In India, Monsanto hired Bollywood actors to promote genetically engineered cotton seeds to illiterate farmers. Nana Patekar became a brand ambassador for Monsanto. The advertising has been called “aggressive, unscrupulous and false.”
Bill Gates, heavily invested in Monsanto’s GMOs as well as in vaccines, hired the most beloved of Indian actors, Amitabh Bachchan, to promote the oral polio vaccine.
In one example of the ads Bachchan created, Bachchan used Bollywood to promote vaccines, and here is another ad, in which Bachchan employes his acting skills. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation says:
“Worldwide efforts in the last two decades have reduced the number of polio cases by 99 percent. Until we reach eradication, however, we are working with governments and all partners in the polio effort to ensure no child is at risk of either contracting or transmitting this crippling disease.”
Monsanto used Bollywood actors and succeeded in selling India’s farmers Bt cotton seeds. Profits for Monsanto rose. When yields were less than promised, farmers incurred massive debt, leading many to suicide, in what is considered “ the worst ever recorded wave of suicided of this in human history.” To date, the number of suicides has surpassed 250,000.
P. Sainath details this neoliberal terrorism:
“With giant seed companies displacing cheap hybrids and far cheaper and hardier traditional varieties with their own products, a cotton farmer in Monsanto’s net would be paying far more for seed than he or she ever dreamed they would. Local varieties and hybrids were squeezed out with enthusiastic state support.
In 1991, you could buy a kilogram of local seed for as little as Rs.7 or Rs.9 in today’s worst-affected region of Vidarbha. By 2003, you would pay Rs.350 — ($7) — for a bag with 450 grams of hybrid seed. By 2004, Monsanto’s partners in India were marketing a bag of 450 grams of Bt cotton seed for between Rs.1,650 and Rs.1,800 ($33 to $36).”
Long after it was apparent that Monsanto was having a lethal impact on India, Bill Gates who says he wants to help the poor in India, made a huge investment in Monsanto. Does Gates care that he invested in a company that has left poor children of India without their fathers and lost them the land they had lived on?
How is Gates’ other investment – vaccines – faring? Mimicking Monsanto’s PR, Gates used Bollywood actors to strongly promote his vaccine campaign to ‘eradicate polio’ across India. Vaccines were given to Indian children. Have they brought health?
From “Polio program: let us declare victory and move on” by Neetu Vashisht and Jacob Puliyel at Medical Ethics
“In 2011 there were an extra 47500 new cases of NPAFP [non-polio acute flaccid paralysis]. Clinically indistinguishable from polio paralysis but twice as deadly, the incidence of NPAFP was directly proportional to doses of oral polio received. Through this data was collected within the polio surveillance system, it was not investigated.”
The Oral Polio Vaccines were given to Indian children. The CDC dropped the OPV from its vaccine schedule in the US because it was causing polio.
Secrets of HIV-Aids Journal 