A 14-year GMO activist responds to Kevin O’Leary after he claims Monsanto is a hero.
Kevin O’leary was recently challenged by a 14 year old GMO activist, Rachel Parent. She is the founder of gmo-news.com. She would like an opportunity to speak with him on the CBC show “The Lang and O’leary Exchange”.
Kevin O’Leary – “Monsanto Should be held up as a hero because they’ve developed technologies that help under developed countries increase productivity by 5 and 10 times. You’re an ignorant and stupid person if you say what Monsanto does is bad for human beings”
When she was 12, Rachel Parent won a medal for her speech on GMOs to her school. At 13 she founded the Kids Right to Know Club to raise awareness about urgent environmental issues affecting youth. She also launched gmo-news.com. At 14 she appeared on CBC to take on Canadian business mogul, investor and media personality Kevin O’Leary.
The interview came about after O’Leary trashed GMO protesters on CBC’s Lang & O’Leary Exchange, May 27, 2013, with statements like these:
At an anti-GMO rally in Toronto the next weekend, Parent fought back, saying:
I challenge you, Mr. O’Leary, to have me on your show next week. And if you promise not to to use the word ‘stupid’, then I won’t use the world ‘fascist’. We can just talk about the real issues of GMO here in Canada.
O’Leary: My point is you’re an ignorant person if you get a placard and walk around the street saying what Monsanto does is bad for human beings, you’re just stupid…because what they don’t understand is that if we don’t advance our understanding of how to get productivity out of agriculture, we’re not going to be able to feed this planet….
O’Leary: Let’s say you weren’t as lucky as you are, and you were born in an Asian country. You were 14 years old. Your only food was rice that had no Vitamin A in it. You’re going blind, and then you die. 550,000 people your age die that way every year. And a company like Monsanto could come along and offer you a genetically modified rice that includes Vitamin A that could save your eyesight and your life. How do you feel about that, Rachel?
Parent: Actually, funny you mention this. Golden Rice was scrapped because it didn’t work, and in order for the average 11-year-old boy to get enough Vitamin A from rice he’d have to eat 27 bowls of rice per day. And another thing is, the reason there’s blindness isn’t because there’s a lack of Vitamin A in the rice. It’s because their diet is simply rice.
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I’m not going to badmouth a 14-year-old student, but she didn’t win. Kevin O’Leary is right.
Sooooo…you against labeling GMO…Genetically Modified Organism’s??? Your right to know what is in the food you eat…
I know what’s in my food. I read the ingredient labels. GMO is not an ingredient; it’s a breeding method. Do you also want to see foods labeled “mutagenesis”? It’s another method of plant breeding–one that bombards organisms with radiation to induce hundreds of thousands of unknown mutations. Does that concern you? It does not seem to concern the organic industry that uses it.
I am going to tell you the other horror of food, beverage and meds. SULFITES I fight every day to keep myself alive. I am not allergic to anything but added sulfur even in shampoo, toothpaste etc. Our Asian friends are dying of cancer because of a steady diet of MSG and sulfites. If you have a diet of this kind for fifty years, the body cannot take any more. I had to do massive research or I would not be alive. There is not antidote!