An international development organization, in response to a vitamin A deficiency among people in the impoverished nation of Tagus, has engineered a new breed of millet high in vitamin A. While seeds for this new type of millet cost more, farmers will be p

An international development organization's efforts in developing an engineered millet variety, to fight Vitamin A deficiency among the people of Tagus, is commendable. Despite of this, their directives to the government to promote the said variety and their efforts to subsidise the cultivation of the variety seem to reveal their suspicious, if not surreptitious, motivation in doing so.

The first issue that the farmers in Tagus would face is the cost of seeds, notwithstanding the subsidies that they would be offered in return for cultivating those seeds. Simply put, the the farmers of Tagus are already poverty-stricken and just wouldn't be able to invest high amounts for purchasing the seed. A sensible and cheaper alternative would be to find alternative crops that are high in vitamin A?

The organization seems to be promoting their engineered variety as a panacea for Vitamin A deficiency, they have not cited any scientific study that says just the intake of this millet would suffice to remove Vitamin A deficit among people. This could be misleading to the people of Tagus, who, already impoverished, may be gullible enough to believe that consumption of this "wonder food" would be a solution to all their health problems.

Millet maybe a staple food, but that is no guarantee that its engineered version, though high in Vitamin A, will be readily accepted by the people of Tagus. People in underdeveloped countries, however impoverished, are usually wary of such scientific developments that are thrust towards them, just because they have been found to have some beneficial effects.

No mention has been made about what quantity of the millet is deemed safe for dietary intake and whether consuming more of this millet could also be dangerous to some important groups of people, like infants, pregnant women, and old people. Also, there seem to be no analyses about the probable allergenicity of the engineered millet, which may put sensitive individuals at risk.

Making efforts towards food security in today's times is definitely noble, but the engineered millet variety of this international development organizations raises doubts about its actual effectiveness in curbing the Vitamin A deficiency of the people of Tagus. To get wider acceptance of their new variety among the people of Tagus, the organisation would need to base their recommendations on solid scientific proof and not just blind promotion strategies.