Posted on 02/22/2013 10:52:31 AM PST by CharlesMartelsGhost
Vitamin A deficiency has killed 8 million kids in the last 12 years. Help is finally on the way. Finally, after a 12-year delay caused by opponents of genetically modified foods, so-called “golden rice” with vitamin A will be grown in the Philippines. Over those 12 years, about 8 million children worldwide died from vitamin A deficiency. Are anti-GM advocates not partly responsible?
Golden rice is the most prominent example in the global controversy over GM foods, which pits a technology with some risks but incredible potential against the resistance of feel-good campaigning. Three billion people depend on rice as their staple food, with 10 percent at risk for vitamin A deficiency, which, according to the World Health Organization, causes 250,000 to 500,000 children to go blind each year. Of these, half die within a year. A study from the British medical journal the Lancet estimates that, in total, vitamin A deficiency kills 668,000 children under the age of 5 each year.
Yet, despite the cost in human lives, anti-GM campaigners—from Greenpeace to Naomi Klein—have derided efforts to use golden rice to avoid vitamin A deficiency. In India, Vandana Shiva, an environmental activist and adviser to the government, called golden rice “a hoax” that is “creating hunger and malnutrition, not solving it.”
The New York Times Magazine reported in 2001 that one would need to “eat 15 pounds of cooked golden rice a day” to get enough vitamin A. What was an exaggeration then is demonstrably wrong now. Two recent studies in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition show that just 50 grams (roughly two ounces) of golden rice can provide 60 percent of the recommended daily intake of vitamin A. They show that golden rice is even better than spinach in providing vitamin A to children.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
WHEN LUDDITES KILL: The Deadly Opposition to Genetically Modified Food: Vitamin A deficiency has killed 8 million kids in the last 12 years. Help is finally on the way.
Finally, after a 12-year delay caused by opponents of genetically modified foods, so-called “golden rice” with vitamin A will be grown in the Philippines. Over those 12 years, about 8 million children worldwide died from vitamin A deficiency. Are anti-GM advocates not partly responsible?
Golden rice is the most prominent example in the global controversy over GM foods, which pits a technology with some risks but incredible potential against the resistance of feel-good campaigning. Three billion people depend on rice as their staple food, with 10 percent at risk for vitamin A deficiency, which, according to the World Health Organization, causes 250,000 to 500,000 children to go blind each year. Of these, half die within a year. A study from the British medical journal the Lancet estimates that, in total, vitamin A deficiency kills 668,000 children under the age of 5 each year.
Yet, despite the cost in human lives, anti-GM campaigners—from Greenpeace to Naomi Klein—have derided efforts to use golden rice to avoid vitamin A deficiency.
For all the claims of “murder” thrown at the NRA over its policy arguments, the usual suspects are much quieter on this subject, where the connection between policy-advocacy and dead children is much clearer.
Greenpeace is just another eco-fascists organization thinking they know what is best for the rest of the world.
This shows why one cannot have a reasonable discussion with these people... they will put the "welfare" of butterflies ahead of that of human beings!
Until libs reduce our country into a third world cesspool and I have no choice but to eat this food, I will continue to raise and preserve my own heirloom veggies and fruits.
Okay, how do we separate the beneficial stuff from the stuff that has potential to harm? I’m no idiot. Humans have been modifying food for millenia (corn wouldn’t be corn without humans) through cross-polination, selective breeding, etc..., but how do we know when we’ve maybe crossed a line we shouldn’t have?
GMO food is not about feeding the world or saving the children. It is about controlling the supply of food through patent laws.
“Control the oil,you control the nation. Control the food, you control the people.” Henry Kissinger.
Nice tag line. Updated;
“Joe Biden’s motorcade has killed more people than my guns.”
Modifying to add vitamins is fine with me, I have issues screwing with genes that add insecticides, etc....
Start with the Movie “Food inc.”
Also “The World according to Monsanto.”
Then “The Future of Food”
The patent holder only controls the seed produced pursuant to his patent. The fact that the marketplace recognizes some patented seeeds to be markedly superior to seeds previously in commercial use testifies to the value of free markets.
Liberals are Luddites. They hate progress that will result in healthier children with fewer adverse consequences for the environment.
You’d think Greenpeace would want to end world hunger and take millions of square meters of farmland out of circulation. You’d be wrong.
Does the "it's for the children" reasoning have a familiar ring to it? Personally, I think it's BS. It's mostly about Syngenta controlling that part of the seed market like Monsanto with corn, soy beans and cotton. GMO seeds being 'intellectual property' farmers can't save any of the seed for the next season unless they pay royalties to the seed producer. Just google "Monsanto sues farmer" and see what's going on.
Making crops pest-resistant means fewer applications of toxic chemical pesticides to control pests.
It means less environmental degradation and more safe and healthier food on the table. Apparently you must like food slathered with chemicals that are more dangerous than genes that combat pest infestation of the foods you eat.
You’re an idiot!
Constitutionally patents are on very weak legs when applied to plants [IMO], as it says To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; but plants aren't 'inventions' nor are these modifications 'discoveries' -- add to that the 'perpetual copyright' the Supreme Court basically handed Disney means that these GMO patents may realistically never expire.
If liberals and RINOs stopped paying farmers not to farm, stopped turning corn into fuel, and stopped sending aid to evil dictators and other countries that want to party like it’s 1499, then we wouldn’t need any of these GMOs as there would be enough food “fer the childrun” and these archaic societies would be forced into modernity.
A plant variety must be invented and asexually produced by the applicant to be eligible for a patent. Plant patents, like utility patents, expire after 20 years.
You are so correct in that it is to control the food supply. Farmers are taking Monsanto to court as the farmers have been told they can no longer use their own seeds to grow crops but have to buy them from Monsanto.
Just because something has a basis in something simpler, or is an improvement doesn't mean it's not a new invention; IIRC, there is a little plastic piece that can fit in your pocket that literally replaced a whole roomful of machinery for dialysis.
A plant variety must be invented and asexually produced by the applicant to be eligible for a patent. Plant patents, like utility patents, expire after 20 years.
That's just my point! Plants aren't invented! Soybeans, asexually reproducible, for example, are still soybeans -- even if they have a patented resistance to roundup.
And you are ignorant of the effects of GMOs on human health.
“Vitamin A deficiency has killed 8 million kids in the last 12 years.”
If there ever was a sentence designed to manipulate and control, that’s it.
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