fw: THE WEB OF DECEIT OVER GM FOOD

[Guest guest]

CORPORATE PHANTOMS: THE WEB OF DECEIT OVER GM FOOD

(Tony Blair was correct when he observed on Thursday that " there is only

a small band of people... who genuinely want to stifle informed debate " .

But he was wrong to identify this small group as those opposed to GM

crops. Though he didn't know it, the people seeking to stifle the debate

are the ones who wrote his speech; not in the days before he delivered

it, but in the years in which the arguments he used were incubated.)

 

 

Common Dreams - Views

 

Published on Wednesday, May 29, 2002 in the Guardian of London

Corporate Phantoms The Web of Deceit Over GM Food

by George Monbiot

 

Tony Blair's speech to the Royal Society last Thursday was a wonderful

jumble of misconceptions and logical elisions. He managed to confuse

science with its technological products. GM crops are no more " science "

than cars, computers or washing machines, and those opposing them are no

more " anti-science " than people who don't like the Millennium Dome are

" anti-architecture " .

 

He suggested that in the poor world people welcome genetic engineering.

It was unfortunate that the example he chose was the biotech industry in

Bangalore in south-west India. Bangalore happens to be the center of the

world's most effective protests against GM crops, the capital of a state

in which anti-GM campaigners outnumber those in the UK by 1,000 to one.

Like most biotech enthusiasts, he ignored the key concern of the

activists: the corporate takeover of the food chain, and its devastating

consequences for food security.

 

But it would be wrong to blame Blair alone for these misconstructions.

The prime minister was simply repeating a suite of arguments formulated

elsewhere. Over the past month, activists have slowly been discovering

where that " elsewhere " may be.

 

Two weeks ago, this column showed how the Bivings Group, a PR company

contracted to Monsanto, had invented fake citizens to post messages on

internet listservers. These phantoms had launched a campaign to force

Nature magazine to retract a paper it had published, alleging that

native corn in Mexico had been contaminated with GM pollen. But this, it

now seems, is just one of hundreds of critical interventions with which

PR companies hired by big business have secretly guided the biotech

debate over the past few years.

 

While I was writing the last piece, Bivings sent me an e-mail fiercely

denying that it had anything to do with the fake correspondents " Mary

Murphy " and " Andura Smetacek " , who started the smear campaign against

the Nature paper. Last week I checked the e-mail's technical properties.

They contained the identity tag " bw6.bivwood.com " . The message came from

the same computer terminal that " Mary Murphy " has used. New research

coordinated by the campaigner Jonathan Matthews appears to have unmasked

the fake persuaders: " Mary Murphy " is being posted by a Bivings web

designer, writing from both the office and his home computer in

Hyattsville, Maryland; while " Andura Smetacek " appears to be the

company's chief internet marketer.

 

Not long ago, the website slashdot.com organized a competition for

hackers: if they could successfully break into a particular server, they

got to keep it. Several experienced hackers tested their skills. One of

them was one using a computer identified as bw6.bivwood.com.

 

Though someone in the Bivings office appears to possess hacking skills,

there is no evidence that Bivings has ever made use of them. But other

biotech lobbyists do appear to have launched hacker attacks. Just before

the paper in Nature was publicly challenged, the server hosting the

accounts used by its authors was disabled by a particularly effective

attack which crippled their capacity to fight back. The culprit has yet

to be identified.

 

Bivings is the secret author of several of the websites and bogus

citizens' movements which have been coordinating campaigns against

environmentalists. One is a fake scientific institute called the " Center

for Food and Agricultural Research " . Bivings has also set up the

" Alliance for Environmental Technology " , a chlorine industry lobby

group. Most importantly, Bivings appears to be connected with

AgBioWorld, the genuine website run by CS Prakash, a plant geneticist at

Tuskegee University, Alabama.

 

AgBioWorld is perhaps the most influential biotech site on the web.

Every day it carries new postings about how GM crops will feed the

world, new denunciations of the science which casts doubt on them and

new attacks on environmentalists. It was here that the fake persuaders

invented by Bivings launched their assault on the Nature paper.

AgBioWorld then drew up a petition to have the paper retracted.

 

Prakash claims to have no links with Bivings but, as the previous

article showed, an error message on his site suggests that it is or was

using the main server of the Bivings Group. Jonathan Matthews, who found

the message, commissioned a full technical audit of AgBioWorld. His web

expert has now found 11 distinctive technical fingerprints shared by

AgBioWorld and Bivings' Alliance for Environmental Technology site. The

sites appear, he concludes, to have been created by the same programmer.

 

Though he lives and works in the United States, CS Prakash claims to

represent the people of the third world. He set up AgBioWorld with Greg

Conko of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the far-right libertarian

lobby group funded by such companies as Philip Morris, Pfizer and Dow

Chemical. Conko has collaborated with Matthew Metz, one of the authors

of the scientific letters to Nature seeking to demolish the maize paper,

to produce a highly partisan guide to biotechnology on the AgBioWorld

site. The Competitive Enterprise Institute boasts that it " played a key

role in the creation " of a petition of scientists supporting biotech

(ostensibly to feed the third world) launched by Prakash. Unaware that

it had been devised by a corporate lobby group, 3,000 scientists, three

Nobel laureates among them, signed up.

 

Bivings is just one of several public relations agencies secretly

building a parallel world on the web. Another US company, Berman & Co,

runs a fake public interest site called ActivistCash.com, which seeks to

persuade the foundations giving money to campaigners to desist. Berman

also runs the " Center for Consumer Freedom " , which looks like a

citizens' group but lobbies against smoking bans, alcohol restrictions

and health warnings on behalf of tobacco, drinks and fast food

companies. The marketing firm Nichols Dezenhall set up a site called

StopEcoViolence, another " citizens' initiative " , demonizing activists.

In March, Nichols Dezenhall linked up with Prakash's collaborator, the

Competitive Enterprise Institute, to sponsor a conference for

journalists and corporate executives on " eco-extremism " .

 

What is fascinating about these websites, fake groups and phantom

citizens is that they have either smelted or honed all the key weapons

currently used by the world's biotech enthusiasts: the conflation of

activists with terrorists, the attempts to undermine hostile research,

the ever more nuanced claims that those who resist GM crops are

anti-science and opposed to the interests of the poor. The hatred

directed at activists over the past few years is, in other words,

nothing of the kind. In truth, we have been confronted by the crafted

response of an industry without emotional attachment.

 

Tony Blair was correct when he observed on Thursday that " there is only

a small band of people... who genuinely want to stifle informed debate " .

But he was wrong to identify this small group as those opposed to GM

crops. Though he didn't know it, the people seeking to stifle the debate

are the ones who wrote his speech; not in the days before he delivered

it, but in the years in which the arguments he used were incubated.

 

www.monbiot.com

 

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002