What’s so golden about Golden Rice?

A golden rice breeder, Mallikarjuna Swamy, examines golden rice at the International Rice Research Institute’s transgenic screenhouse in Los Banos, Laguna province, south of Manila. – AFP

TOWARDS the end of 2020, I tuned in to a webinar on so-called Golden Rice, the beta carotene-enriched rice touted by the Philippine government as the solution to Vitamin A deficiency (VAD) among Filipino children. Led by the Agriculture Department’s Philippine Rice Research Institute, the project appears to have the backing of the entire agriculture bureaucracy, not to mention the International Rice Research Institute and Swiss agrochemical giant Syngenta, owned by ChemChina.

Far less enthusiastic were the farmers, it seemed. The contentious rice tariffication law was signed just a year earlier, wiping out some P80bil (RM6.77bil) in income for rice producers after palay prices plummeted. Already one of the perennially poorest, most marginalised sectors in the country, our farmers were contending with a market flooded with imported rice when the pandemic hit. The push to put Golden Rice into our soil and markets thus struck me as misguided at best and opportunistic at worst.