Jackie,
> Come on Dale, get with it. These multi-national companies do
> not spend millions of dollars engineering food out of the
> goodness of their hearts, they do it for PROFIT - the bigger,
> the better.
I was mainly talking about IRRI's efforts to develop nutritionally enhanced
varieties of rice. IRRI is part of the Consultative Group for Agricultural
Research. The CGIAR is "an informal association of fifty-eight public and
private sector members that supports a network of sixteen international
agricultural research centers."
http://www.cgiar.org/centers.htm
I am a somewhat familiar with this because I did my dissertation research at
CIAT in Colombia. I think these ag research centers do a lot of good. From
everything I have seen and heard, the rice breeders at IRRI are absolutely
top-notch. BTW, they have a lot of good publications on rice culture and
development issues.
http://www.cgiar.org/irri/publications/pubcontents.htm
> That profit cannot come from the poor, malnourished people
> they want to "help". It will come from the big governments
> providing aid (you know, the ones with deep pockets).
Which is better, food aid or cultivar development?
> Remember the old saying: "Give a man a fish and he eats for a
> day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime."
Don't you think that development of improved cultivars falls into the latter
category?
The real disagreement driving this whole thread is the distrust of genetic
engineering among Sanet subscribers. My point, and the reason I jumped into
this thread, is that the hypothetical problems with transgenic crops are
nebulous, trival and academic compared to the needs among the worlds poor.
If vitamin A enriched rice can be made, then by all means it should be done,
transgenic or not.
Dale
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