Prakash has a make-over! AgBioWorld paints it black

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GMW: Prakash has a make-over! AgBioWorld paints it black

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Fri, 8 Apr 2005 16:25:10 +0100

 

 

 

 

 

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1.Prakash has a make-over! AgBioWorld paints it black - GM Watch

2.Corporate Phantoms - George Monbiot

3.The Covert Biotech War - George Monbiot

4.How Monsanto manufactures the poor on the net - Jonathan Matthews

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1. Prakash has a make-over - AgBioWorld paints it black

 

Yesterday CS Prakash announced a " Redesigned AgBioWorld Website " :

 

" AgBioWorld is proud to announce the launch of our new, redesigned

website. We would also like to thank the people who were generous

enough to

send us donations, which helped make the new site possible. "

 

As part of the make-over the site is now adorned with pensive-looking

African children - doubtless, their staring eyes are meant to be hungry

for the fruits of biotech.

 

Who undertook the latest make-over is unclear but we know who undertook

the last one - Monsanto's Internet PR company Bivings and, funnily

enough, Monsanto's Internet homepage also used to be adorned with the

faces

of Third World children. It was part of an Internet campaign that

proved unpersuasive and so led to the use of independent seeming third

parties to imprint the same message.

 

Below are extracts from 3 articles about CS Prakash, his website and

Monsanto's use of the Internet as part of, what George Monbiot has

called, their covert biotech war.

 

For more on Monsanto's black-washing see: The Uncle Tom Award

http://spinwatch.server101.com/modules.php?name=Content & pa=showpage & pid=344

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2. Corporate Phantoms [extract]

by George Monbiot

The Guardian, Wednesday May 29, 2002

http://www.gmwatch.org/p2temp2.asp?aid=58 & page=1 & op=2

 

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 email 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 email'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 [the e-mail front was later tracked back right to

Monsanto itself - see Geoerge Monbiot's follow up article below]

 

....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

" Centre 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 [and Monsanto]. 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 " Centre 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 " , demonising 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.

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3.The Covert Biotech War [extract]

George Monbiot,

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 [with hte help of the investigative

journalist, Andy Rowell] 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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4.THE FAKE PARADE

by Jonathan Matthews

Under the banner of populist protest, multinational corporations

manufacture the poor

http://www.freezerbox.com/archive/article.asp?id=254

Environment, 3 December 2002

 

The Internet provides a perfect medium for... showcases [for support

for biotech], where the gap between the virtual and the real is easily

erased.

 

Take the South-facing website Foodsecurity.net, which promotes itself

as " the web's most complete source of news and information about global

food security concerns and sustainable agricultural practices " .

Foodsecurity.net claims to be " an independent, non-profit coalition of

people

throughout the world " . Despite its global reach, however,

Foodsecurity.net's only named staff member is its " African Director " ,

Dr. Michael

Mbwille, a Tanzanian doctor who's forever penning articles defending

Monsanto and attacking the likes of Greenpeace.

 

The news and information at Foodsecurity.net is largely pro-GM

articles, often vituperative in content and boasting headlines like " The

Villainous Vandana Shiva " or " Altered Crops Called Boon for Poor " .

When one

penetrates beyond the news pages, the content is very limited. A single

message graces the messageboard posted by an myoung - the

domain name of The Bivings Group, an internet PR company that numbers

Monsanto among its clients.

 

There's also an event posting from an Andura Smetacek, recently

identified in an article in The Guardian as an e-mail front used by

Monsanto

to run a campaign of character assassination against its scientific and

environmental critics.

 

The site is registered to a Graydon Forrer, currently the managing

director of Life Sciences Strategies, a company that specializes in

" communications programmes " for the bio-science industries. A piece of

information that is not usually disclosed in Graydon Forrer's

self-presentation is that he was previously Monsanto's director of

executive

communications. Indeed, he seems to have been working for the company

in 1999 -

the same year the site of this " independent, non-profit coalition of

people throughout the world " was first registered. Foodsecurity's

" African " , Dr. Mbwille, is not, incidentally, in Africa at the moment.

He is enjoying a sabbatical observing medical practice in St. Louis,

Missouri - the home town, as it happens, of the Monsanto Corporation.

 

Foodsecurity.net forms but one of a whole series of websites with

undisclosed links to biotech industry lobbyists or PR companies, as our

previous research has demonstrated.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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