Over 80 percent of Americans support "mandatory labels on foods containing DNA"

[ND-Dem]

67. First, I never claimed it was "developed by a corporation". I said "the corporate solution is..."

You may read that as "golden rice was developed by a corporation" but that wasn't my meaning.

However, it is very much a 'corporate solution' which serves corporate interests, and things are more complex than the statement about "corporations not being involved" indicates. They're very much involved, just with layers of "plausible deniability." Corporate interests fund the research, the scientific institutes, etc, in their own interest, though they claim humanitarian motivations,

Syngenta has supported the Golden Rice project and is proud to be associated with it and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), which is the lead developer of the project, along with the inventors in a continuing commitment of the project. We have agreed with IRRI when needed to support the regulatory and stewardship aspects of the project during its advanced development phase to help bring the project to a successful conclusion. Although Syngenta has a significant interest in seeing the humanitarian benefits from this technology become reality, we have no commercial interest in Golden Rice whatsoever. Golden Rice is an exclusively humanitarian project.

Background

Golden Rice was invented by Professor I. Potrykus, previously of the Institute for Plant Sciences, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, and by Dr P. Beyer of the University of Freiburg, Germany. It is a gift to resource poor farmers and consumers in developing countries by these inventors.

Syngenta, the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture (SFSA) and both of Syngenta's legacy companies (Novartis and Zeneca) provided financial support and other resources to the inventors to support the development of Golden Rice for a period of time.


IRRI is now the lead developer of Golden Rice and is directly involved in breeding, capacity building, and safety research. IRRI has been working together, and continues to do so, with leading agriculture and nutrition research organizations such as the Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice), the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute (BRRI), and Helen Keller International (HKI) to evaluate Golden Rice as a potential new way to reduce vitamin A deficiency. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the US Agency for International Development, and national governments are the current donors for the project.

http://www.syngenta.com/global/corporate/en/news-center/Pages/what-syngenta-thinks-about-full.aspx

Gerard Barry... spent more than 20 years in St. Louis working for Monsanto, the company that pioneered genetically engineered crops. He's listed as first inventor on some of Monsanto's most valuable patents. He found the gene that made crops immune to the weedkiller Roundup. That gene is now in soybeans, corn and cotton grown on hundreds of millions of acres.

But along the way, Barry also got interested in rice...Ten years ago, Barry left the corporate world and moved to the nonprofit International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines — the place where the idea of golden rice was born.His job is now to shepherd it down the home stretch to the finish line.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/03/07/173611461/in-a-grain-of-golden-rice-a-world-of-controversy-over-gmo-foods

(Potrykus') relationship with the biotech industry is a long-standing one. As a result of his research, he is named as 'inventor' and thus has interest in some thirty plant-related patents, most of them belonging to Syngenta/Novartis. Alert to the value of the PR bonanza arising from Golden Rice, the biotech industry was keen to help Potrykus get round the multiple impediments posed by the intellectual property rights (IPR) the industry posessed. Potrykus records how 'only (a) few days after the cover of "Golden Rice" had appeared on TIME Magazine, I had a phone call from Monsanto offering free licenses for the company's IPR involved. A really amazing quick reaction of the PR department to make best use of this opportunity.'

However, the PR exploitation of Golden Rice triggered a number of awkward questions. The journalist Michael Pollan, for instance, wrote in The New York Times magazine, 'A spokesman for Syngenta, the company that plans to give golden rice seeds to poor farmers, has said that every month of delay will mean another 50,000 blind children. Yet how many cases of blindness could be averted right now if the industry were to divert its river of advertising dollars to a few of these programs?' (ie existing, but less well publicised, programs for delivering Vitamin A)

http://www.lobbywatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=105

Syngenta AG is a global Swiss agribusiness that markets seeds and agrochemicals. Syngenta is involved in biotechnology and genomic research. It was formed in 2000 by the merger of Novartis Agribusiness and Zeneca Agrochemicals. The company was ranked third in total seeds and biotechnology sales in 2009 in the commercial market.[2] Sales in 2013 were approximately US$ 14.7 billion. Syngenta employs over 28,000 people in over 90 countries. Over half of the sales are in Emerging Markets.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngenta

In response to a report by Vandana Shiva, an Indian campaigner against GM foods, Rockefeller Foundation spokesman Gordon Conway said: "First it should be stated that we do not consider golden rice to be the solution to the vitamin A deficiency problem. Rather it provides an excellent complement to fruits, vegetables and animal products in diets, and to various fortified foods and vitamin supplements."

He said that for poor families lacking, for example, 10%, 20% or 50% of the required daily intake of vitamin A, golden rice could be useful, although even the best lines of rice produced by the bio-tech companies, reported in the journal Science, could contribute only 15% to 20% of the daily requirement.

He added: "I agree with Dr Shiva that the public relations uses of golden rice have gone too far.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2001/feb/10/gm.food