February 11, 2007
Updated 06:43:00 (Mla time)
Rina Jimenez-David
Inquirer

MANILA, Philippines -- Last year, the rice-eating, rice-growing world—which counts over 100 rice-growing countries and over two billion rice eaters—was thrown into an uproar by two scandals involving GE (genetically-engineered) rice.

Field trials of GE rice in the United States and China were found to have contaminated the global rice supply—alarming news because, according to the Greenpeace report “Future of Rice,” “There is evidence that the Chinese rice variety may be harmful to human health (while) there is not enough data to determine if the US rice is safe.” When GE rice from the United States and China were found to have been surreptitiously imported into Europe and parts of Asia, “farmers, millers, traders and retailers around the globe (faced) massive financial costs, including testing and recall costs, cancelled orders, import bans, brand damage and consumer distrust that could last for years.”

Already, says Greenpeace campaigner Von Hernandez, the European Union has restricted rice imports from the United States, while Vietnam and Thailand, the world’s biggest exporters of rice, have announced their commitment to grow only GE-free rice. Greenpeace says that since the two countries account for more than half of all the rice traded in the world market today, their commitment to grow only GE-free rice “will put mounting pressure on other rice-producing nations to commit to a GE-free rice supply.”

“At least three multi-million dollar class action lawsuits have been filed by farmers and traders
seeking damages from Bayer CropScience, the company responsible for the US contamination,” states the Greenpeace study. “The world’s largest rice processor has already stopped buying US rice because of brand damage. In China, attempts by the Government to control the illegal sale and sowing of GE rice seeds have clearly failed. The contamination has spread like a plague across China and now into the global rice supply.”

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“FUTURE of Rice” was written by Dr. Emilio Borromeo, who holds a doctorate in genetics, worked for IRRI and is now a freelance consultant on sustainable agriculture and GE crops; and Dr. Debal Deb, who has a Ph.D in ecology and founded in 1998 the first non-governmental rice gene bank in east India.

Their study, they say, is concerned not so much about the risks and costs of developing GE rice, but “about the compelling reasons why we should embrace rice knowledge developed by farmers over thousands of years and combine it with the best of modern biotechnology;
not genetic engineering but science that is precise, predictable and acceptable to the public.”

The authors come to the conclusion that “GE rice and the risks that it brings are simply unnecessary.” Their reasoning is that with as many as 140,000 varieties of rice developed during the course of shared agricultural history, varieties developed for specific reasons, including withstanding climactic conditions and resisting certain infestations, “the
diversity of rice and varieties represents the future of rice and those that depend on it.”

Why then are companies—with the cooperation of governments—spending billions to tweak the DNA of rice (among other foods)? Borromeo and Deb assert that “GE technology is an attempt by large corporations to take from public hands the shared knowledge of rice and replace it with a technology that doesn’t work.”

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IF THESE companies have their way, they might also eventually end up “owning” rice itself, since they would own the patent over the GE’d rice (which is an entirely new organism, not just a new variety of rice). “They are promoting a level of corporate control over food production that will unacceptably compromise the cost of and access to food, the diversity of food types, and the safety of food that we eat.”

GE rice, the authors stress, “is no magic bullet and will cause more problems than it can possibly solve.” At best, they say, GE rice “has promised much but delivered little, while ignoring the potential health, environmental and economic consequences of a technology that cannot be controlled.”

And it’s not as if there are no other alternatives to GE rice to boost productivity and create sturdier, more resistant, and even more fragrant rice. Many existing or promising technologies—that do not involve genetic engineering—“not only solve pest and disease problems but create additional sources of income and food for farmers and communities.”

All these “alternative” (well, not really alternative because they are traditional and time-tested)
solutions “exist and are used and working in various parts of the world,” say Borromeo and Deb. But they also require that governments “invest in the long-term future of their farming and food producing systems and that the rice industry recognize that its own long term viability rests with rice production systems that work and that its customers will accept.”

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WHICH brings me to the consumer’s viewpoint. Since I am a consumer, and, being a Filipino, a consumer of rice, I think I can speak authoritatively on the issue.

The news that GE rice is being sold in supermarkets that I patronize filled me with dread. If I am going to be eating rice—and serving it to my family and guests—that may tweak my DNA and give me freakish grandchildren, then at the very least I demand that I know what exactly it is I am putting in my gullet.

While labeling laws in other countries require food marketers to state if their products contain GE organisms, there is no such requirement in the Philippines. And if “double dead” chickens and pork from China can be sold openly in local markets, it’s not too farfetched to imagine that we could have been eating GE rice without our knowing it. It’s time to get mad, my peeps!