[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.