Abstract
Following its approval in the Philippines in July 2021, provitamin A-rich “Golden Rice” is set to become the worlds' first commercialized genetically modified crop with direct consumer benefits. Despite supplementation and fortification programs, the burden of micronutrient deficiencies remains high. For Golden Rice to be successful in reducing vitamin A deficiency, it needs to be taken up by food systems and integrated into consumer diets. Despite negative information often being associated with genetic engineering, evidence suggests that consumers react positively to Golden Rice. Thus, it offers policy makers and public health stakeholders a new, powerful option to address micronutrient malnutrition that they can integrate as a cost-effective component in broader nutrition strategies and tailor it to consumers’ heterogeneous socio-economic contexts and needs to promote “Golden Diets”. For this to happen, the right framing of the pathway from policy to consumption is crucial.
Highlights
Paper for the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2020
2021 was yet another landmark for the strengthening of the agriculture-nutrition-health nexus, when the Philippines gave their green light for the cultivation of genetically modified (GM) Golden Rice, a rice variety biofortified with provitamin A (Science, 2021)
Instead of looking at the heated debate and po larization between proponents and opponents (Kettenburg et al, 2018), it is worthwhile to focus on how Golden Rice could be taken up by local communities and how its use could be better framed by policy makers, nutritionists and the scientific community
Summary
2021 was yet another landmark for the strengthening of the agriculture-nutrition-health nexus, when the Philippines gave their green light for the cultivation of genetically modified (GM) Golden Rice, a rice variety biofortified with provitamin A (Science, 2021). Bio fortification refers to the use of crop breeding or of agronomic practices to increase the mineral or vitamin content in crops to address micro nutrient malnutrition and improve public health. Hundreds of conven tionally biofortified crop varieties have already been released and shown impact and acceptance (Birol et al, 2015; CAST, 2020), but Golden Rice is set to become the worlds’ first commercialized GM bio fortified crop. Instead of looking (again) at the heated debate and po larization between proponents and opponents (Kettenburg et al, 2018), it is worthwhile to focus on how Golden Rice could be taken up by local communities and how its use could be better framed by policy makers, nutritionists and the scientific community
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