A blocked GMO rice could have saved 100,000 children. The same tech makes pineapples pink.

A rice that could prevent childhood blindness and death has been ready for two decades. It still isn't growing anywhere. The same technology is safely used in the U.S. on luxury pineapples.

Every year, vitamin A deficiency blinds 250,000 to 500,000 children. Half of them die within a year of losing their sight.

One third of children worldwide are deficient, roughly half of children in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia¹. Deficiency weakens the immune system, so children are more likely to die from common infections like diarrhea or measles.

Rich countries solved this kind of problem by adding nutrients to staple foods. The United States adds iodine to most salt, and folic acid to flour to prevent birth defects.

Rice is a critical staple among the world’s poor, so scientists improved rice. They added beta-carotene, the thing that makes carrots orange and that the body turns into vitamin A. The new rice cooks and tastes the same, but it’s yellow. They called it Golden Rice and licensed it for free to any farmer earning under $10,000 a year.

It has been ready since the mid-2000s. Today it grows nowhere.

The reason is that it is a GMO. Environmental groups, led by Greenpeace, fought it in country after country for two decades.

As far as I can tell, no one has calculated the cost of that delay. I’ve spent the last few weeks doing so. My rough estimate is that the delay has killed about 106,000 children and left another 210,000 to 425,000 blind.² Measured in healthy years of life lost, that is somewhere between 7 and 12 million.³ (My full calculations are here. I will update these figures as I receive feedback.)

That works out to roughly fourteen children dying every single day, for twenty years, from a nutrient we already know how to add to food.

If a new disease were killing fourteen children a day, it would have an internationally-recognized name and a task force. Golden Rice got villified as one word instead: GMO.

“GMO”

Often, that word scares people. But we eat GMOs all the time. They are in about 70 percent of packaged American food, 96 percent of US soybeans, and 92 percent of US corn. Billions of people have eaten them every day for thirty years. No one has been harmed.

Golden Rice was different in one small way. Most GMO crops are changed in how they grow, so the part you eat is ordinary. In Golden Rice, the part you eat is the part that changed. That made it feel new.

Greenpeace framed it as dangerous, saying corporations were secretly behind it. They falsely claimed it was unproven and that it was unclear whether children could absorb the vitamin. Activists tore up test fields and filed lawsuits to block approval. Over a hundred Nobel laureates signed a letter asking Greenpeace to stop.

While Golden Rice sat blocked, other new GMO foods reached store shelves. One of them is a pink pineapple. It sells for about $10 in stores and up to $50 online. It uses the same chemistry as Golden Rice, run in the opposite direction. Golden Rice turns on the pathway that makes the vitamin children need. The pineapple turns it off, so the fruit stays a pretty pink.

The lifesaving technology is in the Western world, growing a nicer pineapple for parties.

Source: Del Monte’s East Coast vendor TropicalFruitBox.com

I’m grateful for this pineapple. The pineapple has a company behind it that can afford to fight critics and build a market around modified foods. Golden Rice only had scientists and charities. It was a cheap crop for poor people, with no profit margin to help it defend itself.

In 2021, the Philippines became the first country to approve Golden Rice. Three years later, a court there revoked the approval after Greenpeace and a group of farmers sued.

Blocking a new crop is cheap. A single lawsuit claiming there is no scientific consensus on its safety can freeze it for years, even when consensus exists. Approving it is expensive because a government must be willing to spend political capital on people who cannot pay it back. Golden Rice’s beneficiaries were poor, scattered, and far from anyone in charge.

When one of these children dies, the cause is recorded as measles, diarrhea, or poverty, never as the campaign that kept the cure out of the field. A plane crash kills a few hundred people and leads to grounding fleets immediately. This killed more than a hundred thousand children over twenty years, with no wreckage to photograph and no single day it happened on.

That may be starting to change: the Global South is engineering crops of its own now, aimed at preventing harm, like pests and crop failure, rather than high margins or novelty. One is a cassava richer in iron and zinc. The more of these that become normal, the harder it gets to keep blocking the one that should have come first.

This post took several weeks of research and calculation. If you found it useful, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

1. As of 2013 WHO data.

2. I estimated this by adding up the countries with high vitamin A deficiency, high rice consumption, and reliance on domestically grown rice. I projected how long it would take Golden Rice to reach about 70 percent adoption.

As of 2023, vitamin A supplementation programs reach three in four children who need them. This estimate counts only the children they don’t protect. India, the biggest contributor to the figure, reaches only about 60 percent of its children.

3. The closest estimate I found was a 2014 peer-reviewed study finding that India lost 1.4 million healthy years in a single decade.