Robyn E. Blumner is president and CEO of the Center for Inquiry and executive director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason &Science. She is a lawyer who previously held posts as a syndicated columnist and editorial writer at the Tampa Bay Times and as executive director of the ACLU of Florida and ACLU of Utah.
Developing countries such as Bangladesh, India, the Philippines, and other nations where rice is a principal staple of poor children’s diets suffer f rom a particular type of malnutrition. A diet largely consisting of a few bowls of rice per day will result in a vitamin A deficiency. This exceptionally dangerous condition is responsible for a million deaths annually—mostly of children—and another half million cases of blindness—again, mostly in kids (Regis 2019).