How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

by Matt Ridley

Greenpeace turned its attention to blocking the humanitarian application of GMOs, especially in the form of beta-carotene-containing Golden Rice, specially designed by a non-profit project to prevent malnutrition and death among poor children. Golden Rice was developed by the Swiss-based scientist Ingo Potrykus and colleagues, in a long and laborious endeavour during the 1990s, purely as a humanitarian, non-profit project designed to alleviate the high mortality and morbidity caused by vitamin-A deficiency in people who rely on rice for food. By one estimate vitamin-A deficiency kills 2,000 mainly urban children under five every day, 700,000 a year, in countries where poor people eat rice as a staple diet: it lowers their immune resistance and causes them to go blind.