GM potato — Magic bullet or mere hype? 

DEVINDER SHARMA / The Hindu Business Line 12feb03

AFTER the failure of the much-hyped `golden rice', comes another `magic bullet' from the biotechnology industry: A protein-rich genetically modified potato — to combat malnutrition in India. It looks as if agricultural scientists have suddenly woken up to the lingering crisis on the nutritional front and are desperately looking for technological remedies to fight the scourge of mankind — silent hunger.

Potato, on an average, contains a maximum of 1.98 per cent protein. Even if its availability has been enhanced 50 per cent, the protein increases to 3 per cent. How will this `protein-rich' potato help solve the country's malnutrition problem?

`Hidden' or `silent' hunger, is the new buzzword in scientific circles. Thirty years after the advent of Green Revolution technology, scientists are rediscovering the importance of nutritional security for the masses. But the preoccupation is not so much with addressing the problems of `hidden hunger' as with according public acceptance to the controversial science and technology of genetic engineering. The `magic bullets', therefore, fail to enthuse the hungry masses.

At the time of the Green Revolution, high-yielding varieties of wheat were developed for increased yield potential at the cost of reduction in nutrients. Both the factors — yield and protein — are negatively correlated, in the sense that if you were to breed for higher productivity, it would be at the cost of quality protein. The productivity increase in wheat and subsequently in rice was justified on the plea that the country needed to feed the hungry millions.

For the next 30 years or so, while agricultural scientists remained flummoxed on the necessity to increase micronutrient deficiency, the policy-makers too remained blind to the ground realities, as a result of which crops that could meet the requirements of nutritional security did not attract attention.

Such was the callous neglect and apathy that agriculture was sacrificed at the altar of GDP and economic growth once the country achieved food `self-sufficiency'. As a result, those who were hungry also suffered acutely from malnutrition and the related ailments. And those who were chronically malnourished fell easy victims to such natural calamities as cold or heat wave.

For an average Indian, the common menu revolves around `dal' and `roti'. While the `roti' (or Indian bread) was easily accessible (if you had the purchasing power), the availability of `dal' (or pulses/lentils) has been on a continuous decline. Pulses being the crop of marginal areas were ideally suited to the rain-fed areas, which account for 70 per cent of the country's land under plough.

Pulses, on an average, contain 20-24 per cent protein. Any effort to increase the production of pulses would have helped reduce the prices, thereby making it easily accessible. This did not happen. Instead, the country, which consumes the largest quantity of pulses, gradually turned into a major importer.

At the same time, production of cereals continued to grow. With globalisation adding to unemployment, even the cereals went out of the masses' reach. Thus, the country is saddled with over 50 million tonnes of wheat and rice even as some 320 million people go to bed with empty stomachs everyday.

`Golden rice' was the first `magic bullet' (see Box).

Ostensibly, in a desperate effort to repair its damaged credibility, the genetic engineering industry is all set to unleash its "secret weapon", and that too on millions of unsuspecting destitute smallholders in the developing world. But what is not understood is that, like all other "secret weapons", `golden rice' too is an ecological and health hazard.

Nor is it the answer to the nutritional needs of the small producers and the poverty-stricken masses in the South. It can provide, at best, a minuscule portion of micro-nutrients. The remaining intake will have to be met from other nutritional sources.

In India, for instance, rice is consumed invariably with a combination of pulses, which provide the essential proteins and vitamins that the human body requires. So is it in other developing countries. Syngenta's Dr Adrian Dubock recently claimed that "the levels of expression of pro-Vitamin A that the inventors were aiming at, and have achieved, are sufficient to provide the minimum level of pro-vitamin A to prevent the development of irreversible blindness affecting 500,000 children annually, and to significantly alleviate vitamin A deficiency affecting 124,000,000 children in 26 countries."

He also stated that each month that the entrance of `golden rice' into the market is delayed, 50,000 children will go blind. However, a simple calculation based on the recommended daily allowance (RDA) figures shows that an adult would have to eat at least 12 times the normal intake of 300 gm of rice to get the daily recommended amount of pro-vitamin A from `golden rice'.

Moreover, vitamin A availability depends upon the fat absorption ratio. Those who are hungry and malnourished do not have adequate fats to absorb vitamin A that is made available. Micro-nutrient deficiency in human food is nothing new. But societies over the centuries have evolved and perfected dietary systems that adequately take care of the nutrient balance the human body needs.

What is perplexing is who decided that Vitamin A is the most essential micro-nutrient required to be incorporated in rice? Why not Vitamin B complex? After all, several hundred million people in India suffer from malnutrition (compared to only half a million people worldwide who get blinded from Vitamin A deficiency). In India, some 12 million people suffer from Vitamin A deficiency, but the number of people deficient in Vitamin B complex is several times more.

Under an Indo-Swiss collaboration, the `golden rice' technology is to be made available to the Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR) and the Department of Biotechnology. The project, funded to the tune of $2.6 million over seven years, aims to engineer the pro-vitamin A genes into local varieties of rice.

The majority of the acutely malnourished people whom the proponents of `golden rice' claim to be targeting cannot afford to buy rice from the market. If these poor people cannot afford to buy normal rice, how will they buy `golden rice' is a question that has been conveniently overlooked.

If these hungry millions were able to meet their daily requirement of rice, there would be no malnutrition in the first place. The problem, therefore, cannot be addressed by providing nutritional supplements through genetically modified rice but by bringing in policy changes that force the governments to ensure food for all.

It is true that potato is part of the common Indian diet, and that it is priced so low that even slum-dwellers can afford to buy it. The potato (especially the way it is cooked in India) has been held responsible for obesity and other health-related problems that afflict the modern generation, and has a very low protein content.

Potato, on an average, contains a maximum of 1.98 per cent protein. Even if its availability has been enhanced 50 per cent, the protein increases to 3 per cent. How will this `protein-rich' potato help solve the country's malnutrition problem?

With 3 per cent protein — perhaps researchers can even raise it to, say, 5 per cent — how will the country's nutritional security be addressed?

About the availability of amino acids, this is what Dr Arpad Pustzai has to say: "As regards the claims of increased essential amino acids; it is meaningless. The nutritional value of potato proteins is high because its amino acid composition is balanced, containing the right amounts of lysine and methionine. It is not clear that the increased essential amino acid content is the result of the increased protein content or not."

Some reports point to another flaw. The protein is expressed more in the leaves than in the tuber itself. The cost involved in producing and developing the transgenic potato must also be ascertained. Is it not time civil society questioned the wisdom of such expensive research projects when simple and adaptive technological solutions and the right policy mix can make a monumental difference?

At the National Centre for Conservation and Utilisation of Blue-Green Algae, New Delhi, scientists have developed a mutant strain of Spirulina that contains 80 per cent protein. Normally, Spirulina, which falls in the category of cyanobacteria, carries 65 per cent protein.

For two years, scientists have been ready with this wonder strain of Spirulina but there is no enthusiasm. It use in human, animal, agricultural and nutritional needs has been well documented but no one seems to be as excited as the molecular biologists are over GM potato.

The reason is simple: there is no industry for promoting and applying such useful technologies. The global effort to shift the focus of agricultural research from addressing immediate hunger to `hidden hunger' is in reality an effort to postpone the real problems confronting society.

Scientists and socio-economists need to come out with strategies that will make available to the needy the abundant food rotting in the godowns.

By diverting attention from the more pressing problems of hunger and starvation, scientists are merely trying to protect their own livelihood security. They know for sure that any attempt to eradicate `hidden hunger' is bound to fail unless an all-out attack is launched to first remove hunger.

`Hidden hunger' cannot be removed without eradicating hunger. `Cutting-edge' science has first to accept this.

The author is a New Delhi-based food and trade policy analyst. Responses can be emailed to dsharma@ndf.vsnl.net.in