There is a need for what Golden Rice can deliver: vitamin A. According to the World Health Organization an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 vitamin A-deficient children become blind every year, half of them dying within 12 months of losing their sight.
“These are real deaths, real disability, real suffering, not the phantom fears, none of which have held up to objective scientific scrutiny,” risk-perception expert David Ropiek writes. Allowing Golden Rice to be eaten by populations prone to vitamin A Deficiency means that blindness could be prevented (it cannot be cured once it has happened).
Greenpeace, et alia throw up various smokescreens which boil down to suggesting that it is preferable to raise the needy’s standard of living and provide them with alternative diets and/or supplements: the “Let them eat kale” defense. Those might work, but if the poor could afford a more varied and fulfilling diet, don’t you think they would do so?
In the four minutes it took you to read this, two, three or four children lost their sight due to Vitamin A Deficiency, and, in the same four minutes at least one child died. Everything else is noise.
Read the full, original article: The Green Chain: Golden Rice now, everything else is noise
