GMOs generally require fewer inputs (fuel, water, fertilizers, labor, etc.), leading to less water and air pollution. So in the case of environmental impact, organic is no better than GMO, and may be worse.
Now, it’s all well and good to say that there’s no real difference between organic and conventional produce, but why does it actually matter? If it reassures people to buy a more expensive lettuce when they go grocery shopping, let them. It’s their money.
That’s true, but there’s more to it than that. When we demonize non-organic food, especially GMO food, we hinder innovation. If there’s no market for GMO produce, or if people actively fight against the introduction of GMO produce, it won’t be developed for the people that are willing to eat it. That can have terrible consequences.
In 1999, the journal Science published “New Genes Boost Rice Nutrients,” which introduced the invention of β-carotene enhanced rice to the world. It’s an innocuous title for an invention that Time Magazine, a year later, claimed “could save a million kids a year.”
β-carotene enhanced rice, or Golden Rice, as it came to be called, was a rice that had been created via genetic modification to express β-carotene, a precursor to vitamin A. In the developed world, this seems like a strange characteristic to develop, considering that vitamin A can be found in dairy, leafy greens and tomatoes, among other foods. In other parts of the world, however, this innovation could save lives.
Vitamin A deficiency affects millions of people every year, many of them children, leading to millions of deaths and hundreds of thousands of cases of blindness. Most of these people live in areas where rice is the staple crop. For many families, it’s the only crop, with food like butter, eggs or meat being reserved for special occasions.
In developing Golden Rice, lead researcher Ingo Potrykus and his team intended to end vitamin A deficiency worldwide and save millions of lives. They thought that all they needed to do was prove its efficacy, get it past regulatory restrictions and distribute the seeds to farmers. They were wrong.
In 2001, not even a year after Time Magazine featured Golden Rice as its cover article, Greenpeace posted pictures of members protesting the potential introduction of the rice in the Philippines, calling the hype around Golden rice a “propaganda campaign.” They went on to claim that a woman “should have as much as 3.75 kg of genetically engineered rice (dry!) a day if she wants to meet her Vitamin A requirement.” There was no evidence to support that figure, and it would later be disproved.
That one press release was not going to be the end of the opposition to Golden Rice. For the next 20 years, Greenpeace continued to block the approval and introduction of Golden Rice. In 2021, the Philippines approved Golden Rice for commercial cultivation, which seemed like a great leap forward. Unfortunately, in April of this year, a Manila Court of Appeals revoked the permit– in response to a lawsuit brought by Greenpeace and other groups.
This sustained, continuous assault on Golden Rice comes from a distrust of GMOs. Since that distrust has been disseminated so widely, millions of children every year will go blind or die of complications related to vitamin A deficiency. That’s awful in and of itself, but the question that really scares me is this: what innovations were never even tried because a scientist looked at what happened to Golden Rice and decided not to bother?
If we want to fully take advantage of the technology we have available to us, we need to put aside our fear of GMOs and genetic engineering. If we don’t, we’ll be giving up one of the best avenues we have for improving global health. With that as our motivation, shouldn’t we trust the science?
Best,
Grace for the Don’t Count Us Out Yet Team
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