The next bulletin was from someone called ‘Andura Smetacek’ who claimed Chapela was in league with environmental groups and added, wrongly, that his paper was “not a peer-reviewed research article subject to independent scientific analysis”. Smetacek and Murphy have between them posted around 60 articles on the Prakash Iist. So who are they?
Mary Murphy’s email is [email protected], which hides her employer. On one occasion on an internet message board she used this address but also left a trail of other identifying details that showed she worked for the Bivings group, a PR company with offices in Washington, Brussels, Chicago and Tokyo.
Bivings, which has more than a dozen Monsanto companies as clients, has been assisting the GM firm’s use of the internet since realising that it played a significant part in the company’s poor PR image. Bivings says it uses the internet’s “powerful message delivery tools” for “viral dissemination”.
When asked about what they do for Monsanto, a spokesperson for Bivings said “We run their web sites for various European countries and their main corporate site and we help them with campaigns as a consultant. We are not allowed to discuss strategy issues and personal opinions”. They declined to give any further information on their work for the company.
However further insight can be gleamed from a recent report by Bivings which said: “Message boards, chat rooms and listservs are a great way to anonymously monitor what is being said. Once you are plugged into this world, it is possible to make postings to these outlets that present your position as an uninvolved third party.”
As a “third party” Bivings has covertly smeared biotech industry critics on a website called CFFAR.org as well as via articles and attacks on listservs under aliases. The attack on the Nature article was a continuation of this covert campaign.
Andura Smetacek is no stranger to such tactics. The Big Issue South West can also reveal that she was the original source of a letter that was published under the name of TonyTrevawas, a pro-GM scientist from the University of Edinburgh, in the Herald newspaper in Scotland. The letter became a source of legal action between Greenpeace, its former director Peter Melchett, and the newspaper. The case went to the high court and ended with Melchett receiving undisclosed damages and an apology from the Herald. Trevawas has always denied he wrote the letter.
In a letter written earlier this year, Smetacek said: “I am the author of the message which was sent to AgBioWorld. I’m surprised at the stir it has caused since the basis for the content of the letter comes from publicly available news articles and research easily found on-line”.
Smetacek is also a “front email”. In an early posting to the AgBioView list she gave her address as London, while in recent correspondence with The Ecologist magazine Smetacek left a New York phone number. However, after extensive searching of public records in the US, the Big Issue South West found no one in America with that name. Despite numerous requests by The Ecologist for Smetacek to give an employer or land address she has refused to do so.
A clue to her identity is that Smetacek’s earliest messages to AgBioView consistently promoted the CFFAR.org website. CFFAR stands for the Centre For Food and Agricultural Research and describes itself as “a public policy and research coalition dedicated to exploring and understanding health, safety, and sustainability issues associated with food and fiber production”.
In fact the website attacks organic agriculture as well as environmental groups, like Greenpeace, calling them “terrorists”. The website is registered to an employee of Bivings who works as one of Monsanto’s web gurus.
Even the AgBioWorld Foundation website is linked to Bivings.
Jonathan Matthews, a leading anti-GM activist, has researched the activities of Bivings. While searching the AgBioWorld archives he received a message that told him that an attempt to connect him to a Bivings database had failed. Internet experts believe that this message implies Bivings is hosting an AgBioView database. These experts also notice technical similarities between the CFFAR, Bivings and AgBioWorld websites.
Prakash, though, denies receiving funding or assistance for the AgBioWorld foundation and denies working with any PR company saying he is “pro-the technology not necessarily the companies”.
However Matthews said: “Via Bivings, Monsanto has a series of shop windows with which to influence the GM debate. One of these is AgBioWorld. The chief mannequin seems to be Prakash who has been very influential in the whole Nature/GM corn contamination fiasco. But I wonder if Nature really knows who is behind the attacks.”
Dr Sue Mayer from GeneWatch UK says: “It is quite extraordinary the lengths the biotech industry and the scientific establishment will go to discredit any critical science.”
[Andy Rowell is the author of ‘Green Backlash: global subversion of the environment movement’, Routledge, London and New York, 1996]
I got this here
Will
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