What is golden rice

In the late s, German scientists developed a genetically modified variety of rice called Golden Rice. It was claimed to be able to fight Vitamin A deficiency, which is the leading cause of blindness among children and can also lead to death due to infectious diseases such as measles.

The claim has sometimes been contested over the years, with a study from Washington University in St Louis reporting that the variety may fall short of what it is supposed to achieve. Now, Bangladesh could be on the verge of becoming the first country to approve plantation of this variety.

Advocates of the variety stress how it can help countries where Vitamin A deficiencies leave millions at high risk. The nutrition study is necessary to impartially determine the potential for Golden Rice to be used as a public health approach for reducing vitamin A deficiency.

IRRI supports its national partners in developing pilot-scale deployment strategies to ensure that Golden Rice reaches the farmers and consumers that need it the most. If approved by national regulators and found to be safe and efficacious, IRRI and its partners will work together to introduce Golden Rice as a complementary, food-based approach to improve vitamin A status in most-at-risk populations.

A sustainable delivery program will also be implemented to ensure that Golden Rice is affordable, acceptable and accessible in vitamin A deficient communities.

Golden Rice. Updates on the Golden Rice Project Golden Rice is at different stages of regulatory review in the Philippines and Bangladesh, and Golden Rice will only be made available to the public once all necessary permits have been received. Potrykus and Beyer said they never anticipated the Intellectual and Technological Property Rights and material transfer agreements required for the production of Golden Rice.

These licenses protect inventors' rights to genetic material, scientific techniques, and exchange of seeds for research. A legal assessment of Golden Rice in showed that it contained material protected by greater than seventy patents, but patents vary country to country. Many of the patents do not apply in developing countries, which are the target markets for Golden Rice.

Critics of Golden Rice include the environmental group Greenpeace, headquartered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Greenpeace has staged public protests against Golden Rice, and it opposes all genetically modified organisms. Greenpeace claimed that the amount of beta-carotene in Golden Rice was so small that one would need to consume massive quantities of rice to reach an effective dose. While it can be difficult to measure the ingestion of vitamins, a team of scientists from Syngenta in introduced Golden Rice 2, which produced increased levels of beta-carotene by substituting the original daffodil genes with corn genes.

As of , tests of Golden Rice remained in field trials. While IRRI has participated in the Golden Rice project nearly since its invention, Helen Keller International, headquartered in New York, New York, joined the project in to support the public health benefits of vitamin A, which can prevent blindness. Furthermore, the government of Bangladesh approved field trials of Golden Rice, and in estimated that varieties would be available for consumption by Golden Rice By: Marci Baranski.

Keywords: golden rice , GMOs , agricultural biotechnology. Sources Ahmad, Reaz. Charles, Daniel. New York: Perseus Books Group, Enserink, Martin. International Rice Research Institute. Nash, Madeline.