A video promoting a global “March Against Monsanto” has enlisted the help of celebrities like Bill Maher, Danny DeVito and Dave Matthews to sound the alarm over what those critics say are the potential health dangers of GMO crops.
“Here in America you don’t get the right to know whether you’re eating genetically modified organisms,” Matthews says in the video that uses statements made during California’s ballot measure fight to label GMO foods. The repurposed footage is part of a pitch for a global day of protest against Monsanto on May 25.
“We have protests planned in 36 countries around the world,” Tami Canal, the international coordinator and founder of March Against Monsanto, told the Daily News.
Though March Against Monsanto did not produce the video, Canal, who now lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, first went to battle with Monsanto in California over Proposition 37.
It is estimated that 70% of the food on American supermarket shelves now contains genetically modified organisms, and a study undertaken at Caen University in France found that rats who were fed diets consisting of genetically modified corn developed tumors at higher rates than those that did not.
A review of the Caen study by six leading French academies found that it was flawed.
“Given the numerous gaps in methods and interpretation, the data presented in this article cannot challenge previous studies which have concluded that NK603 corn is harmless from the health point of view,” a statement from the national academies of agriculture, medicine, pharmacy, sciences, technology and veterinary studies said.
“They’re the most-tested food product that the world has ever seen. Europe set up its own Food Standards Agency, which has now spent €300 million ($403.7 million), and has concluded that these technologies are safe,” Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant told the Wall Street Journal in January. “France determined there’s no safety issue on a corn line we submitted there. So there’s always a great deal of political noise and turmoil. If you strip that back and you get to the science, the science is very strong around these technologies.” (Bullshit)