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 subscribers 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.lobbywatch.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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