RICE & PEACE

An NGO and a scientific initiative agree that malnutrition is a huge global problem, but their approaches clash. So drastically that it is costing millions of lives. 

There is a silent killer among the poorest of the poor: vitamin A deficiency. It costs the lives of almost 300,000 young children every year.

But the approaches to combating this deplorable state of affairs could not be more different. 

On the one hand, there are the biologists Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer, who recognised the problem and, with the help of genetic engineering, developed the first version of "Golden Rice" in the 1990s, a special rice that supplies the body with vitamin A. The rice is a staple food for the poor. Rice is the staple food for almost half the world's population. For this development, they were celebrated by science and the public.

On the other side: NGOs, first and foremost Greenpeace. For them, the use of genetic engineering is sacrilege and Golden Rice is not a meaningful contribution to the solution. Therefore, they torpedo the development and the necessary approvals wherever they can and sue politicians who want to allow cultivation.

But what sounds like a 30-year dispute over sensitivities has bitter consequences: Up to 90 million people have died since then from precisely this shortage. Two of them are children of the Chavez family. They died of malnutrition at the ages of three and five - their lives could have been saved, and father Fernando knows it, but he still asks: 'Is anyone really responsible for this?'

Rice & Peace tells the incredible story of Greenpeace vs. the Golden Rice Project, with all its ups and downs - and how two parties with the same goal of improving humanity can allow something so cruel to happen and drastically affect the lives of others.