GMO food, what are we really doing?

I kind of see the whole GMO food business as much the same as Western Medicine has become; just a band-aid solution. If we are going to solve the worlds food crisis we really should be looking at things more holistically and solving deeper issues about nutrition, pesticides and soil depletion.

Scientists from the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics (ACPFG) have produced rice with high enough iron levels to meet daily-recommended requirements for iron intake. However, will this really solve the issue of malnutrition and soil depletion? And what side effects will there be, as the industry is unregulated we will not know the side effects for probably a few generations. As they say, the mistakes we make will show in our children’s children.

Scientists based at the Universities of Adelaide, Melbourne and South Australia, and Flinders University, genetically modified rice to increase the amount of iron that is transported to the endosperm of the grain (the part that people eat). This resulted in rice that has up to four times more iron than conventional rice. The rice also has doubled zinc levels. It all sounds so generous of these scientists to try to solve the world’s nutrition problems, but the sceptic in me thinks otherwise.

Dr Alex Johnson from ACPFG said, “Rice is the primary source of food for roughly half of the world’s population, particularly in developing countries, yet the polished grain, also known as white rice, contains insufficient concentrations of iron, zinc and pro-vitamin A to meet daily nutritional requirements. But Dr Alex Johnson, if we just ate the whole grain being ‘brown rice’ instead of polishing it, all the nutrients, and fibre would still be there. So why are we playing with the genetics of this plant and then bothering to polish it again? We could perhaps ‘do less’ with a much bigger result in enhancing nutritional status.

“A lack of genetic variation in rice has hindered efforts by conventional breeding programs to address iron levels. These programs have not been able to achieve the level of iron and zinc in the rice grain that we are able to achieve with a biotech approach in our glasshouse experiments.”
This research represents the first time rice lines have been reported with iron levels at or higher than the daily-recommended levels. Why do we need higher than recommended daily levels?

According to the World Health Organisation, iron deficiency is the most common and widespread nutritional disorder in the world and affects more than two billion people (30% of the world’s population). Symptoms include poor mental development, depressed immune function and anaemia.
This being so, I still GMO as a band-aid to deeper issues.