Golden Rice Finally Released in Bangladesh

Golden Rice Finally Released in Bangladesh

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The consortium has one overriding rule – any crops that result from their project are to be given – for free – to poor farmers. How is giving free seeds to farmers taking away their rights? This also perpetuates the – farmers saving their own seeds – mythology. When farmers have the opportunity to buy seeds every year, they generally choose to do so, because it is a massive time and resource saver. Saving seeds is a lot of work. It’s cheaper to just buy them. And in this case – they are just being given the seeds. Even if farmers want to save their seeds, they can go right ahead and do so. No one is stopping them or taking away their “sovereignty.” Another lie is that golden rice doesn’t work. I already debunked this bit of nonsense: Quote: The FDA has specific rules for labeling of approved food products. In order to claim that a food is fortified with a specific vitamin, it has to include a specific amount based on typical American consumption. But the typical southeast Asian eats 25 times the rice of the typical American. So the amount of beta-carotene in the golden rice is not sufficient, given levels of consumption, to be significant for an average American, but is significant for a child growing up in southeast Asia with Vitamin A deficiency. Rice was targeted because it is a staple crop for half the world, including much of the world that is poor and undernourished – which does not include the US.

When I was a Peace Corps Volunteer, Vitamin A deficiency was still a problem. One of the side projects they allowed us to do was to encourage vegetable growing, although this was not limited to those high in beta-carotene, the gist of it was still to help address deficiencies arising from a diet heavy in rice, wheat, and lentils with little else. I remember that carrots and yams were few and far in-between at the village markets.

I think I remember nurses giving kids a drop of a Vitamin A solution on Polio day (a day when parents are encouraged to get theirs kids a polio vaccine).

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