Anti-Biotech Opposition to Golden Rice Has Cost 1.4 Million ‘Life Years’ in India Alone. Will Anyone Be Held Accountable?
20th March 2014
Hint: No.
Opposition to biotech crops, and the subsequent failure to adopt safe, healthy genetically modified crop variants, is causing mass human suffering all over the world.
The most obvious example of this is Golden Rice, which has been available since the early part of the last decade, but is not in regular use in any country. Golden Rice is a genetically altered rice strain built to address Vitamin A deficiency, which affects about 10 percent of the 3 billion people for whom rice is a staple food. That deficiency causes blindness in between 250,000 and 500,000 children each year, half of whom die within 12 months, according to the World Health Organization.