Stuffed, But Hungry For More?
Genetic engineering has been used to modify and put into commercial production some of the major agricultural crops in the world, canola, corn, cotton, soybeans and sugarbeet. But these are not the crops that are of the most importance to agriculture in developing countries. Different crops are important for human consumption in countries, like India, the Congo, Malaysia and Zimbabwe. Some of these foods might be familiar to us, like banana, rice and eggplant, but others we might never have heard of, like cassava and sorghum.
Golden rice is a variety of rice that was engineered using recombinant DNA to produce provitamin A or beta-carotene, which can be converted to vitamin A in the human body. While in developed countries we get adequate vitamin A in our diet, in developing countries people suffer from vitamin A deficiencies, which can cause night blindness. In Southeast Asia, it is estimated that a quarter million children go blind each year because of nutritional deficiencies. Also lack of vitamin A makes certain other diseases more severe. Since rice is a staple, and sometimes the only, food for many of the world’s poor and because rice lacks the provitamin, scientists in Switzerland and Germany engineered rice with two plant genes and one bacterial gene to produce provitamin A in the grain.
For more information on Golden Rice, see http://cls.casa.colostate.edu/transgenicCrops/hotrice.html
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