more appeals to REASON (are you kidding!) on AgBioView re: organics etc and golden rice
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From: Craig Sams This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Subject: Craig Sams' final appeal to reason
The flurry of critiques of my posting was a bit of a surprise as I tried to be reasonable on issues like pesticide residues, E.coli, etc. My points still stand. I will be brief.
1. Organic food usually contains no pesticide residues and, if it does, they are at far lower levels than in conventional food.
2. Organic food has never permitted the many additives and hormones, some of which have been banned in recent years.
3. There is no recorded case of certified organic production methods being a cause of E.coli. How can anyone consistently and repeatedly ignore the obvious problem? CDC records since 1983 show the main channel of transmission of E.coli O157:H7 to human beings is via hamburgers and other meat products that have originally been contaminated with cow faeces shortly after slaughter. Please can we have one scientist on this website who will accept that this is true? I am beginning to feel very lonely in making this blindingly obvious assertion. Of course botulism and salmonella are risks, as with all food, and hygiene and good manufacturing practice are crucially important. But the suggestion that organic food is the source of the tragic annual deaths from E.coli O157:H7 is a smear and that is why I am dismayed to see it repeated despite its irrelevance.
4. The direct recipients of agricultural subsidies are the producers of primary commodities such as soybeans, corn and wheat. This distortion of the market is greater than any other comparable government intervention in any other marketplace, except defense, where there are good political reasons for it. Subsidies of Western farmers are a principle cause of poverty and starvation in the Third World. If the US government subsidised Iowa farmers but not Nebraska farmers, then subsidies would be a principle cause of poverty in Nebraska. Subsidies create an artificially low price structure for basic commodities that favour American and European exporters and drive Third World unsubsidised producers out of business. (Dumping surpluses has the same effect). The subsidies also make the production of chicken, beef, pork, corn syrup, corn chips and other foods cheaper, thereby giving an unfair competitive advantage to all the participants in the subsidised chain. The subsidy 'trough' is an exclusive one, only rich people are allowed to put their snouts in, everyone else in the world has to stand on their own two feet. Am I the only person who thinks this is immoral, cynical, corrupt and inconsistent with the principles of a free global market economy?
5. Genetic engineering is not the same as traditional breeding. For years the proponents of GM have sung its praises for just this reason. The Maya clearly did something very clever to create maize out of teosinte, but I am not aware of any evidence that this involved gene splicing .
6. Nobody has attempted to reproduce Puztai's research. The crucial factor, intestinal lesions, is the source of public concern. Problems like irritable bowel syndrome, autism and 'leaky gut' are chronic conditions of little relevance to a farm animal that is going to meet its end as soon as it achieves marketable weight, but it matters a lot to a human who is hoping for at least three score years and ten.
7. Land. If everyone became vegetarian we could live on one seventh of the amount of arable land we need now. Put another way, the world's population could increase to 35 billion before there were food shortages. There would be other problems of overpopulation long before that. If everyone in the US ate less meat they would be a lot healthier and a lot less obese. Would that be so terrible? If agricultural subsidies were dropped, then we would see a fall in meat consumption as real market mechanisms took over from the totally false mechanisms that currently apply.
Craig Sams
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From: Red Porphyry This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Subject: Re: AGBIOVIEW: Potrykus and Vitamin A
After a month hiatus from this group to celebrate the twelve days of Christmas and meet several pressing work deadlines, the Redster is back. :-) After catching up on this list, I found the most interesting comments to be those made by Potrykus himself (msg # 932) about golden rice. I must say, however, that I'm not sure what he means about the golden rice discussion being "not too helpful". It's unfortunate that he apparently doesn't see any importance in discussing just how much vitamin A the average Asian adult or child can actually expect to obtain from eating golden rice. Be that as it may, I was heartened to see that he did at least agree that the best strain of golden rice he and his co-workers had created thus far ("Z11b") only yielded at best 1.6 micrograms of beta-carotene per 1 gm (dry weight) of golden rice. We are, at last, beginning to get somewhere. I also recognize that he is currently working on making "Z11b" homozygous for the beta-carotene pathway in order to increase the yield to 2.0 micrograms of beta-carotene per 1 gm (dry weight) of golden rice and (presumably) ensure that the trait "breeds true". Although the original Science article describing the achievement is now one year old, it seems reasonable to me that Potrykus will succeed in improving "Z11b" as outlined in his Science paper within the next two or three years.
Even so, this still doesn't change the fact that, even if Asians completely change their diets and eat 300 gm (dry weight) of golden rice per day, adults will still only obtain 15% of the RDA of vitamin A from it. Most likely, they will eat no more than 1/3rd of this per day, meaning golden rice will only provide 5% of the RDA of vitamin A (for children, these percentages are all cut in half). While 5% is better than nothing in absolute terms, I stand by my claim that golden rice is not, and never can be, the golden bullet that will solve the problem of severe vitamin A deficiency in Asia. If solving VAD is truly the goal, golden rice will (assuming Asians actually *do* end up eating *some* of it on a daily basis) at most serve as one small piece in the overall solution puzzle. Like it or not, most of the solution will involve vitamin A supplementation (either by pill or by traditional fortification of foodstuffs and cooking oils) and increased local production and consumption of fruits and vegetables high in beta-carotene. On the other hand, if actually solving the problem of VAD isn't really the point ("Asians don't need to be brought up to Caucasian nutritional standards, they just need enough to get by") then perhaps it doesn't matter. I do find it curious that an unusually large number of contributors to this list seem extremely reluctant to even consider fortification + fruits/vegetables + golden rice as an appropriate approach to VAD, particularly given the fact that one-half cup (4 oz.) of cooked carrots by itself provides the RDA of vitamin A for adults.
I also eagerly wait with bated breath to hear what Potrykus' "secret strategy" is for completely changing the terms of the debate and ending VAD in one fell swoop and for all time. My "secret strategy" is to feed Asian adults 4 oz. of cooked carrots per day and Asian children 2 oz. of cooked carrots per day. :-)
Red