The research reported below on GM rice in China suggests some very significant benefits are accruing to farmers growing GM rice. It noth cut costs for poor farmers and improved health, according to the just published study.

GM proponents wishing to propel China into a GM future are making the most of the study - and the researchers themselves seem to be taking a lead in the hype. One of the resarchers, Jikun Huang, , who led the study, is quoted enthusiastically predicting, "Agricultural biotechnology may boost China's agriculture, improve the nation's food security, and increase the income and improve the health of rice farmers."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/04/29/wrice29.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/04/29/ixworld.html

A BBC report quotes Jikun Huang as saying "he hoped it would help persuade the Chinese government to license the commercial use of GM rice." (GM rice praised in Chinese study)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4495775.stm

For some this wave of GM rice hype may produce a remarkable sense of deja vu.

The American researchers Carl Pray and Scott Rozelle, who together with Huang Jikun and another Chinese colleague, Hu Ruifa, have produced this research, have previously done an exactly similar job on GM cotton in China.

Their surveys conducted in five northern provinces in China on the impact of Bt cotton pointed, in the words of Randy Hautea of the GM lobby group ISAAA, to GM cotton having "positive and significant economic and health benefits for poor, small farmers". (Why genetically modified cotton thrives in China)
http://www.gene.ch/genet/2002/Oct/msg00008.html

And in the case of Bt cotton too the researchers weren't at all shy about suggesting that there were policy implications for the expansion of GM cultivation in the light of their findngs.
http://ideas.repec.org/p/cdl/aredav/1025.html

But Bt cotton points up the danger of arriving at short-term solutions to long-term problems, particularly when there are other low-cost low-risk solutions to the problems that GM technologies seek to overcome.
http://members.tripod.com/~ngin/article2.htm
http://www.farmingsolutions.org/
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=5172

In fact, there have already been reports of major problems in China with GM cotton and even predictions that the technology could not only be useless within a decade but, in the words of one Chinese reseacher, "could cause a disaster".
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=3636

A report published in June 2002 seriously questioned the claims of success made for Bt cotton in China. The report suggested that while the widespread adoption of Bt cotton in China may have reduced pesticide consumption, it had also resulted in the evolution of Bt toxin-resistant bollworms which could make the technology "ineffective in controlling pests after eight to ten years of continuous production". The scientists also pointed to secondary pests emerging that caused equivalent damage to Bt cotton.

Inevitably, the research came under ferocious attack from the GM lobby, even though it was based on the work of scientists at a research institute funded by China's State Environmental Protection Agency. But then Liu Xiaofeng, a researcher in Henan, China's number two cotton producing province, confirmed the research findings. Liu was cited as saying that the cotton bollworm was indeed developing resistance and predicted it would no longer be susceptible to Bt cotton within six to seven years. He also confirmed that Bt cotton was not effective in controlling secondary pests.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=3636

Prof. Dayuan XUE, of the Nanjing Institute of Environmental Science in China has also expressed scepticism about the claims made for major benefits for small-scale farmers. "Modern agri-biotechnology has produced significant benefits for commercial companies, " he says, "but not for small farmers in China."
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=2765

Hans Herren, Director General, of the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology Nairobi, Kenya and winner of the 1995 World Food Prize puts his finger on the problem: "farmers are likely to be weaned from pesticides to be force fed biotech seeds, in other words, taken off one treadmill and set on a new one! The trend towards a quasi-monopolization of funding in agricultural development into a narrow set of technologies is dangerous and irresponsible. Also, too many hopes and expectations are being entrusted in these technologies, to the detriment of more conventional and proven technologies and approaches that have been very successful and which potential lies mostly unused in the developing countries. It is only too obvious to concerned scientists, farmers and citizens alike that we are about to repeat, step by step, the mistakes of the insecticide era, even before it is behind us."
http://members.tripod.com/~ngin/feedtheworld.htm

The BBC report on the GM rice study also notes some more specific concerns over how the study has been conducted. Sze Pang Cheung of Greenpeace China is quoted as saying: "The Science paper states that farmers cultivated the GE rice without the assistance of technicians, and that quite a number of the randomly selected participants grew both [genetically engineered] and conventional varieties on their small family farms."

"In other countries, GE field trials are tightly regulated, monitored and separated from conventional rice crops.

"The Chinese system of regulating GE field trials is failing. It looks like GE rice has grown out of control under the very noses of the scientists that were trusted to control it."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4495775.stm

The New York Times recently reported that experimental GM rice which has been through no approval process and whose health and environmental effects remain entirely unknown was being sold for commerical purposes by a university researching it, and going into China's food supply.

"Many sellers here said the supplies came from a local university that specializes in biotech rice research. They said bags of rice could be bought there... "All the anti-bug seeds have been sold out," said a woman operating the store at the Huazhong Agriculture University in Wuhan.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=5118

With the world becoming ever more aware of the problem of rogue GM crops, and buyers and regulators already taking action over rogue GM maize out of the US, China will be committing economic suicide if it allows itself to be manipulated further down the dangerous GM path.
------

Farmers say GM rice cuts pesticide illness
Tim Radford, science editor
Friday April 29 2005
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/gmdebate/Story/0,2763,1472840,00.html

Small farmers in China growing GM rice reported higher yields than for conventional varieties, a lower use of pesticides, and less illness related to the use of the pesticides, Chinese and US scientists report today in Science journal.

In eight field trials in two consecutive years, the 69 farmers grew a rice genetically engineered to be resistant to stem borer and leaf roller, and also a rice fitted with an insect-resistance gene from a cowpea plant. They were not paid and made their own decisions about pesticide use; the research was funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

For comparison, the researchers also surveyed farmers who used conventional varieties, or who grew both types. All applied the same kinds of pesticides, but on a per hectare basis the quantity and cost of those applied to conventional rice was eight to 10 times higher.

Yields of one GM variety were 9% higher than normal; the harvest from the other was about the same.

The researchers also asked the farmers' families if they had headaches, nausea, skin irritation, or digestive upsets after spraying. None of the farmers who completely converted to GM crops had pesticide health problems in either 2002 or 2003.

Of those that grew both GM and conventional varieties, 7.7% reported some illness in 2002, and 10.9% in 2003.

"This study provides China and other nations with objective, research-based information about whether GM food crops can actually improve farmer welfare," said Carl Pray of Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited