
Mint Press News
By Katie Rucke
Filipino farmers destroyed an 800 square meter trial plot of genetically modified rice Thursday that was just weeks away from being sent to the authorities for a safety evaluation.
The “Golden Rice” crop was genetically engineered (GE) by scientists to create an increased production of beta-carotene, which the human body converts into vitamin A. The Golden Rice project was started about 20 years ago by German researchers, who received funding from the Rockefeller Foundation.
The group of about 400 protesters, which included local farmers and members of two anti-GMO groups—the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Bikol (KMB) and the Sararong Inisyatiba nin Kahinwanmaan sa Wasakon ang Agrokemikals na Lasong-GMO (Sikwal-GMO)—said they uprooted and trampled the rice plants because they wanted to protect the health of the people and their environment.
Despite the use of genetically modified technology being highly contentious in the Philippines, researchers planted five small test plots in the country, and hoped to be able to release the crop to farmers starting in 2014.
The Philippines is the world’s fourth-largest importer of rice in the world, since the country has very limited land resources to produce the amount of rice needed. However, officials reported earlier this year that due to increased rice planting, they expected a 6 percent increase of the crop this year, which was estimated to result in the production of 18 million metric tons of rice.
Despite the limited amount of land for rice production and the fact that 89 percent of the rice is consumed, Filipino rice farmers often don’t earn enough income to support their families on that money alone.
Scientists reasoned that since there are millions of children in the developing world that have a vitamin A deficiency, which can cause blindness and increase a person’s susceptibility to disease, the vitamin A deficiency is seen as a significant problem in the world. Reports from Helen Keller International say that there are around 670,000 children that die each year around the world from a vitamin A deficiency, and about 350,000 will go blind.
Of the five experimental fields in the country, protesters reportedly destroyed just one. While there were about 30 policemen at the field trying to prevent the destruction of the crop, Bert Autor, the coordinator of Sikwal-GMO and secretary-general of the KMB, said farmers finished the job in about 15 minutes.
“They [farmers] were not able to control their emotional outburst,” Autor said in a statement, adding that the farmers were fired up by warnings from “concerned scientists and peasant leaders” about the “dangers” of the Golden Rice (or GM rice) to health and its threat to biodiversity.
Autor added that the rice “was nothing but a ploy of agrochemical transnational corporations like Syngenta to satisfy their monopoly on seeds and rake more profits.” Syngenta, the third-largest biotechnology and global chemical company in the world, owns the patent on Golden Rice.
Autor said that despite promises from officials from the Department of Agriculture that there wouldn’t be any trial fields, the trials have continued. “We are very concerned as there is news that feed testing will start this year and that the harvest will be used in these feed experiments. In China, the people have protested against the feed trials on children, prompting proponents to compensate the affected families. We do not want our people, especially our children to be used in these experiments,” he said.
“This should serve as a stern warning to those planning to conduct GM field trials in Bicol. What we need is a comprehensive and long-term solution to address hunger and malnutrition. Golden rice, and GMOs [genetically-modified organisms], in general, will only aggravate the already dire condition of the small and resource-poor farmers.”
Despite the protest and destruction of the field, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), the Department of Agriculture and the Philippine Rice Research Institute all have said that the development of the Golden Rice crop will continue in the country, since the purpose of the genetically modified crop is to fight malnutrition.
On its website, the IRRI said the field trials were part of the organization’s work to see if the crop would be a safe and effective way to reduce vitamin A deficiencies, which mostly affect women and children.
Dr. Bruce Tolentino is the deputy director general of communications and partnerships for the IRRI. He said “Vitamin A deficiency is horrible and unnecessary, and we want to do our part to help to reduce it.”
He added that the organization was “really disappointed” the field was vandalized, but said that “This is not a major setback, because it is just one trial of a series and just one of several sites. We remain completely committed to continuing our Golden Rice research to help improve people’s nutrition.”
But despite the allegedly good-intentions of IRRI to develop the crop, the Asian Peasant Coalition (APC) has said there are better ways to reduce the number of people with vitamin A deficiencies than using a genetically engineered crop.
Rahmat Ajiguna, secretary-general of the APC, said farmers cannot trust any scientist or government official who has ties to IRRI, Syngenta, Monsanto or any other agrochemical organization.
Dr. Chito Medina, convenor of Resist and Masipag (Farmer and Scientist for the Development of Agriculture) national coordinator, agreed with the protest and called for an immediate stop to all field testing of GM crops, explaining that the crops are hazardous to human health, the environment and agriculture.
Visit EcoWatch’s GE FOOD page for more related news on this topic.
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EcoWatch Daily Newsletter
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By Katherine Kornei
Clear-cutting a forest is relatively easy—just pick a tree and start chopping. But there are benefits to more sophisticated forest management. One technique—which involves repeatedly harvesting smaller trees every 30 or so years but leaving an upper story of larger trees for longer periods (60, 90, or 120 years)—ensures a steady supply of both firewood and construction timber.
A Pattern in the Rings
<p>The <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/coppice-standards-0" target="_blank">coppice-with-standards</a> management practice produces a two-story forest, said <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bernhard_Muigg" target="_blank">Bernhard Muigg</a>, a dendrochronologist at the University of Freiburg in Germany. "You have an upper story of single trees that are allowed to grow for several understory generations."</p><p>That arrangement imprints a characteristic tree ring pattern in a forest's upper story trees (the "standards"): thick rings indicative of heavy growth, which show up at regular intervals as the surrounding smaller trees are cut down. "The trees are growing faster," said Muigg. "You can really see it with your naked eye."</p><p>Muigg and his collaborators characterized that <a href="https://ltrr.arizona.edu/about/treerings" target="_blank">dendrochronological pattern</a> in 161 oak trees growing in central Germany, one of the few remaining sites in Europe with actively managed coppice-with-standards forests. They found up to nine cycles of heavy growth in the trees, the oldest of which was planted in 1761. The researchers then turned to a historical data set — more than 2,000 oak <a href="https://eos.org/articles/podcast-discovering-europes-history-through-its-timbers" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">timbers from buildings and archaeological sites</a> in Germany and France dating from between 300 and 2015 — to look for a similar pattern.</p>A Gap of 500 Years
<p>The team found wood with the characteristic coppice-with-standards tree ring pattern dating to as early as the 6th century. That was a surprise, Muigg and his colleagues concluded, because the first mention of this forest management practice in historical documents occurred only roughly 500 years later, in the 13th century.</p><p>It's probable that forest management practices were not well documented prior to the High Middle Ages (1000–1250), the researchers suggested. "Forests are mainly mentioned in the context of royal hunting interests or donations," said Muigg. Dendrochronological studies are particularly important because they can reveal information not captured by a sparse historical record, he added.</p><p>These results were <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-78933-8" target="_blank">published in December in <em>Scientific Reports</em></a>.</p><p>"It's nice to see the longevity and the history of coppice-with-standards," said <a href="https://www.teagasc.ie/contact/staff-directory/s/ian-short/" target="_blank">Ian Short</a>, a forestry researcher at Teagasc, the Agriculture and Food Development Authority in Ireland, not involved in the research. This technique is valuable because it promotes conservation and habitat biodiversity, Short said. "In the next 10 or 20 years, I think we'll see more coppice-with-standards coming back into production."</p><p>In the future, Muigg and his collaborators hope to analyze a larger sample of historic timbers to trace how the coppice-with-standards practice spread throughout Europe. It will be interesting to understand where this technique originated and how it propagated, said Muigg, and there are plenty of old pieces of wood waiting to be analyzed. "There [are] tons of dendrochronological data."</p><p><em><a href="mailto:katherine.kornei@gmail.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Katherine Kornei</a> is a freelance science journalist covering Earth and space science. Her bylines frequently appear in Eos, Science, and The New York Times. Katherine holds a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California, Los Angeles.</em></p><p><em>This story originally appeared in <a href="https://eos.org/articles/tree-rings-reveal-how-ancient-forests-were-managed" target="_blank">Eos</a></em> <em>and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.</em></p>Earth's ice is melting 57 percent faster than in the 1990s and the world has lost more than 28 trillion tons of ice since 1994, research published Monday in The Cryosphere shows.
By Jewel Fraser
Noreen Nunez lives in a middle-class neighborhood that rises up a hillside in Trinidad's Tunapuna-Piarco region.