The following article reveals how Monsanto has sought to exploit the food aid crisis in Zambia, even deploying its infamous "fake citizenry" tactic.

"The cynical antics of the biotech industry's lobbyists during the crisis in southern Africa is the ultimate manifestation of the shamelessness seen in their use of fake citizens, fake organisations, and even fake public protest. It's not just a question of using "fronts" for malicious corporate attacks, but of the exploitation of situations where it's important -- on a life-or-death level -- that we are able to discern the truth."

See end for a full list of contents of the January - February edition of GeneWatch, the bimonthly magazine of The Council for Responsible Genetics.
---
BIOTECH'S HALL OF MIRRORS

From Berkeley to Johannesburg, from India to Zambia, biotech's deceivers are playing a very dirty game

By Jonathan Matthews

GeneWatch, Volume 16 Number 1, January - February 2003

In November 2002, a Vice-President of the Biotechnology Industry
Organization, Val Giddings, wrote in the journal Nature Biotechnology
about an event that took place at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg.
It was "something new, something very big," wrote Giddings; an occasion
that would make us "look back on Johannesburg as something of a
watershed event -- a turning point."

The momentous event was a protest march. Not the one that attracted
some 20,000 poor, evicted and landless people, but one that with only
a few hundred demonstrators captured pess coverage on five continents:
a protest staged by farmers and traders in support of free trade and GM
crops.

What made the protest so remarkable, said Giddings, was that for the
very first time, "real, live, developing-world farmers" were "speaking
for themselves" and rejecting the "empty arguments" of the industry's
critics. Giddings singled out the statement of one protesting farmer,
Chengal Reddy, leader of the Indian Farmers Federation. "Traditional
organic farming . . . is the very technology that led to mass
starvation in India for centuries, " said Reddy. "Indian farmers need
access to new technologies and especially to biotechnologies."
Giddings also noted that the farmers dedicated a "Bullshit Award," made
with two varnished piles of cow dung, to those who are deepening their
poverty by denying them biotechnology.

But if anyone deserved the cow dung it was Giddings, for almost every
element of this spectacle was framed so as to deceive. Take, Chengal
Reddy. Reddy is not a poor farmer, nor even the representative of
poor farmers. He is a politician who has on occasion admitted to never
having farmed in his life. His "Indian Farmers Federation" is a lobby
for big commercial farmers in Andhra Pradesh, where his family is a
prominent right-wing political force -- his father having coined the
saying, "There is only one thing that Dalits (untouchables) are good
for, and that is being kicked".

If it seems doubtful Reddy was in Johannesburg to help the poor speak
for themselves, the identity of the march organizers is also not a
source of confidence. Although the London Times ran an admiring
commentary on the march under the headline, "I Do Not Need White NGOs
to Speak for Me," the media contact on the organizers' press release was
Kendra Okonski, the daughter of a U.S. lumber industrialist. Okonski
has worked for a variety of anti-regulatory NGOs, including the ultra-
right Competitive Enterprise Institute, all funded and directed, needless to
say, by "whites". Okonski also runs Counterprotest.net, a website
devoted to helping pro-corporate lobbyists take to the streets in mimicry
of popular protesters.

Given this, it hardly needs saying that the "Bullshit Award" was far
from the imaginative riposte of impoverished farmers, that Giddings
suggests. Rather, it was the creation of another right-wing pressure
group. Based in New Delhi and well known for its fervent support of
deregulation, GM crops and Big Tobacco, the Liberty Institute is part
of the same coalition that organized the rally -- the deceptively named
Sustainable Development Network. In London, the SDN shares offices,
along with many of its key personnel -- including Okonski -- with the
International Policy Network, a group whose Washington address happens
to be that of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Another irresistible question is how impoverished farmers -- according
to Giddings, farmers from five different countries attended the
march -- could afford the trip to Johannesburg from distant lands like
the Philippines and India. Here, too, there is reason for suspicion. In
late 1999, The New York Times reported that a street protest against
genetic engineering outside a public FDA hearing in Washington, D.C. was
disrupted by African-Americans carrying placards bearing messages like
"Biotech saves children's lives." The Times learned that Monsanto's
public relations company, Burston-Marsteller, had paid a Baptist
Church from a poor neighborhood to bus in these "demonstrators" as part
of a wider campaign "to get groups of church members, union workers and the
elderly to speak in favor of genetically engineered foods."

The industry's fingerprints are all over Johannesburg as well.
Chengal Reddy, who has featured prominently in Monsanto's promotional
work in India for almost a decade, was brought to Johannesburg by AfricaBio,
a group that, like others represented at the march, is closely aligned
with Monsanto.

The rally in Johannesburg provides but one gaudy spectacle in a
continuing fake parade. Consider, for instance, the sleight-of-hand
behind Nature's unprecedented disowning of a previously published
article that demonstrated the transgenic contamination of traditional
maize in a remote part of Mexico [See "Transgenic Maize in Mexico,"
GeneWatch Vol. 15 No. 4]. Val Giddings told the Washington Post, "We
believe that Nature erred in publishing the article to begin with, and
it seems they came to the same unavoidable conclusion. The
authors . . . commitment was not to data and science but to a religious
commitment to an [anti-biotechnology] dogma."

Despite the fiery campaign of criticism, largely generated on the net,
leading to Nature's muddled retraction, that decision was in fact very
far from "unavoidable." Prior to its publication by Nature, the
article -- written by two University of California at Berkeley
scientists, Ignacio Chapela and David Quist -- was screened with unusual care,
going through four rounds of peer review. Then, in light of the
controversy, it was re-reviewed by three reviewers; only one advised a
retraction, while the others concluded that the main results had been
left unchallenged by the critics.

Still more revealing, though, is the fact that Giddings' denunciation
of the Berkeley scientists was almost identical to the attacks which
launched the campaign against them on the very day of the research's
publication. In an article about the Mexican maize controversy, the
journal Science described how "widely circulating anonymous e-mails"
accused Chapela and Quist of "conflicts of interest and other
misdeeds". Those e-mails surfaced first on the listserv of AgBioWorld, a
pro-biotech group co-founded by Greg Conko of the Competitive
Enterprise Institute and one C.S. Prakash, who edits an email list,
AgBioView, in which GM critics have been compared to Hitler and the
September 11
terrorists.

AgBioWorld prominently circulated emails from a "Mary Murphy" and an
"Andura Smetacek" that claimed Dr. Chapela was an "activist first"
and a "scientist second," and that he colluded in attacks on "biotechnology,
free-trade, intellectual property rights and other politically motivated agenda
items." Smetacek even insinuated that Chapela had actually designed his
research in collusion with "fear-mongering activists." On top of that,
Smetacek wanted to know how much money Chapela was getting in
"expenses" from the anti-biotech "industry."

Although the internet is an easy place to launch such inflammatory
attacks from Hotmail-type addresses, it is also a place where, without
meticulous care, the details of identity can be surprisingly easy to
track.

In July 2000 a "Mary Murphy" posted a fake Associated Press article on
the message board of foxbghsuit.com, a website dedicated to a legal
case connected to Monsanto's genetically engineered cattle drug rBGH.
The Hotmail reply address given matches that of Chapela's attacker;
however, Murphy is also identified as bw6@bivwood.com. This is not the
only evidence as to Murphy's true identity. After making a passing defence
of DDT on the AgBioView listserv, Murphy was drawn into correspondence
off-list with another subscriber. The technical headers on these e-
mails again show Murphy's mails as originating from bivwood.com -- the
domain name of The Bivings Group, an internet PR company that numbers
Monsanto among its clients.

The e-mail headers of "Andura Smetacek" are still more startling. In
her earliest emails, Smetacek presented herself to the AgBioView list
as a concerned observer of the GM debate writing from London. However,
the Internet Protocol address on those messages is 199.89.234.124 --
numbers assigned to Monsanto's headquarters in St. Louis, Missouri.

Tracking Monsanto's fake citizenry leads into a wider web of deceit.
For instance, Smetacek posted information on the website Foodsecurity.net,
which claims to be run by "an independent, non-profit coalition of
people throughout the world" but which is actually registered to
Monsanto's former director of executive communications, Graydon
Forrer. Again, in "her" early e-mails Smetacek consistently promoted the
website of the Center for Food and Agricultural Research (CFFAR) as a
key information source. However, this agricultural "center" turns out to
be as phoney as Smetacek herself, never having existed beyond a now
discarded website chock full of articles labelling Monsanto's critics
"vandals" and "terrorists".

If anyone has any lingering doubts that the rot starts at the top,
consider a PR industry workshop in Chicago at the end of 2001 run by
Jay Byrne, Monsanto's former Chief Internet Strategist and Head of
Corporate Communications. Billed by its organisers, Ragan
Communications, Inc., as showing how Monsanto "brilliantly outwits
its opponents at their own game of guerilla PR," Byrne's presentation
was accompanied by a PowerPoint display. One slide, headed, "Take
action/Take control," illustrates Monsanto's work on a particular search
engine. Listed are

the top search results for "GM food" before and after Monsanto took
action. All the "before" sites are critical of GM; the "after" sites
were mostly created by Bivings and include "CFFAR" - the fake
agricultural institute promoted by Smetacek.

Another of Byrne's slides is headed "Listservs: Directed & opt-in."
It contains a single image: a thread of messages on the AgBioView list.
The implication is that Monsanto uses this list for strategic PR
purposes. Interestingly, in addition to providing a conduit for all
of Murphy and Smetacek's attacks on Ignacio Chapela, AgBioWorld is
listed among the members of the "Network" which organized the fake
Johannesburg demonstration. Finally, an error message I received while
searching AgBioWorld's original list archive showed its material was
being drawn from a database on 'apollo.bivings.com' -- the main server
of The Bivings Group.

AgBioWorld and Monsanto have also been active during the current food
aid crisis in southern Africa, where the danger of being caught
exploiting the hunger of millions for PR purposes has apparently been
outweighed by the opportunity to paint the industry's critics in the
darkest hue.

Lingering at the top of Monsanto-India.com's home page for several
weeks in September was a link to an article, "Green Killers and
Pseudo-Science," which blended an account of the Bullshit Award in
Johannesburg with a wider attack on "green fundamentalists" whose
"opposition to genetically modified foods is killing people in
famine-hit Africa today, and could threaten Indians in the future
too." The "green killers" rhetoric has, of course, been finely honed on
AgBioView since the start of the crisis.

In late October, Monsanto's electronic newsletter, "The Biotech
Advantage," carried the headline "Academics Say Africans Going Hungry
Because of Activist Scare Tactics." The activists in question turned
out to be the staff of a Catholic theological centre and a Zambian
agricultural college. Their "academic" attackers, by contrast,
included AgBioWorld's founders, Prakash and Conko, and the editor of a
biotech industry newsletter who has called on the U.S. to bomb Zambia
with GM grain if it continues to reject it.

Around this time a Friends of the Earth campaigner in the U.K.
forwarded me an interrogative e-mail from a "Max Russell-Bennett,"
ostensibly a private citizen, which he'd received with an AgBioWorld
press release attached. The press release implied thousands had died
in the Indian state of Orissa as a result of resistance to GM food aid.
It urged activists not to repeat the same mistake in southern Africa. In
reality, all the deaths in Orissa had been caused by a cyclone; when
we ran a check on the IP address from which the e-mail had originated,
it was that of Monsanto Belgium.

The cynical antics of the biotech industry's lobbyists during the
crisis in southern Africa is the ultimate manifestation of the
shamelessness seen in their use of fake citizens, fake organisations,
and even fake public protest. It's not just a question of using "fronts" for
malicious corporate attacks, but of the exploitation of situations
where it's important -- on a life-or-death level -- that we are able to
discern the truth.

It matters what poor farmers and people in the Third World really
want, and it matters what actual scientists and real citizens are trying
to say; and this becomes difficult to discern within a hall or mirrors
where industry's facade is reflected from a dizzying array of sources
that in the end turn out all to be just one and the same.
---
For more on Monsanto's dirty tricks campaign:
http://ngin.tripod.com/deceit_index.html
For more on the food aid crisis in southern Africa:
http://ngin.tripod.com/forcefeed.htm

=================================================================
*** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this
material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a
prior interest in receiving the included information for research and
educational purposes. PLEASE acknowledge the original source. ***