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ASIA: Facing the Threat of GE Rice

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Mar 27 2007 (IPS) - With an eye to the future of rice farming in Thailand, a local grassroots organisation is bringing together youth in a north-eastern rice-growing province in a celebration of the diverse varieties of this staple grown in the traditional way.

The event in Kalasin, from Mar. 28 to Apr. 4, aims to ‘’expose the young to the local rice-growing culture,” says Janphen Ruyan, programme manager of the Foundation of Reclaiming Rural Agriculture and Food Sovereignty Action. ‘’Rice is our life; it is not something we just consume.”

This youth camp aims to make the sons and daughters of the country’s farmers ‘’proud of what their communities have produced in the past” and ‘’the need to do more,” she explained in an interview. ‘’There is concern because some of the local varieties of rice are disappearing.”

In fact, such an awareness campaign is part of a broader effort, spanning the rice-growing countries of Asia, to showcase the triumphs of farmers and rural communities that toil to ensure an abundant crop annually. Thirteen countries, ranging from Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka, on one end, to Cambodia, Indonesia and the Philippines, on the other, are part of the Week of Rice Action (WORA), which runs from Mar. 29 to Apr. 4.

‘’This is a fight for the grassroots people,” says Anne Haslam, spokeswoman for the Pesticide Action Network Asia and the Pacific (PAN-AP), a regional non-governmental organisation (NGO) based in Penang, Malaysia which is spearheading this campaign. ‘’We want to collect a million signatures during the week to support the work of the local farmers.”

The week of activism is a response to growing fears that traditional farming is under threat from genetically engineered (GE) rice varieties, she told IPS. ‘’GE rice has been detected in some Asian countries.”

‘’Agri-business has paved the way for hybrid rice and now, GE varieties such as ‘Golden Rice’, ‘Bt rice’ and ‘Liberty Rice’, have brought about not only the loss of strong and unique local and traditional rice varieties, but their contamination as well,” states the petition being circulated for signatures during (WORA). ‘’GE will only make the problem of world hunger worse.”

The petition also targets the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), based in Los Banos in the Philippines, accusing it of joining ranks with agri-business giants to ensure ‘’corporate control of seeds and agriculture,” which, the petition argues, ‘’rightfully belongs to the farmers of the land.”

IRRI has led the way in producing high yielding hybrid rice in Asia for over four decades. In the last ten years, for instance, it developed over 20 hybrid rice varieties and distributed them to nine Asian countries, from India and Bangladesh in South Asia to Indonesia and Vietnam in South-east Asia. IRRI also pioneered the Green Revolution, during which high yielding varieties of rice were distributed to increase the rice output by 42 percent over a 13-year period, from 1968-81.

But grassroots sympathisers are hardly impressed by such feats, as the ‘People’s Statement on Saving the Rice of Asia’ notes. ‘’Through the so-called Green Revolution, corporate agriculture has poisoned people and rice fields with pesticides and synthetic fertilisers; degraded rice lands; destroyed rice ecosystems, ecological rice practices and rice culture; and severely undermined the safety of cereal as food,” states the petition.

Bangladesh illustrates that view. The introduction of hybrid rice has seen that country’s rice varieties drop from an estimated 50,000 rice varieties to about 1,500. Activists blame the Green Revolution for destroying the traditional farming culture that had given birth to such an abundant diversity of grain.

Asia is the largest producer of the grain that feeds an estimated three billion people daily. China, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Vietnam, the Philippines and Thailand top the list of the world’s rice-growing nations. The region harvests over 500 million tonnes of paddy annually, according to Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimates.

Thailand, moreover, is the world’s leading rice exporter, shipping over seven million tonnes of the grain annually, in recent years, to overseas markets, adds the U.N. food agency. Vietnam comes second in a list that also includes China, India and Pakistan.

But early this year, the global environmental lobby Greenpeace raised the alarm on threats to Asian rice varieties by GE rice varieties produced in the United States but detected in South-east Asian markets. The Philippines government was the target of this warning, given Manila’s decision to allow ‘’the importation and continued sale of genetically-modified rice which, by law, cannot be legally distributed and marketed for human consumption in the country.”

Among the rice brands singled out by the South-east Asia office of Greenpeace was ‘’Uncle Sam Texas Long Grain,” which it said was ‘’tainted with the GMO Bayer LL601.” This grain ‘LL601′ is rice that has been ‘’genetically altered to resist the powerful herbicide glufosinate. It is illegal (not approved for distribution and human consumption) everywhere in the world except in the U.S.”

‘’This is a threat to biodiversity in the region. It shows that there is no proper effort to check and monitor contaminated rice from the U.S. ending up here,” Neth Dano, an associate of the Third World Network, a regional think tank, said in a telephone interview from Manila. ‘’Governments are still not aware about the dangers posed by GE rice.”

The week-long awareness campaign is needed to drive home the concerns of local farmers and communities that the paddy fields of the region are not open to GE rice, she added. ‘’If things change, it will be very tragic.”