rice is the staple food of more than half the world’s population. or so goes about 90% of the introduction of the papers IRRI scientists have published. or some variant of it, at least. as the opposition against genetically modified crops mount (switzerland just vetoed GM crops in a referendum last week), proponents of GM crops rally their arguments.

monsanto released videos of interviews with farmers touting the benefits of GM crops and the differences it made to their lives. filipino farmer jesus gavino attests,

“With the help of biotech, we can send our children to school.”

IRRI and cornell university rehashes an already familiar story on the iron-fortified rice.

Haas and his colleagues tested the biofortified rice in the Philippines, where they monitored the diets of 192 Catholic religious sisters in 10 convents.

the experimental rice used in the study has four to five times more iron content than commercially available rice in the Philippines.

their results were promising:

“Although this sounds like a modest increase, it means that instead of 50 percent of women getting adequate iron, 71 percent of the women who consumed the biofortified rice, while eating a traditional Philippine diet, met the estimated average requirement for iron.”

in fact, their preliminary results were so promising that, on my first year here in germany, i was helping hubby feed iron-fortified rice to piglets to further verify the effect of the diet on diet-induced anemia. the nun-study was the “proof-of-concept” that hubby needed to receive funding for his experiments. that was five years ago. which makes me wonder why this press release is doing the rounds now. ah, the politics of scientific research…

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