Robin McKie and The Observer have been systematically misreporting on Golden Rice for over a decade. Report: Jonathan Matthews

The pro-GMO lobby were never going to respond well to a court in the Philippines stopping the cultivation of GMO Golden Rice on the grounds that there is a lack of scientific consensus on its safety. But their histrionics failed to catch much attention until The Observer’s science editor Robin McKie published an inflammatory article accusing Greenpeace of causing “a catastrophe” through its role in the court case.

This triggered other media pieces that repeated McKie’s claims that Greenpeace had blocked the planting of “lifesaving” Golden Rice, that “tens of thousands of children could die in the wake of the ruling”, and that this GM rice, despite its ability to prevent blindness and death, had now been obstructed for three decades by “the green movement’s vociferous opposition”.

These claims, as we’ve previously reported, have been roundly debunked by experts. As Professor Glenn Davis Stone has pointed out, there is no evidence that Golden Rice can actually improve vitamin A levels in its target population, and the reason that even after 30 years it is still not ready for commercial production is largely down to numerous technical problems and has “little to do with activists”. Stone has also pointed out that during all these years that Golden Rice has been failing to make the cut, vitamin A deficiency rates have been successfully “reduced in many areas of the world without the enormous cost of Golden Rice”.

If this leaves you wondering how such a misleading piece of reporting popped up in The Observer, then it’s worth noting that this is far from McKie’s first rodeo. As we will see, he and The Observer have been systematically misreporting on Golden Rice for over a decade.

Ready for prime time

In 2013 a story of McKie’s got picked up by media outlets around the world. According to McKie’s original article, not only had Golden Rice been proven effective in ameliorating vitamin A deficiency but it was now ready for prime time: “In a few months, golden rice… will be given to farmers in the Philippines for planting in the paddy fields.”

Headlined After 30 years, is a GM food breakthrough finally here?, McKie’s article was in part one of hope: “Thirty years after scientists first revealed they had created the world’s first GM crop, hopes that their potential to ease global malnutrition problems may be realised at last.” But McKie’s story went on to say that what had held up this remarkable breakthrough for so long was the vehement opposition of ideologically-driven campaigners who saw “golden rice as a tool of global capitalism”.

This view, McKie said, was “rejected by the scientists involved”. He quoted “Adrian Dubock, a member of the Golden Rice project” who talked up the “enormous potential” of Golden Rice and insisted no one was “going to make any money out of (it)”. And Dubock’s opinion, McKie told us, was “shared by Mark Lynas, an environmental campaigner and one of the founders of the anti-GM crop movement”. Lynas, McKie reported, had described Greenpeace’s actions as “immoral and inhumane” because they deprived “the needy of something that would help them and their children because of the aesthetic preferences of rich people far away”.

The only other people quoted in McKie’s piece were four GM crop scientists, who all expressed their support for the technology and/or their concern about regulation hindering it – a concern that Dubock also raised. There was not a single quote from any scientists or other experts, including anyone in the Philippines, who were remotely sceptical about any of the claims put forward in the article. Yet such voices were needed because the article was not just one-sided – its key claims were simply false.

McKie’s fake news

The Observer’s report, along with an article it inspired by Bjorn Lomborg, was considered so misleading by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), the body responsible for developing and deploying GM golden rice in the Philippines, that the institute felt it necessary to make a public statement contradicting both of the article’s key assertions.

Quoting McKie’s claim that “In a few months, golden rice… will be given to farmers in the Philippines for planting in the paddy fields,” the IRRI said: “Golden Rice will not be available for planting by farmers in the Philippines or any other country in the next few months, or even this year”. The IRRI scientists went on to say that they expected that it “may take another two years or more” for Golden Rice to become available to farmers.

As a result of the IRRI’s intervention, more than a month after McKie’s article was first published in The Observer, it was amended online to remove the words “will be given to farmers” and “in a few months”. These were replaced with the more cautious “could be given to farmers” and “next year”. This the paper further qualified in a note on the amendment that said Golden Rice “may not be released until next year at the earliest.” In fact, Golden Rice was so far from ready at the time of McKie’s article that it would be another decade before it finally appeared in farmers’ fields – and even then, this was only in pilot plantings.

The IRRI also contradicted McKie’s other key claim – that Golden Rice had already been proven effective. Quoting the Observer’s description of Golden Rice as “a new strain that boosts vitamin A levels and reduces blindness in developing countries”, the IRRI scientists commented: “It has not yet been determined whether daily consumption of Golden Rice does improve the vitamin A status of people who are vitamin A deficient and could therefore reduce related conditions such as night blindness”. They added that “studies still had to be carried out before this could be known”. Those studies, incidentally, have still not been carried out.

Despite the flat contradiction of McKie’s assertion that Golden Rice boosted vitamin A levels and reduced blindness in its target population, his piece remains uncorrected in this regard. Perhaps understandably so. The accurate story – that Golden Rice wouldn’t be ready any time soon, and nobody knew if it would work anyway – would be an extremely embarrassing one to have reported as world-shaking news.

More problems, hidden interests

The problems with McKie’s article don’t stop there. For instance, McKie maintained that it wasn’t just the Philippines that was on the verge of rolling out Golden Rice, but “Bangladesh and Indonesia have indicated they are ready to accept golden rice and other nations, including India, have also said that they are considering planting it”. But more than 11 years later it hasn’t gone into farmers’ fields anywhere in the world, outside of the Philippines.

Then there is what McKie failed to disclose about the GM promoters he quoted. The most prominent of these was Adrian Dubock. McKie describes him simply as “a member of the Golden Rice project” and one of “the scientists involved”. What he doesn’t mention is that Dubock is Syngenta’s former commercial biotechnology manager, who had also worked for the Syngenta predecessor companies Zeneca Agrochemicals and ICI. What makes this information particularly pertinent is that Syngenta not only played a key role in the Golden Rice project, but at the time of McKie’s article it owned the patents on it. And, although Syngenta claims it has no commercial interest in it, the company still retains full commercial rights over the GM rice.  

McKie also quotes two GM crop scientists, Jonathan Jones and Cathie Martin, who he describes as from the John Innes Centre (JIC) in Norwich. What he doesn’t tell readers is that the JIC and its Sainsbury Laboratory have had tens of millions of pounds in investment from GM giants like Syngenta. Nor does he mention, when quoting Jones’s reassurances about the safety of GM crops, that Jones co-founded a biotech firm that had Monsanto as its “most important customer and collaborator”. Yet this is something of which McKie could hardly be unaware, given that Jones had “found himself at the centre of a storm” over his industry links that was reported on by McKie’s own paper.

Similarly, when quoting Martin about the good things GM can deliver if the “regulatory process is not prohibitively expensive for publicly funded organisations” like the JIC, McKie fails to mention what Martin herself disclosed in her JIC profile at the time – that the public and the private were hard to separate in her world: “I am inventor on seven patents and I recently co-founded a spin-out company (Norfolk Plant Sciences) with Professor Jonathan Jones FRS, to bring the benefits of plant biotechnology to Europe and the US.”

Finally, McKie’s description of Mark Lynas as “one of the founders of the anti-GM crop movement” was based on a Lynas claim that was entirely bogus, as McKie might have discovered with even a modicum of fact checking. In fairness though, he was far from the only journalist to lap up what James Wilsdon, professor of science policy at the University of Sheffield, has called Lynas’s “essentially fabricated reinvention of his own biography”.

Award for a fraud?

You might think it would be pretty humiliating for a leading science editor like McKie to have the key claims in his high-profile article comprehensively demolished by the scientists actually producing the stuff he has been writing about – experts he had clearly failed to consult. Yet when it came to the British Journalism Awards for 2013, not only was the winner for “Science and Technology Journalist of the Year” none other than Robin McKie of The Observer, but the judges gave particular mention to his Golden Rice article:  “His piece on a GM rice strain which could save millions from blindness was a particularly fine piece of science writing on a hugely important global issue.” (It’s worth noting that the director of the corporate-funded Science Media Centre, Fiona Fox, was among the judges that year and so is likely to have been the one other judges turned to when it came to an award for science and technology reporting.)

It would be understandable after that accolade if McKie and his editors concluded that articles about Golden Rice were full of golden promise, gaining attention and earning plaudits however one-sided they were – and however empty the hype they were built around. And Golden Rice promoters might reasonably have concluded that Robin McKie was their go-to guy.

The blame game

That could certainly explain another sensational McKie piece that appeared in The Observer in 2019 under the provocative headline Block on GM rice ‘has cost millions of lives and led to child blindness’. McKie based this article on a new book about Golden Rice by the science writer and biotech enthusiast Ed Regis, and in particular what its author had to say about why this GM rice was taking such an “extraordinarily long time” to reach farmers’ fields.

In McKie’s earlier article, regulation had been in the frame for causing the delay, but McKie had laid the main blame on “the green movement’s vociferous opposition”. Now his new piece reported Regis as placing the blame on green groups and regulation in tandem.

“Regis is clear where the blame lies,” McKie said. “For a start, many ecology action groups, in particular Greenpeace, have tried to block approval of Golden Rice… Nevertheless, this opposition did not have the power, on its own, to stop Golden Rice in its tracks, says Regis. The real problem has rested with an international treaty known as the Cartagena Protocol,” and the government regulations that flowed from it.

But in the press release for his book, Ed Regis, while making clear his dislike of Greenpeace, tells the story very differently from McKie. He starts by explaining that he had previously co-authored a book with the Harvard geneticist George Church. And as a result, “(I) came to regard him as a person who knew everything. And so in 2016, when I read an interview with Church I believed what he said, which was: (1) that a product called Golden Rice was ‘ready’ in 2002, (2) that the environmentalist organization Greenpeace was responsible for delaying its introduction for 13 years, with the result that (3) millions of people died, and (4) that Greenpeace was therefore guilty of a crime against humanity for this wanton act of mass murder. All this made me so mad that I decided more or less on the spot that I had to write a book about Golden Rice to inform the public of this unspeakable atrocity. During the course of my research and writing, however, I gradually discovered that except for (3), all the other claims were false!”

According to Regis, none of Greenpeace’s “diatribes”, as he calls their press releases and position papers, “had done anything to stop, slow down, or interfere with the process of Golden Rice research and development, which proceeded at its own steady, albeit deliberate, pace”. Regis found the real obstacles to Golden Rice being ready were not, as McKie reports, Greenpeace + government regulations, but regulations + the fact “it takes a long time to breed increasingly higher concentrations of beta carotene (or any other valuable trait) into new strains of rice (or any other plant).” This key reason why Golden Rice was taking so long to reach farmers’ fields is completely omitted from McKie’s article, which instead bore the strapline: “Eco groups and global treaty blamed for delay in supply of vitamin-A enriched Golden Rice”.

Sleazy sleight of hand

There is no excuse for McKie keeping green groups in the frame. Regis was crystal clear about their not having delayed the project when talking to interviewers. In one interview, for instance, he again says Greenpeace’s actions “did nothing to halt research and development of Golden Rice”.

And in outlining the two things that had really held Golden Rice up for so long, Regis identified the difficulty of the R&D as primary: “The first [reason] is that it takes a long time to breed increasingly higher concentrations of beta carotene (or any other valuable trait) into new strains of rice (or any other plant). Plant breeding is not like a chemistry experiment that you can repeat immediately as many times as you want. Rather, plant growth is an inherently slow and glacial process that can’t be [sped] up meaningfully except under certain special laboratory conditions that are expensive and hard to foster and sustain. The second reason is the retarding force of government regulations on GMO crop development.”

But in his Observer article about the book, McKie not only omitted the first reason for the delay that “has cost millions of lives” but inflated the role of Greenpeace, while implying that Golden Rice was ready long ago: “It was developed two decades ago but is still struggling to gain approval in most nations.” Regis, it will be remembered, said in the book’s press release that the claim that Golden Rice was “ready” long ago was one of the things he’d discovered to be “false”. Another was that “Greenpeace was responsible for delaying its introduction”. But McKie’s article had Regis blaming “eco groups” like Greenpeace for doing just that.

And, of course, in McKie’s recent (2024) article Greenpeace is back centre stage as the villain of the piece. It was this that prompted Glenn Davis Stone to comment, “The shrill claim that Greenpeace has blocked a lifesaving crop is a sleazy sleight of hand to hide the fact that after 30 years of development, Golden Rice is still not ready.”

Fairytales or reality?

Stone, who says he hopes Golden Rice succeeds while remaining sceptical that it will, recently told an interviewer, “What I really would like most, I think, is for people who are involved with this, and that includes the scientists, the economists who study it and also the journalists who write about it, to be a bit more objective about it. It makes for a good juicy story if you can have a villain in it. So you’ve got a hero here, which are the scientists with their Golden Rice, and you’ve got a villain, [for] which they like to point to Greenpeace, and it makes for a good story.” But this story, Stone says, steers people away from the science.

That, of course, may be exactly what it is intended to do, because when the issues around Golden Rice are examined more objectively, the picture that emerges is one where, as Stone pointed out in the same interview, this “lifesaving” rice – despite 30 years of development – turns out to contain unstable beta-carotene, to have unstudied health impacts, and to have been bred into an obsolete variety.

Stone also points out that – despite all the focus on Greenpeace – their local branch wasn’t the lead in the coalition that successfully challenged the safety of Golden Rice in the courts. The lead petitioner was MASIPAG – a farmer-led network representing over 30,000 farmers, 41 NGO partners, 20 Church-based development organisations and 15 scientists. Other petitioners included the Southeast Asia Regional Initiatives for Community Empowerment (SEARICE), the Peasant Movement of the Philippines (KMP), the Climate Change Network for Community-Based Initiatives (CCNCI), and the Salinlahi Alliance for Children’s Concerns (SALINLAHI), as well as notable individuals, including the former Philippines’ defence secretary and senator Orlando Mercado.

But by focusing almost exclusively on Greenpeace, as McKie does in his articles, it’s possible to conjure up an amorphous international body supposedly driven by an anti-human ideology and “the aesthetic preferences of rich people far away”, rather than admit that the legal challenge to Golden Rice came from a broad coalition deeply rooted in Philippines’ society.

It remains to be seen whether McKie’s latest sensationalist piece of partisan reporting on Golden Rice will also be judged a “particularly fine piece of science writing” rather than a “sleazy sleight of hand”.