The Chinese government announced on Monday that, following the discovery of deeply controversial testing practices, a lead researcher on a genetically modified rice testing programme has been suspended from work.

The Ministry of Health has suggested children in China's Hunan province may have been used as test subjects in research on GM food including ‘Golden Rice,’ engineered to be rich in beta carotene, a precursor of vitamin A, in 2008. The Ministry has suggested the children of poor rural families were used in testing, and may have been poorly informed of the nature of the study.

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The issue was raised by Greenpeace in late August; the environmental organisation expressed concerns that joint research between Chinese and US researchers had involved feeding Golden Rice, which had not undergone other types of testing, including being fed to animals, to 24 children aged between six and eight years old. A paper published in the August edition of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition recounted the trial.

Golden rice was first unveiled in 2000, ostensibly as a humanitarian tool, however its efficacy has been challenged and the rice, which is not currently available for human consumption, has been strongly opposed by environmentalists and anti-globalisation activists.

Indian environmental activist and respected philosopher Vandana Shiva has contested the rice’s purported benefits. She suggested the focus of organisations including the WHO and private agribusinesses on one issue, vitamin A deficiency, obfuscates a larger issue of constricting biodiversity and a lack of availability of diverse, nutritionally rich foods. Dr Shiva puts this down to the results of the encroachment of monocultures and intensive agriculture into areas where multicrop systems were formerly prevalent.

She said poverty, corporate control and biodiversity loss are playing greater roles in hunger and malnutrition than is currently widely acknowledged. Dr Shiva added that Golden Rice would not address this – particularly given the potential benefits for agribusinesses which have colluded with public sector organisations over the rice’s development.

Nevertheless, as many as 800 million people, of which 250 million are children, suffer from vitamin A deficiency worldwide according to the World Health Organization. Deficiency leads children to become more susceptible to a range of diseases and frequently causes blindness.

The Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention announced on Monday that Yin Shi'an, the third author of the Journal of Clinical Nutrition study, had been put under investigation and claimed the paper’s authors had not sought ethical approval for their trial on children. However, researchers from Tufts University, Massachusetts maintain the study was conducted with the appropriate regulatory backing.

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