When a Philippine court ruled in April against the commercial propagation of two key genetically modified crops, it inflamed a debate that has divided environmentalists and scientists for decades.
Golden Rice and Bt eggplant have both been touted as miracle crops to combat famine and vitamin deficiency in the global south. Golden Rice, first developed in the 1990s, contains a compound the body turns into vitamin A once consumed. Bt eggplant, meanwhile, is resistant to the eggplant fruit and shoot borer, a pest that regularly devastates harvests in the Philippines.
But their implementation in the Philippines has hit decades of roadblocks. The country was the first in the world to approve the cultivation of Golden Rice, only for the farmers’ group MASIPAG to uproot the crop from plantations and file a lawsuit to have it banned.
In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of MASIPAG, saying that proponents of both crops must show more scientific evidence that they will not harm the environment. This ruling was upheld by an appeals court in April.
It’s launched a vicious war of words, with both sides saying that losing the battle would be fatal to their cause.
The project “has taken more than two decades so far and has been blocked every step of the way by ideological cynics, such as Greenpeace,” said Adrian Dubock, executive secretary of the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board, criticizing the environmental nongovernmental organization whose Southeast Asian branch supported MASIPAG.
Dubock believes the court will reconsider its ruling in the coming months and said it made errors while deliberating. MASIPAG also expects the court to reopen the case.
Golden Rice, first conceived by scientists in the 1980s and developed in collaboration with the International Rice Research Institute and the Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice), uses two added genes to produce beta-carotene, which the body then converts into vitamin A. This was intended to combat vitamin A deficiency, which can lead to childhood blindness and even death and affects as many as one in five Filipino children in poor communities.
But the core objections of farmers in the Philippines are centered on historical fears of top-down corporate control of agriculture. This has only been heightened by fears that GMO crops can be “sterile,” restricting the propagation of second-generation seeds—although Golden Rice itself can be replanted freely, according to the International Rice Research Institute. Their grievances could help clarify what the GMO movement needs to do to win public trust in rural global south communities with histories of government or corporate exploitation.
MASIPAG was formed in 1985 by farmers angry that rice monopolies under the rule of dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr. left rural communities in poverty. The Masagana 99 program, launched in 1973, encouraged the use of synthetic fertilizers and herbicides, raising initial yields but killing indigenous plants and animals, which led to lower future rice yields. It offered loans to rice farmers that, over time, were only accessible to rich landowners and left farmers themselves destitute.
Farmers critical of these policies were often targeted and killed by the military or state forces in incidents such as the Escalante Massacre in 1985, where paramilitary forces killed 20 protesters in a major sugar farming region.
In the years that followed, agricultural land reform promises made by the Marcos Sr. administration went largely unfulfilled by successive administrations, and farmers continued to be at the mercy of landowners.
Their distrust festered when, in 2013, Golden Rice was introduced in one community in Bicol, even after farmers there said they did not want it—and had apparently received a promise from the government’s rice authority that it would not be planted there.
“They got angry and criticized why the implementation of the project was not transparent,” said Alfie Pulumbarit, the national coordinator of MASIPAG. “They convened, they talked about it, and they said that since it’s no longer at the level of formal dialogue, let’s take it into our own hands.”
“So they went to the PhilRice office, to the experimentation [areas], and they uprooted the Golden Rice that was planted there.”
Farmers at the time feared Golden Rice could contaminate the remaining rice varieties not already wiped out by the rice production initiatives of Marcos Sr., although scientists believe this risk is extremely low.
The initial dispute between farmers and the government, however, set the tone for what has become a hostile debate over GMOs in the Philippines that is deeply intertwined with social issues and years of broken promises.
The same has happened with Bt eggplant, which contains a naturally occurring protein that creates resistance to the eggplant fruit and shoot borer without the need for additional pesticides. Bt eggplant, which is already used in Bangladesh, was approved for commercial use in the Philippines in 2022, only to be halted by the courts.
“Farmers understand that Bt varieties and eggplant hybrids are a safe and proven solution to reduce the use of insecticides needed to protect their crops,” said Maricelis Acevedo, a research professor at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University, who visited farmers in the Philippines shortly before the court ruling.
“The global scientific community hopes that science-based decisions will prevail,”Acevedo added. “Filipino farmers and consumers deserve the right to access this technology and are eagerly awaiting it.”
But Greenpeace Southeast Asia campaigner Wilhelmina Pelegrina said such “silver bullet” approaches—modifying crops to make them vitamin-rich or pest-resistant, for example—do not work in a world facing down climate change.
“In some ways, you can view the use of [GMOs] as an old-school approach,” she said. “We need diversity for climate resilience, to absorb some of the shocks of the impacts of climate change. We need to shift our food production away from fossil fuel-based systems.”
To GMO proponents, such arguments create unfounded fears. “The arguments used by organizations to delay adoption of [Golden Rice] often resemble the arguments of anti-vaccination groups, including those protesting vaccines to protect against COVID-19,” said an opinion paper by Dubock and five others published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Aldrich Fitz Dy, a Filipino consulting attorney not involved in the Golden Rice dispute, told Science he believed the court heard evidence from both sides but then ruled there was no scientific consensus, rather than weighing the validity of each side’s claims.
But the dispute has all too often papered over the core grievances of Filipino farmers and neglected the need to rebuild trust in communities stung by past experiences.
Farmers in rural communities are still being killed in operations apparently linked to state forces, and protesters, including members of MASIPAG opposed to GMOs, have been “red-tagged,” or falsely labeled as members of the communist New People’s Army—a label often interpreted as a license to kill.
Pulumbarit said his organization remains opposed to all GMOs, but he was careful to specify this opposition has roots in the corporatization of agriculture.
“It’s not a matter of science versus ideology,” he said. “We’re asking for more science to be included. … We have to really scrutinize the science behind GMOs, which is heavily influenced by corporations.”
Pulumbarit doesn’t dispute the health benefits of Golden Rice, but he questions why it’s necessary without developing a more sustainable agricultural system that also ensures farmers won’t be at the mercy of patent owners or corporate interests.
“Many [farmers] are already practicing organic, sustainable farming that doesn’t need synthetic inputs,” Pulumbarit said. “They see these GMOs … as a package of technologies that almost always are intertwined or related with the corporatization of agriculture that, for the longest time, they’ve been wanting to be liberated from.”
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