10th August 2013

A group of activist farm­ers in the Philip­pines stormed a gov­ern­ment research facil­i­ty and destroyed an area of genet­i­cal­ly mod­i­fied rice crops the size of 10 foot­ball fields. Accord­ing to New Sci­en­tist, the farm­ers say that genet­i­cal­ly mod­i­fied organ­ism (GMO) foods have not been estab­lished to be safe for con­sump­tion and that the real solu­tion to world hunger isn’t bio­log­i­cal­ly engi­neered plants, but a reduc­tion in world­wide rates of pover­ty.

“The Gold­en Rice is a poi­son,” said Willy Mar­bel­la to New Sci­en­tist. Mar­bel­la is a farmer and deputy sec­re­tary gen­er­al of a group of activists known as KMP — Kilu­sang Mag­bubukid ng Pilip­inas or Peas­ant Move­ment of the Philip­pines.

The farm­ers attacked the fields at the research facil­i­ty in Pili, Camarines Sur out of con­cern that their own crops could be pol­li­nat­ed and there­by con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed by the GMO plants, pos­si­bly result­ing in a boy­cott of their prod­ucts like U.S. farm­ers of soft white wheat saw when a strain of Mon­san­to her­bi­cide-resis­tant wheat abrupt­ly appeared in an Ore­gon field. South Korea and Japan both halt­ed imports of U.S. wheat in the wake of the dis­cov­ery.

Gold­en Rice is a strain of rice that has been mod­i­fied by sci­en­tists to con­tain beta carotene, a source of vit­a­min A. An esti­mat­ed 2 mil­lion peo­ple die from vit­a­min A defi­cien­cy world­wide every year. Annu­al­ly, about 500,000 chil­dren — main­ly in the devel­op­ing world — go blind from lack of the nutri­ent.

Gold­en Rice advo­cates claim that replac­ing half of a child’s rice intake with Gold­en Rice pro­vides them with 60 per­cent of their dai­ly require­ment of vit­a­min A.

Rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Inter­na­tion­al Rice Research Insti­tute (IRRI), a fer­vent­ly pro-Gold­en Rice orga­ni­za­tion, say that even though the GMO has yet to be approved for human con­sump­tion, research tri­als sug­gest that it’s safe, and that sci­en­tists can’t find out any­thing more if peo­ple destroy the test plants.

Fram­ing attacks on GMO crops as attacks on the effort to end world hunger, the IRRI issued a series of press releas­es since the action at Pili on Thurs­day decry­ing the farm­ers as ill-informed “van­dals.”

Anti-GMO activists say that too many stud­ies on the effects of GMOs are being under­tak­en by orga­ni­za­tions that have a stake in their suc­cess. They also say that Gold­en Rice is being used as a seem­ing innocu­ous “poster boy” crop to sell GMOs to an over­ly cred­u­lous pub­lic.

Beau Baconguis of Green­peace South­east Asia told New Sci­en­tist, “There is not enough safe­ty test­ing done on any GM crops.”

“I think that the farm­ers know what they want,” she said. “What they want is a safe envi­ron­ment that they can grow their crops in” with­out fear of con­t­a­m­i­na­tion and a sub­se­quent boycott…This is play­ing with the lives of peo­ple when you are using Gold­en Rice to pro­mote more GMOs in our food.”

Watch a video state­ment about the inci­dent from the Inter­na­tion­al Rice Research Insti­tute, www.youtube.com/embed/uxa76CHDH5Y