1.GM Industry Flak scheduled to speak May 20th at UC Berkeley Commencement
2.Wambugu's Whoppers

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1.GM Industry Flak scheduled to speak May 20th at UC Berkeley Commencement
by Kavikratu Tattva Budh
Wednesday May 16th 2007 http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/05/16/18417101.php

Dr. Florence Murinigi Wambugu is scheduled to speak at UC Berkeley the morning of May 20th, 2007, as the Commencement Speaker during the College of Natural Resources Commencement Program. Dr. Florence Wambugu is a leading African biotechnolgy expert whose career and research projects are funded by Monsanto, Dow, Noivartis, AgrEvo, Bayer, BBSRC, Cargill, Pioneer, Syngenta. These companies also provide millions to UC Berkeley for research.

Extensive analysis of published reports shows Dr. Florence Wambugu's reinvention of the future via genetic engineering exists only at the level of myth. Unfortunately, the Wambugu myth is helping to inhibit change for some of the world's poorest farmers.

Dr. Wamugu was picked and trained by Monsanto for its GM virus-resistant sweet potato project. It is around this project that Wambugu has built her reputation, capturing massive positive publicity for GM crops in the process.

Since 1998 the Berkeley campus plant scientist have been wracked by dissent over research in genetic engineering. In that year UC Berkeley signed a lucrative deal with the Swiss-based firm Novartis (now Syngenta), giving the company privileged access to the university's plant scientists in return for $25 million.

Post-Monsanto Wambugu became the first Director of the AfriCentre of the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA), based in her native-country, Kenya. ISAAA is a U.S.-centered, GM promotion and ‘technology transfer’ agency funded by AgrEvo, Bayer, Cargill, Dow, Monsanto, Novartis, Pioneer, Syngenta, in addition to foundations and Western governmental funding agencies, including the BBSRC. Its Board of Directors has contained leading biotech industry executives from both Monsanto and Novartis (now Syngenta).

The AfriCentre's focus was projects that assisted the introduction of GM into Sub-Saharan Africa. As part of their mission, Wambugu and ISAAA spun off a number of innocuously named pro-GM fronts, such as the African Biotechnology Stakeholders' Forum (ABSF), of which she is the Vice Chair, and the African Biotechnology Trust.

References:

May 20th, 2007 CNR Commencement Program http://www.cnr.berkeley.edu/site/speakers.php

GM Watch profile of Dr. Wambugu

http://www.lobbywatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=131

UC Department Torn Over Corn Research; Scientist's Reputation May Be Damaged, Daily Californian, April 2002 http://www.mindfully.org/GE/GE4/Chapela-Reputation9apr02.htm

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2.Wambugu's Whoppers earn her Smouldering (not so!) Smalls award
PANTS ON FIRE AWARD
http://www.lobbywatch.org/p2temp2.asp?aid=59&page=1&op=2

'Nobody has ever claimed that GM is the answer to world hunger,' ventured Tony Combes, Monsanto UK’s director of Corporate Affairs. But the same weekend his comment was published, Kenyan scientist Dr Florence Wambugu claimed in the Canadian press that GM crops were 'the key to eradicating poverty and hunger in the Third World.'

Pantie pyrotechnics

This kind of inflammatory claim is far from a one-off. Media-friendly Flo told New Scientist, 'In Africa GM food could almost literally weed out poverty'. In the journal Nature she claimed it could not just solve 'poverty' but could take care of 'famine' and 'environmental degradation' too. Warming to her theme, Flo told a Canadian newspaper GM was not just the answer to hunger but could pull 'the African continent out of decades of economic and social despair'.

High-flying Flo - the industry's HOT SHOT!

'If anyone tells you that GM is going to feed the world, tell them that it is not,' the former head of Novartis Seeds in the UK once remarked. But nobody from the biotech industry has tried telling that to Flo. Indeed, far from being embarrassed by the Monsanto-trained scientist's extravagant vapour trail, Flo is considered one of the industry's hottest properties.

'I wish we could clone her,' says Val Giddings of the Biotechnology Industry Organisation. Fiery Flo has certainly not gone unrewarded. A two-time winner of the coveted Monsanto Company Outstanding Performance Award, Flo is also a luminary of DuPont's Biotech Advisory Panel. She has also been appointed to the Bill & Melissa Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative .

The US magazine Forbes went so far as to name Flo one of fifteen people around the globe who will 'reinvent the future', telling us, 'While the West debates the ethics of GM food, Florence Wambugu is using it to feed her country'. ('Millions served; Florence Wambugu feeds her country with food others have the luxury to avoid' ).

Wham, Yam -- thank you Ma’am...

Spinning the spud as a stud!

Wambugu's meteoric career has been built around a Monsanto-initiated project to create a genetically engineered virus-resistant sweet potato -- a showcase product intended to hype GM as the saviour of Africa.

Trialled in Kenya, the results of sub-Saharan Africa's first GM crop were 'astonishing', according to the article in Forbes magazine. Yields were 'double that of the regular plant', with ‘potatoes bigger and richer in colour’, indicating they'd retained more nutritional value. For hungry Africa, we were told, 'Wambugu's modified sweet potato offers tangible hope'.

Better yet, a piece in the Toronto Globe & Mail in July 2003 claimed that the yields were actually more that doubled: 'Dr Wambugu’s