Rice Genome Project.... Done!

AtomicBomb writes "First, it was human; now, it is rice. The gene code for the first important crop will soon be (sort of) available. BBC provides us a few more articles. Hopefully, the genetic informatuion can speed up the breeding of tougher and higher-yielding varieties that will benefit the world's burgeoning population..."

Comments

Hunger spin doesn't pan out

[andaru]

They are trying to make themselves look like humanitarians by working on rice and claiming that their research will help the starving people of the world; that the abillity to tailor rice to produce more will provide the surplus of food that is missing in the equation of world hunger.

There are all sorts of things wrong with this.

1. The human race produces more food than is required to feed the entire population of the world. This has been true for at least a decade, I believe.

2. The reasons that surplus food does not make it to the hungry of the world are almost always political (and often exacerbated by the physical difficulties of distribution). It is not that there is not enough food, it is that it is difficult to give it away without it being stolen by the local powers. In many cases, the donors of the food (I'm looking at you, U.S. gov't) know in advance that the people who are receiving it will sell it to buy weapons; donated food is often used to covertly fund arms deals.

3. Often, the original causes of hunger are political deals which trade the agricultural land of native citizens (without compensation or consent) to U.S. agricultural corporations, who remove the native population from 'their' new farmland and often destroy it in the process of farming it irresponsibly.

4. Eating a sufficient quantity of food does not mean that you are getting the necessary nutrition to survive. You cannot establish good health in an impoverished area just by providing enough rice.

5. History hath shown that when companies genetically engineer foods, they do it, not for the purposes of increasing the nutritional value, or flavor, or anything else of real interest to the ultimate consumer. They engineer things like square tomatoes to save on shipping costs. They engineer herbicide immunities, not so that farmers can grow more food by growing fewer weeds, but so that they can sell their patented herbicide. The ultimate effect of this is to damage our agricultural resources for the profit of a few large corporations.

6. Even if we could 'safely' increase yield with genetically engineered rice, the likelihood is that this would just lead to faster consumption of our agricultural land (since we farm it irresponsibly) and exacerbate our water crisis (meanwhile, Monsanto is trying to buy up all of the world's water supply they can).

7. Given the cavalier attitude of corporations releasing under-tested genetic modifications into the wild, I would not give them good odds of getting the benefits of genetic modifications to outweigh the harms. I would never release a piece of software with the cavalier attitude that these companies release biological command sets. They have proven that they have under-tested by making "scientific" claims about the engineered foods that have turned out too be patently untrue (won't pose human allergy risks, won't contaminate non-GM crops, etc.). It seems that software developers are able to be carefull enough to deliver mission critical applications that actually work as advertised; these genetic systems are the ultimate in mission critical (the mission being the survival of an ecosystem which supports us) and it seems that they are using much less caution in dealing with them than you would if you were writing a piece of software to control someone's life-support equipment.

Anyway, the point is, when you read an article that says that some large corporation's forray into the land of profit is somehow going to bring widespread benefit to humanity, you can bet it is a load of crap. Any action which brings widespread benefit to humanity tends to be counter to their abillity to control their profits.

As an example, if a giant fast food franchise chain were going to automate all of their drive-up windows, you might see an article with a headline like, "Automated drive-ups free workers from meaningless, horrible drudgery." What do you think happens to the workers? Does the company, in its bid to benefit humankind, keep paying them so that they can go and create something usefull for the rest of the world? No, the workers get laid off and go on unemployment or welfare, the company makes more money, and the landlord has a hard time getting the rent. This example looks like a benefit to everyone at first, but when you look closer, it is the corporation making money at everybody else's expense.