[connorgutman]

You are philosophically correct but the flaw with this argument is time and $$$. With each passing year millions of people around the world die or go blind from vitamin A deficiency. Most of these cases are due to an over-reliance on white rice in particular, making golden rice essentially a drop-in solution for much of the world’s poorest. The goal is (or should be) to stop the bleeding with golden rice while also investing in and providing education around more diverse agricultural production.

[makomk]

They're not just philosophically correct but probably correct in practice as well. Golden rice - especially the original version of it - is not just an easy drop-in solution. It requires the development of specific variants suited to the climate where it's grown, the original version didn't supply enough vitamin A even in an ideal scenario and had pretty major yield reductions which made the rice more expensive (which is a huge problem when poverty is one of the major reasons people are so dependentt on rice in the first place), and this was compounded by licensing restrictions which blocked both cross-border sales and most growing in countries which were self sufficient for food production.

Those licenses made it effectively unavailable both to most countries which imported their rice and most countries that were self-sufficient. I think the two countries that had early trials may well have been the only two that were both eligible to make use of it and able to do so, and in at least one case that was a result of an error which resulted in them being counted as eligible when they weren't. They mostly seem to have been a PR stunt, something big biotech could point to and claim that they'd given the world a free solution to vitamin A deficiency that was being blocked by evil anti-GMO campaigners that wanted kids to go blind.

[adrian_b]

It should be obvious that golden rice must be more expensive than traditional rice, otherwise it would not be promoted by whichever company has invented it.

Therefore it would take $$$ from the pockets "of the world’s poorest" to the pockets of that company.

Correct education is the "drop-in solution" for the poor, not convincing them to buy a more expensive "IP-protected" product, so that their lives will become dependent of the new exclusive supplier.

[p_l]

Golden rice want IP protected - it was part of the deal that targeted use was not too be encumbered.

The biggest "IP protections" on golden rice came from... Greenpeace and other anti-GMO activists - who wanted prevention against "accidental contamination" of non-gmo with gmo.