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Comment by hiou | Hacker News Reader

Many of the objections would be immediately put to rest if the patent was released to a global health or other ngo that could oversee and license it without restriction.

Patenting the food supply is one of the scariest things for the developing world. Certainly vitamin A deficiency is a real problem but we are then trading that problem for giving one company absolute power over a group of people with very few resources to defend themselves.

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For what it's worth.

Monsanto have now agreed to provide royalty-free licenses for its technologies to help fast-track the further development and distribution of the rice.

Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2560613/pdf/1110...

To developing countries only. I didn't see how a country is deemed no longer developing, so it makes me think it's just the classic pusher tactic: the first crop is free.

Once a developing country's economy has become entangled with the crop, start charging rent.

The IMF typically determines the developing country status based on HDI, and when countries graduate to developed status.

They actually licensed it to low-income, food-deficit countries as defined by the FAO, which means that countries have to both be below a minimum GDP per capita and grow less calories of food than required to feed their population. (The pilot project was in the Philippines, which has since been retroactively removed from the list due to a re-estimation of their GDP.) Most of those countries can't grow rice for climate reasons. Worse, the estimates of its usefulness assume that a rather large proportion of people's calories come from golden rice, which obviously isn't possible - and it's of questionable effectiveness even then.

The Phillipine government has since largely solved their vitamin A deficiency problem through a lower-tech and cheaper approach: vitamin supplements.

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