New study finds that most families at risk for vitamin A deficiency can’t grow golden rice themselves, and most commercial farmers won’t grow it either

Behind the story we put out yesterday about GMO golden rice is a new peer-reviewed study by Glenn Davis Stone, professor of sociocultural anthropology and environmental studies in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St Louis, and Dominic Glover, a rice researcher at the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Sussex.

Article 2 below is the study abstract and Article 1 is Washington University in St Louis's news story about the study.

1. No clear path for Golden Rice to reach consumers
2. Golden Rice and technology adoption theory: A study of seed choice dynamics among rice growers in the Philippines
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1. No clear path for Golden Rice to reach consumers

By Talia Ogliore  
Washington University in St Louis, February 7, 2020
https://source.wustl.edu/2020/02/no-clear-path-for-golden-rice-to-reach-consumers/
[links to sources at this URL]

* Seed choice study reveals flawed assumptions behind hotly debated GMO
* After nearly three decades of development, Golden Rice is still beset by problems, according to Glenn Davis Stone, professor of sociocultural anthropology and environmental studies in Arts & Sciences

Heralded as a genetically modified crop with the potential to save millions of lives, Golden Rice has just been approved as safe for human and animal consumption by regulators in the Philippines. The rice is a beta carotene-enriched crop that is intended to reduce Vitamin A deficiency (VAD), a health problem in very poor areas.

But a new study finds that most families at risk for VAD can’t grow Golden Rice themselves, and most commercial farmers won’t grow it either.

“Many families with Vitamin A deficient kids don’t even have rice land to plant it,” said Glenn Davis Stone, professor of sociocultural anthropology and environmental studies in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and co-author of a new paper in the journal Technology in Society.  “And those in the mountains won’t plant it because it has been bred into the lowland varieties of rice known as IR-64 and RSC-82.”

The regulatory approval in the Philippines is a landmark for the scientists who developed Golden Rice for nutritional purposes. It is the first such approval in the developing world. But even after nearly three decades of development, Golden Rice is still beset by problems, according to Stone.

Golden Rice still has to be approved for commercial sale, and it still needs a company to grow marketable quantities of seed. And even then, Stone argues, there is no clear path for the rice to get to poor children.

Stone, an internationally recognized expert on the human side of global agricultural trends, was an early advocate for keeping an open mind about ‘humanitarian’ GMO crops, such as Golden Rice. Since 2013, he has directed a major Templeton Foundation-funded research project on rice in the Philippines.

Stone’s new study is based on surveys and interviews of more than 115 rice farmers in the Nueva Ecija region, considered part of the ‘rice bowl’ of the Philippines.

Writing in the Feb. 7 issue of The Conversation, Stone and his study co-author Dominic Glover, a rice researcher at the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Sussex, suggest that backers of Golden Rice — and even some economists who have tried to project its health impacts — have made certain flawed assumptions about farmers’ willingness to plant the crop.

“The old claim, repeated again in a recent book, that Golden Rice was ‘basically ready for use in 2002’ is silly,” Stone and Glover wrote. “As recently as 2017, IRRI made it clear that Golden Rice still had to be ‘successfully developed into rice varieties suitable for Asia, approved by national regulators, and shown to improve vitamin A status in community conditions.’

“The Philippines has managed to cut its childhood VAD rate in half with conventional nutrition programs. If Golden Rice appears on the market in the Philippines by 2022, it will have taken over 30 years of development to create a product that may not affect vitamin levels in its target population, and that farmers may need to be paid to plant.”
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2. Golden Rice and technology adoption theory: A study of seed choice dynamics among rice growers in the Philippines

Dominic Glover, Sung Kyu Kim, Glenn Davis Stone
Technology in Society
Volume 60, February 2020, 101227
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160791X19304804?via%3Dihub#!

Highlights

* To reach people at risk of vitamin A deficiency, GR must first be planted.
* Paper examines seed selection practices of Philippine rice farmers.
* We find little evidence of chaotic seed fads influenced by off-farm didacts.
* However, off-farm didacts do appear to influence perceptions of seed popularity.
* Farmers are unlikely to plant GR in its current varieties, unless induced to do so.

Abstract

Golden Rice (GR) is a much-debated transgenic crop. Many commentaries and economic analyses have assumed that, if and when the new GR varieties are released, the grains will automatically find their way onto the plates of children in especially poor families who are at risk of vitamin A deficiency (VAD). But many of these families are not rice growers or are unlikely to adopt the varieties into which the transgenic trait has been bred. This raises the neglected question addressed in this paper: How likely is it that commercial rice growers will choose to plant GR varieties? To examine this question, we draw upon and contribute to a wider literature on what drives farmers’ seed selection practices. Seed choice has been a frequent case in the elaboration of technology adoption theory. We apply a recently proposed tripartite model of learning, and present new survey data to shed light on the dynamics of seed choice and variety replacement rates among rice farmers in two sites in Nueva Ecija, Luzon, the Philippines. We compare our findings with previous research on the seed choices of Indian cotton and rice farmers in Warangal, Telangana, India. Seed choices in Nueva Ecija show a moderate degree of faddishness and herding behaviour, and the varieties in which the GR trait are expected to be available have declined in popularity. Farmers here show a modest and variable susceptibility to persuasion by external parties that seek to promote specific rice varieties. Our study suggests that commercial rice farmers may not choose to plant GR varieties unless they are offered specific inducements to do so.