Wonderful Golden Rice

The front page story of the Guardian Weekly this week about GM food was remarkable in many ways.




Firstly, the content of the story brought a warm glow to my heart. After years of battles with regulators and agencies, and false starts with the science, it appears that GM food now has the immediate potential to improve world health.



A small infusion into rice seeds used in the Philippines this year will create a rice crop with marginal different properties to the regular crop. But those properties will give young kids nutrients they otherwise lack and give protection against some killer diseases. Indonesia and Bangladesh are set to follow suit next year.



It is like all those years ago when we started getting Flouride in our drinking water. Simple. Barely noticed. Low cost. And revolutionary in its effect.



I can also hope that medically enhanced food might suddenly explode in impact, as producers have positive examples to quote and countries are shamed into copying their neighbours’ good sense. Although global health has been one of the major success stories of my generation, there is so much further this can be taken. A happy story indeed.



But perhaps even more remarkable than the content was its location, on the front page of GW. For GW has been tireless in its scaremongering about GM food over the years. I must have read fifty articles on the subject, and all the previous forty nine have pained Monsanto as some sort of pantomime villain and raised the spectre of poor countries and their farmers in hoc to globalised big business. Oh, and the risk that these modified foods would somehow affect food chains and kill us all.



(That last risk always seemed a bit farfetched. After all, our food chains are so well regulated. For example, imagine how remote a possibility it would be for horsemeat to get confused with beef. What? Oh? Whoops.)



Even more remarkable still is the tone of the article. Far from simply describing the happy news and its potential impact on kids around the world, the article focuses on how long it has taken to reach this point, and apportions quite a lot of blame to over-cautious regulators and scare-mongering lobbyists.



To his credit, someone called Mark Lynas, a founder of an anti-GM movement, has publicly apologised for his prior opposition. He admits that the effect of his and other groups has been to slow the implementation of beneficial science. Countries have blocked research. Talented individuals have avoided the field. Regulators have been over-cautious. Focus has been on risks alone rather than a balance of risks and benefits. Monsanto and others have been forced into a defensive stance rather than a promoting one.



It is to its credit that GW includes this article so prominently. Yet it cannot bring itself to take the final steps. Unless you believe that its regular readers will all know full well the history and therefore see some self-criticism, there is not the slightest tone of direct apology in the article, and still less any attempt to improve in the future.



And it is almost as if GW can’t bring itself to believe its own story. An inside page has John Vidal commenting under the headline “Hard to trust GM in grip of global giants.” Yes, hard indeed. GW proves that.



I can only imagine the debates that went on in the editorial team deciding how to feature this story. Well done to the editor, who I assume insisted on front page treatment for the potential more embarrassing but more honest and more uplifting angle.



I look forward to more such articles. The Guardian has excellent journalists, and a good approach at times of getting underneath a story. It remains a good read. It and its ilk also do provide a valuable brake on some genuine threats. For one, Rupert Murdoch and his cronies were goliaths brought low by the David of the Guardian. And GW refused to shut up about climate change, no matter how few copies that sells these days.



But the GM debate does offer lessons to GW, and it would do well to try to heed them.



One lesson is about the profit motive. It is true that capitalism has its ugly side. But, as Churchill said of democracies, it is the least bad system we have got. Without the profit motive, Golden Rice would never be produced, and we still would not have Flouride in toothpaste and I would probably have dentures by now. The profit motive attracts resources and provides capital to invest. With sensible regulation, it usually works. Alternatives such as Government intervention and Communism usually don’t.



Yet in GW profit is an evil word. Especially short-term profit or large profit or global profit, as if somehow we should restrict capitalists to local playing fields with small benefits that they have to wait a long time for.



And this lazy categorisation creates lazy, unbalanced journalism, time and again. GM food is not the only own goal: just within the energy sector, look at nuclear power, gas fracking, and biofuels. In each case lobby groups given oxygen by people like GW have placed Europe on the wrong side of progress, to all our detriment.



Another lesson is to look at benefits as well as risks. A bias for optimism makes for sunnier stories and happier readers, and in my experience is often justified. Humans are wonderful creatures who can achieve things that often feel like miracles. Too much of the time, GW is looking for villains not heroes, exploitation rather than breakthrough. This point is well made by Lynas, who quotes a regulatory system dominated by avoiding small risks, rather than ready to offset small risks against quantified large benefits. The journalists and lobby groups have fallen into the same trap.



Finally, always propose practical alternatives. There is a lot of “why oh why” in journalism, and not enough active advocacy of real alternatives. Instead of starting with evil Monsanto, start with the issue of stunted growth and childhood disease. How can we improve child health? That way things like GM can appear as a potential solution, albeit with caveats to address, rather than a hazard to be avoided.



This last lesson can apply in climate change articles too, as well as economic ones. In climate change, we are often fed a diet of doom, with the proposed solutions wildly unattainable or impractical. Start with the issue instead of the doom, and maybe solutions exist that are palatable. The people trying to manipulate climate are somehow distasteful due to links with climate denial and big business, but if they have solutions we should embrace them anyhow.



Perhaps such an approach would rob GW of its passion and its appeal. Personally I don’t think so. More balance, more solutions, more honest apologies and more rethinking of positions might just lead instead to better journalism, and the ability to offer readers more sunny stories. And, much more important, better nourished kids in the Philippines and elsewhere.