Concerns about allergies and autoimmune disorders and such associated with golden rice are comparable to illiteracy, so be sure to wear it proudly.
To give some idea of how fundamentally absurd an approach this is, two 5-cent capsules of vitamin A a year are sufficient to prevent vitamin A deficiency in kids, whereas as far as I can tell replacing all the rice eaten in countries whose poor populations are almost entirely dependent on rice with the most modern, improved varieties of golden rice still wouldn't achieve this. (Oh, and by the way it inherently has worse yields than the varieties it's based on, so that golden rice will be more expensive too.)
Even if it worked, the licensing issues made it undeployable in practice. There's a free license to certain third-world countries that GMO proponents like to wave in the face of opponents, but that's basically all it's useful for - due to a one-two punch of requiring the rice to be grown in the country it's sold in and only licensing countries that can't grow enough rice to feed their population (almost all of which can't grow rice at all), it cannot be used for any kind of meaningful deployment of the tech. Despite the complete and utter lack of any profitable commercial market for golden rice, the GMO industry couldn't bear to actually give up the possibility that they could somehow make money from starving third world kids.
670,000 kids a year die from vitamin A deficiency (and, of course, many more than that "only" go blind). Golden rice has been around for 18 years now, but "activists" have prevented its widespread use.
That's 12 million preventable deaths.
If it were so easy, why none of the anti-GMO fanatics do so already? But of course that would involve doing something useful, not strutting around in the same crowd as anti-vaxxers and flatearthers.
In the context at hand, rice is more convenient.
Yes those evil corporations are trying to save children from blindness just to make anti science activists look bad. The bastards!!!
Sarcasm aside, did you know most of our crop varieties have been modified using radiation? Those types of mutations are still used today and require little testing, much less than what golden rice has been through.
> (Oh, and by the way it inherently has worse yields than the varieties it's based on, so that golden rice will be more expensive too.)
This is straight up FUD. The first version didn't have the same yield but the more recent ones do.
> it cannot be used for any kind of meaningful deployment of the tech
Why not? It clearly states they will provide the technology to the National Agricultural Research Centres and other public sector research institutions, in developing countries. Once the farmers have the crop they can replant as much as they like and they don't have to rely on capsules anymore.
> the GMO industry couldn't bear to actually give up the possibility that they could somehow make money from starving third world kids.
Except the GMO industry (whatever that means) is not involved in the development of Golden Rice (apart from some patents).