Mexico, Argentina, and Paraguay join global demonstrations against roundup-maker Monsanto.
| Autor | Gaudin, Andres |
On the same day, and marching under the same banner, tens of thousands of people gathered in 428 cities across the globe last month to demonstrate against a single multinational corporation: Monsanto, the world's leading maker of genetically modified food-crop seeds and also a major producer of agricultural chemicals.
And yet, as far reaching as the May 21 protests were, the media mostly ignored them. In fact, none of the seven major international news agencies bothered to report that in 38 countries, in all different languages, people were taking the US biotech company to task for the impact its products and practices have on food sovereignty, human health, and the environment.
Medardo Avila Vazquez, an Argentine neonatologist who represents an organization called the Red de Medicos de Pueblos Fumigados (Network of Physicians in Fumigated Towns, RMPF), believes the media silence was no coincidence. "It's hard to publish [this kind] of information because Monsanto spends enormous amounts of money to buy off the media outlets, quiet critical voices, and pay for bogus research showing that genetically modified crops and glyphosate [an herbicide Monsanto sells under the brand name Roundup] are innocuous," he said.
The complaints put forth by the protest organizers, with support from dozens of foundations and entities like the RMPF, a network of doctors concerned about the effects of glyphosate spraying in Argentina, aren't apocalyptic exaggerations; they're backed by real research, including a study that was published in March 2015 by the World Health Organization (WHO) but went largely unreported in the mainstream media.
The study challenged WHO's previous conclusions and found that Roundup (glyphosate) is "probably carcinogenic to humans." The research was carried out by WHO's specialized cancer agency, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France, and presented in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet Oncology. The report said there is "limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans for non-Hodgkin lymphoma" but "convincing evidence that glyphosate also can cause cancer in laboratory animals." The IACR decided, it explained in the report, to classify glyphosate as a Group 2A (probably carcinogenic) rather than Group 2B (possibly carcinogenic) substance.
Interestingly, just five days before the worldwide protests, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in the US published a study...
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