Imagine there was a superfood that could potentially save more than one million lives every year, as well as stopping hundreds of thousands of children going blind. The good news is that it exists. It’s called “golden rice”.

The bad news is that the best current chance to get the crop into cultivation and ultimately to reach the people whose life-chances it could alter has just been blown, after a court in the Philippines ruled that it could not be commercially grown in the country.

The ruling in the Philippines is not just a terrible, tragic, missed opportunity. It may also prove a deterrent to other countries, such as Bangladesh and India, where growing golden rice was being considered.

The British environmentalist Mark Lynas believes the court in the Philippines must have been “bamboozled” by a “barrage of misinformation”. Now he joins the 168 laureates in levelling the gravest of charges against anti-golden rice campaigners, and Greenpeace in particular.

“We call upon governments of the world to reject Greenpeace’s campaign against golden rice specifically, and crops and foods improved through biotechnology in general; and to do everything in their power to accelerate the access of farmers to all the tools of modern biology, especially seeds improved through biotechnology,” they wrote in their letter, concluding: “Opposition based on emotion and dogma contradicted by data must be stopped.”

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