GM Crops Like Golden Rice Will Save the Lives of Hundreds of Thousands of Children - Quillette

GM Crops Like Golden Rice Will Save the Lives of Hundreds of Thousands of Children - Quillette
"Any day now, the government of Bangladesh may become the first country to approve the growing of a variety of yellow rice by farmers known as Golden Rice.
If so, this would be a momentous victory in a long and exhausting battle fought by scientists and humanitarians to tackle a huge human health problem—a group that’s faced a great deal of opposition by misguided critics of genetically modified foods.
Golden Rice, by contrast, was produced in the 1990s by carefully inserting just two naturally occurring genes known to be safe—from maize and from a common soil bacterium—into a rice plant, disturbing no other genes.
It is quite literally golden: its yellow color indicates that it has beta carotene in it, the precursor of vitamin A.
It was developed as a humanitarian, non-profit project in an attempt to prevent somewhere between 200,000 and 700,000 people, many of them children, dying prematurely every year in poor countries because of vitamin A deficiency. 
(Vitamin A deficiency causes children to go blind and lose immune function.)
Yet the rice has been ferociously opposed by opponents of GM foods and, partly as a result, has been tied up in red tape for 20 years, preventing it from being grown.
One study in 2008 calculated that in India alone 1.38 million person-years of healthy life had been lost for every year the crop has been delayed..."
Read on.