Dr. Patrick Moore, ecologist, and former president of Greenpeace Canada, explains that “UNICEF estimates about 25% of child deaths [worldwide] are due to vitamin A deficiency [VAD], which is about 2 million per year. This all happens quietly while poor mothers and fathers look on helplessly.”
VAD is prevalent among malnourished populations subsisting primarily on rice–which does not contain the vitamin A precursor, beta-carotene–and compromises the immune system leading to increased severity of infections, impaired vision, blindness and death.
Dr. Moore believes this can be remedied 
by introducing Golden Rice–a genetically modified plant containing beta-carotene–into the diets of malnourished populations. For over a decade however, Greenpeace has used political, media and legal means in efforts to delay the introduction of Golden Rice. In addition, Dr. Moore notes, “Greenpeace-inspired and probably funded urban activists, pretending to be farmers, destroyed the field trial of Golden Rice in the Philippines on Aug 8, 2013.”
He concludes: “No country has approved Golden Rice even though it is capable of reducing child deaths by 2 million per year. Much of the reason for this is fanatical opposition by Greenpeace and their allies.”
While those at Greenpeace continue to raise money to fund their anti-Golden Rice campaigns, the only solution they offer on their website for the devastation caused by VAD is “food supplements, food fortification and home gardening.” For the people living in abject poverty, where rice is the primary means of sustenance, this is equivalent to saying “let them eat cake.”
Fortunately, the Bill Gates & Melinda Gates Foundation is interested in using scientific advancements to save lives and, according to Dr. Moore, is currently funding “field trials in the Philippines, Bangladesh, and Indonesia.”
“Straight fact is vitamin A deficiency is the biggest killer of children in the world today,” Dr. Moore says. And it’s a child-killer enabled by the anti-science and anti-human ideology of Greenpeace.
*For more on Golden Rice check out Alex Epstein’s interview with Robert Zubrin.