Running scared in California - say hello to the fake persuaders?

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Running scared in California - say hello to the fake persuaders?

 

" GM WATCH " <info

 

Thu, 28 Oct 2004 20:40:12 +0100

 

 

http://www.gmwatch.org

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1.Running scared in California - say hello to the fake persuaders?

2.The Covert Biotech War

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1.Running scared in California - say hello to the fake persuaders?

 

The biotech industry's mouthpiece - AgBioView - has just brought out a

" Special " campaigning bulletin dedicated entirely to the " Reckless

Ballot Measures in California " .

 

The content reflects not just the industry's anxiety over the county

ballot measures calling for a GM ban. It also makes plain its strategy -

a strategy developed after it wasted more than half a million dollars

(via Croplife America) unsuccessfully opposing the Mendocino ballot

iniative.

 

The new tactic is to do everything in the name of the locals - most

especially, the farming community, so that the ballots are not seen as a

fight between giant multinationals and local folk, but as a fight

between local farmers standing up for their independence and overbearing

activists.

 

To this end the industry's friends in California have been busy

organising appropriate locals to sing the industry's tunes. You can

catch a

flavour of what's going on in today's Agbioview Special where an almost

line by line rebuttal is presented of a " GE-Free Butte " Ad. AgBioView's

rebuttal is described as, " A California Farmer Speaks Up and Takes on

'GE-Free' Myths' " .

 

The particular " California Farmer " in question is not identified and,

while he or she may just be bashful, there are very good grounds for

scepticism about such contributions to AgBioView. This is the list that

previously ran a whole series of campaigning pieces by what have been

termed the " fake persuaders " - Monsanto PR flaks posing as ordinary

citizens. These misleading, soemtimes libellous and otherwise poisonous

postings were eventually tracked down to Monsanto's IP address and

that of

its online PR company Bivings, which actually boasted about its

insidious " viral marketing " .

 

Why Monsanto & Co. might want to resort to such good old " third party "

tactics is all too obvious when you read the " California Farmer "

rebuttal. In commenting on the statement in the ad, " GE canola has so

thoroughly contaminated non-GE varieties, Saskatchewan's organic growers

abandoned the crop altogether and are suing Monsanto and Bayer

CropScience " ,

the " California Farmer " retorts, " And who were these organic growers?

Their production accounted for a fraction of a percent of all canola

growers. Did they have the right to hinder the economic viability of all

other growers? "

 

To say the production of these farmers should just be eliminated

without any concern sounds harsh even coming from a " California

Farmer " . Now

imagine those words in the mouth of a multinational!

 

At the end of AgBioView's " Special " is a call to arms to California's

scientists from AgBioView's editor, CS Prakash, who wants them to write

to the media, to Governor Arnie, amongst others, and even provides a

model letter for the purpose.

 

This is highly reminiscent of the campaign against Dr Ignacio Chapela,

where the fake persuaders were used on AgBioView to whip up sentiment

against the Berkeley scientist and then Prakash and others called on the

scientific community to make their views known to the journal Nature,

or Prakash's UK side-kick Tony Trewavas called on rs to write

to Berkeley to demand Chapela's dismissal if he failed to hand over his

Mexican maize samples.

 

For the AgBioView Special

http://www.agbioworld.org/newsletter_wm/index.php?caseid=archive & newsid=2260

 

For more on Monsanto's dirty tricks campaign, and its use of fake

citizens, fake organisations, and even fake public protest, see

'Biotech's

Hall of Mirrors' by Jonathan Matthews

http://www.gene-watch.org/genewatch/articles/16-2matthews.html

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2.Excerpt from " The Covert Biotech War " by

George Monbiot (published in The Guardian, Tuesday 19 Nov, 2002)

http://www.gmwatch.org/p2temp2.asp?aid=2 & page=1 & op=1

 

The battle to put a corporate GM padlock on our foodchain is being

fought on the net

 

Six months ago, this column revealed that a fake citizen called Mary

Murphy had been bombarding internet listservers with messages denouncing

the scientists and environmentalists who were critical of GM crops. The

computer from which some of these messages were sent belongs to a

public relations company called Bivings, which works for Monsanto. The

boss

of Bivings wrote to the Guardian, fiercely denying that his company had

been running covert campaigns. His head of online PR, however, admitted

to the BBC's Newsnight that one of the messages came from someone

" working for Bivings " or " clients using our services " . But Bivings denies

any knowledge of the use of its computer for such a campaign.

 

This admission prompted the researcher Jonathan Matthews, who first

uncovered the story, to take another look at some of the emails which had

attracted his attention. He had become particularly interested in a

series of vituperative messages sent to the most prominent biotech

listservers on the net, by someone called Andura Smetacek. Smetacek first

began writing in 2000. She or he repeatedly accused the critics of GM of

terrorism. When one of her letters, asserting that Greenpeace was

deliberately spreading unfounded fears about GM foods in order to

further its

own financial interests, was reprinted in the Glasgow Herald,

Greenpeace successfully sued the paper for libel.

 

Smetacek claimed, in different messages, first to live in London, then

in New York. Jonathan Matthews checked every available public record

and found that no person of that name appeared to exist in either city.

But last month his techie friends discovered something interesting.

Three of these messages, including the first one Smetacek sent, arrived

with the internet protocol address 199.89.234.124. This is the address

assigned to the server gatekeeper2.monsanto.com. It belongs to the

Monsanto corporation.

 

In 1999, after the company nearly collapsed as a result of its

disastrous attempt to thrust GM food into the European market, Monsanto's

communications director, Philip Angell, explained to the Wall Street

Journal: " Maybe we weren't aggressive enough... When you fight a

forest fire,

sometimes you have to light another fire. " The company identified the

internet as the medium which had helped protest to " mushroom " .

 

At the end of last year, Jay Byrne, formerly the company's director of

internet outreach, explained to a number of other firms the tactics he

had used at Monsanto. He showed how, before he got to work, the top GM

sites listed by an internet search engine were all critical of the

technology. Following his intervention, the top sites were all supportive

ones (four of them established by Monsanto's PR firm Bivings). He told

them to " think of the internet as a weapon on the table. Either you pick

it up or your competitor does, but somebody is going to get killed " .

 

While he was working for Monsanto, Byrne told the internet newsletter

Wow that he " spends his time and effort participating " in web

discussions about biotech. He singled out the site AgBioWorld, where

he " ensures

his company gets proper play " . AgBioWorld is the site on which Smetacek

launched her campaign.

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