Growing a Second Green Revolution

Growing a Second Green Revolution

The ‘golden rice’ champion on the bewildering campaign to stop a miracle food that could save millions of children from blindness and death.

By Hugo Restall in the Wall Street Journal

Los Baños, Philippines

Robert Zeigler is an environmentalist, but he is also a plant scientist. And that has led him to question the motives of an environmental movement that opposes genetically modified crops despite overwhelming evidence that they are safe.

As director general of the International Rice Research Institute, Mr. Zeigler is pushing the development of “golden rice,” a genetically modified variety that began in the lab about two decades ago. Geneticists inserted a gene into the rice plant that allows it to produce beta carotene, which makes its grains yellow.

Because the human body converts beta carotene to vitamin A, golden rice has the potential to dramatically improve the lives of millions of people around the world, particularly in Africa and Southeast Asia, where vitamin A deficiency is an especially common malady that can cause blindness and increases the risk of death from disease. Children are particularly vulnerable: “An estimated 250,000 to 500,000 vitamin A-deficient children become blind every year, half of them dying within 12 months of losing their sight,” according to the U.N. World Health Organization.

Golden rice thus sounds like a godsend—but don’t tell that to activists opposed to anything that falls in the category of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. In August 2013, anti-GMO vandals broke into the International Rice Research Institute’s research facilities and destroyed field trials of golden rice.

The attack set back the program by only a few months, and Mr. Zeigler still hopes to bring the new variety to market in the next two to three years. But the episode was a reminder that environmental groups will campaign hard to put political obstacles in his way, and try to scare farmers and consumers off the yellow rice.

Greenpeace is petitioning the Philippine government to ban GMOs and promote organic farming. The organization says that vitamin A deficiency can be tackled with more balanced nutrition and calls golden rice a “Trojan horse” designed to overcome public resistance to a dangerous technology.

More than just golden rice is at stake. Total rice production is stagnant but populations are growing. Asia badly needs a second “green revolution” of increased yields—Mr. Zeigler estimates that the harvest must increase to 550,000 tons of milled rice a year by 2035 from 450,000 tons today.

One important way to achieve that is through genetic modifications that will produce higher-yielding varieties, and the International Rice Research Institute will be central to that effort. Founded in 1960 with funding from governments and the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, the IRRI was one of the leading institutions in the original green revolution of the ’60s and ’70s. Transgenic technology is becoming an important part of its research arsenal.

Mr. Zeigler is an avuncular 63, but he maintains a grueling schedule. He is just back from Nepal, where a deal was signed for India, Bangladesh and Nepal to accept the others’ approvals of new rice varieties, and he will give the keynote address at the World Rice Congress in Bangkok next week. Sitting in his office, he looks out on rice fields that the institute has cultivated since 1963 to test whether high-yield varieties will exhaust the soil (so far so good). Nearby is a refrigerated gene bank that holds seed samples of more than 117,000 rice varieties used in crossbreeding programs.

Golden rice is a proof of concept in several ways, he explains. It started out showing that “you could engineer a relatively complex trait into a staple food that addressed a major dietary deficiency in hundreds of millions of people.” But on the way to market, golden rice ran into difficulty not of the radical-protester variety: The difficulty and expense of developing a GM food beyond the lab turned out to be much harder than golden rice’s champions initially understood.

For instance, the Philippine government has a well-established process for assessing rice varieties that are already approved in other countries. The IRRI had to work with the authorities to develop new procedures to certify a GM crop developed in the country.

Then there was the problem that the original patent-holders stipulated that golden rice could not be sold for a profit. While the rice will be provided to farmers at a low cost, eliminating all profits meant that it would be excluded from existing marketing and distribution channels.

Finally there are the extra safeguards imposed on any transgenic crop, even though they are safer than those developed using traditional breeding. Crossbreeding different rice varieties runs the risk of creating a weed that can’t be killed without destroying the crops it infests, whereas GM rice can incorporate a single well-understood gene into an existing variety.

Solving the problems facing golden rice will demonstrate that publicly funded entities can use transgenic technology to enhance food security. While companies like Monsanto make important contributions, Mr. Zeigler believes governments can play a crucial role when there is no clear business model.

Rice is a good example. It is self-pollinating, so farmers can buy a new variety and then save some of the grain to plant next year. Some firms sell sterile hybrids, but these have weaknesses that have confined them to a small share of production. Rice farmers have tended to be poor and isolated and produce on a small scale, hardly an appealing market demographic.

Yet the returns to society as a whole from higher-yielding rice varieties are staggering. The IRRI’s semi-dwarf varieties, including the famous IR8, saved India from famine in the 1960s. And they provided good investment opportunities for the World Bank across the region, since they responded well to better growing conditions. Up went dams and fertilizer factories, and up went Asian incomes and living standards.

However, about half of Asia’s rice farmers were left behind because they tilled marginal land, prone to drought, flooding and other problems. The 1960s breeding technology didn’t have answers for them. But today the rice institute is developing varieties that have better resistance and grow well on poorer land. That will be one part of a new jump in yields.

The environment will also benefit from the second green revolution, as crops will require less water, fertilizer and pesticides. There will be opportunities to use GM technology to develop new varieties faster and more safely—as long as the green activists don’t succeed in demonizing them.

“The question is, will this fantastic technology that has the ability to address so many serious human needs be limited so that only short-term, high-profit products of the private sector will be enjoyed, or will the broader public be able to benefit from them?” Mr. Zeigler asks. “And I think it’s a pretty important question. You can’t destroy the public sector’s ability to take advantage of this and move it forward and then at the same time complain that it’s only the multinationals that use the technology.”

GM food has become a casualty of the anticapitalist ideology of the environmental movement, he explains. “You see that jingoism used when people talk about corporate farming, it is a code word for evil.” This obscures the fact that the fundamental science behind GM is sound.

Mr. Zeigler can’t resist a comparison to partisans on the right who he says willfully misrepresent science in a similar way: “If you strip away the actual words and look at the argument structure, it’s exactly the same as the climate-change deniers,” he says, and “the anti-fracking people. If you’re not tied to the science and the facts, you can say just about anything.”

Nevertheless, the environmentalists are his main target: “This is the thing that drives me crazy. As you’ve probably figured out, my politics are a little bit to the left and I feel that society has roles to play, etc. And to see my former allies just throwing out any association with fact and what I’d like to think of as truth, it’s very disheartening because I look at the position of the left on the environment and GMO technology as being totally indefensible.”

Mr. Zeigler also says that governments need to stop trying to control prices in ways that prevent incentives from reaching the farmer. Shortsighted export bans during the spike in food prices in 2008 further disrupted an already thin and distorted market. And he cites the lack of clear property rights in many countries as a deterrent for farmers to invest in their land.

Private companies may also be able to take advantage of the telecommunications revolution that has put cellphones in the hands of rice farmers. The kinds of tailored information services that help big American farmers make decisions based on satellite images and big data could be provided to small farmers at little marginal cost.

Ideally Mr. Zeigler would like to see the public and private sectors working on GM food in parallel, each focused on what it does best. A partnership of that sort underpinned the original green revolution, but it has been lost.

That’s because the world has become complacent about food security. The assumption is that grain shortages are a thing of the past and we can concentrate on better nutrition and how to meet the demand for meat. While those are legitimate goals, “if we take our eye off the basic staples, we could run into trouble,” Mr. Zeigler warns.

He makes a good case that mass starvation is the kind of risk that governments should make contingency plans for and invest in solutions. Even on current trends, the International Rice Research Institute has a significant role to play. And if the institute can get golden rice to market, it will have forged a key part of the second green revolution.

Mr. Restall is the editorial-page editor of The Wall Street Journal Asia.