Inside The Spin Machine

Where you can find American tax dollars, efforts to downplay the risks of pesticides and keep tabs on organic farming advocates

Oct 04, 2024

Being a journalist can often be lonely and surrounded by negativity, especially if your focus is on exposing wrongdoings and you work remotely.

So I welcomed with open arms two chances last week to bond with like-minded people, first at the iMEdD journalism conference in Athens and then at Slow Food Terra Madre in Torino, to talk about the intersections between investigative journalism and sustainable food systems.

Fellow panellist Hazel Healy, editor at DeSmog, noted during our panel discussion at Slow Food how lovely it was to experience the other side of food: the joy, the community, and the camaraderie it brings. I found it whether I was speaking to a Kenyan farmer about their produce, tasting a sourdough made by an Italian baker living in France, or deciding which bottle of vin santo to take home.

Another thing that stuck with me was a comment from Miriam Wells, The Examination's Impact Editor, during our discussion in Athens. She spoke about how the food industry achieved its success - at the expense to human and planetary health - by building alliances, and that we should do the same. Here’s a link for anyone with an hour to burn.

That point feels particularly pertinent this week, based on an investigation which came out last week and led by my colleagues. It involved alliances between a group of dedicated journalists to get it off the ground and alliances between journalists, scientists, and human rights experts to spread the word. We need more such alliances.

Last Friday, Lighthouse Reports’ Food Systems Newsroom, of which I’m a proud member, and multiple media partners published a blockbuster investigation into a covert campaign, partly funded by American tax payers, “to downplay the risks of pesticides and discredit environmentalists in Africa, Europe, and North America”.

My colleagues Margot and Elena worked on it for over a year to get a rare insight into the industry’s attempts not only to defend products that are harmful to human health and nature but also to undermine people who are calling for change.

In The Beginning

It all started with a tip: a major donor withdrew support for a scientific conference scheduled in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2019, supposedly after coming under pressure from the U.S. government. The conference was about showcasing alternatives to pesticides.

Digging further using Freedom of Information (FOI) requests revealed “extensive correspondence between US civil servants, a Kenyan NGO, pesticide executive and a company, v-Fluence, about how to subvert the event.”

Thus begins a quest to find out what happened and who v-Fluence is.

Turns out, it is a Missouri-based PR firm set up by Jay Byrne, a former communications executive at Monsanto, the American agrochemical giant whose name is synonymous with genetically modified (GMO) seeds and the weed killer Roundup, which contains glyphosate. It is now part of Germany’s Bayer.
It also turns out - thanks to public spending records and analysis of financial statements - USAID has granted a contract to v-Fluence to construct a “private social network”.

The firm is also being accused of working with Syngenta to hide the risks of Paraquat, a herbicide that is generally accepted as highly toxic. There is also mounting evidence linking it to Parkinson’s disease.

Headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, Syngenta is another agrochemical giant. Since 2017, it has been owned by China National Chemical Corporation (ChemChina).

The Private Social Network

Byrne came up with Bonus Eventus, which according to him, is “named after the Roman god of agriculture whose name translates to “good outcome””.

The network profiled hundreds of scientists, campaigners and writers who are deemed anti-pesticide and pro-organic, including celebrated US food writers Michael Pollan (of the “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants” fame) and Mark Bittman, the Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva and ecologist Debal Deb, the Nigerian activist Nnimmo Bassey, and two former U.N. Special Rapporteurs, Hilal Elver and Baskut Tuncak.

Many profiles have personal details such as the names of family members, phone numbers, home addresses and even house values. Some have deeply personal details that have little to no relation to their work on crops or chemicals. Many also “include disparaging allegations authored by people funded by, or otherwise connected to, the chemical industry”, said The Guardian.

These are accessible by about 1,000 people who were granted privileged entry. This includes:

In the US, more than 30 current government officials, most of whom are from the US Department of Agriculture.
In Australia, the civil servant overseeing the registration and approval of agricultural chemicals (the profile appeared to have been set up years earlier, and the person involved denied having had access during their tenure as a regulator) and several scientists affiliated with the nation’s top universities.
In Kenya, members of the Ministry of Agriculture and the National Biosafety Authority
In India, the Executive Director of the Federation of Seed Industry of India (FSII), the consulting editor of the right-wing magazine Swarajya (who denied any knowledge about the network and of Byrne), and researchers and policy advisors from research institutes and agrochemical companies

“The network’s membership roster is a who’s-who of the agrochemical industry and its friends, featuring executives from some of the world’s largest pesticide companies alongside government officials from multiple countries,” my colleagues wrote.

Most of the account holders interviewed by Lighthouse Reports, Le Monde and their partners said they have simply signed up for a press review service, and that they do not participate in the network’s activities, do not consult the document database made available to subscribers.

lhreports

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The Pressure on Africa

In Kenya, where more than 75% of the agrochemicals used in 2020 were categorised as Highly Hazardous Pesticides (HHPs) and where there has been both climate and political pressure to boost food production, the consequences have been devastating, wrote The New Humanitarian.

Take John Kiunjuri, 75. In his mid-40s, he worked for a farm growing vegetables and flowers for export. He regularly mixed herbicides without gloves or a mask. His hands started shaking while he was still working on the farm. By 2016, nearly two decades after his contract ended, he could no longer hold a teacup.
“A doctor at Nanyuki General Hospital eventually diagnosed Parkinson’s disease, and told him that his condition could have been a result of the agrochemicals he had handled,” the article said.

There is also a disturbing “chemical colonialism” at work: “Out of all the HHPs registered and legally sold by international companies in Kenya, nearly half are banned in the EU and the United States”.

Brazilian academic Larissa Bombardi who had to leave the country after receiving threats for her research on pesticides, used the same term to talk about the impact of European pesticides on ordinary Brazilians. These are pesticides banned in the EU but still in use in Brazil.

Members of Bonus Eventus in Kenya also wrote multiple op-ed columns, portraying efforts to ban pesticides as threatening the country’s food security and openly criticising agroecology, a holistic philosophy of farming that takes into account the needs of both people and nature and shuns chemical inputs.

Their stance on agroecology mirrors that of a Trump-appointed U.S. ambassador to the U.N. food agencies in Rome who, in a public speech in 2020, called the practice “an explicit rejection of the very idea of progress - extolling “peasant” farming and promoting “the right to subsistence” agriculture.”

Kip Tom, the ambassador, has a farm regarded as one of Monsanto’s largest seed producers. He is a member of Bonus Eventus, according to Le Monde. In a response to Lighthouse Reports, he too denied being connected to the network.

The Attempt to Derail EU’s Farm to Fork

During the Trump administration, v-Fluence also obtained a contract with another PR firm, called The White House Writings Group (WHWG), aimed at undermining the EU’s Farm to Fork policy, according to Le Monde. A key pillar of Farm to Fork was to slash the use of chemical pesticides.

The USDA, assisted by WHWG, tried to get through to Brussels via the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) parliamentary group who were seen as sympathetic to American interests. At that time, ECR members included some trenchantly right-wing groups such as Hungary's Fidesz and Italy's Fratelli d'Italia.

On July 29, 2020, WHWG organised a webinar attended by the then-US Secretary of Agriculture, Sonny Perdue, ECR MEPs and the European Commissioner for Agriculture, Janusz Wojciechowski. Purdue criticised Farm to Fork and said it could jeopardise global food security. Media reports on the webinar focused on the concern.

According to Le Monde:

“In a note sent to USDA executives several months later, the two PR firms congratulated themselves. "At the time of its May release, F2F appeared to have achieved widespread acceptance across the Continent; until the webinar at the end of July, not a single negative story on F2F appeared in mainstream European media.””

In a November 2020 memo, v-Fluence and WHWG not only pledged to defeat the F2F strategy and the European Green Deal, they also proposed to step up operations in the countries of the South, the article added.

Regular readers of Thin Ink know what happened to the Farm to Fork and the pesticide regulation: the former is in limbo and the latter was abandoned.

The work, worth up to $4.9 million, was set to begin in 2020, but public spending records suggest the work either did not continue or was suspended when President Biden was elected. The USDA said that it was reviewing the agreement.

The Response

In an email statement to Lighthouse Reports, v-Fluence founder Byrne said that the allegations of his network secretly profiling individuals who have spoken out against pesticides and their unregulated use are “grossly misleading representations” and “manufactured falsehoods”.

v-Fluence also denied having held government contracts now or in the past, but said that the US government was a “funder of other organisations with whom we work.”

Byrne also described v-fluence’s role as “an information collection, sharing, analysis, and reporting provider” to “promote understanding of all the various stakeholders, positions, research… impacting food and agriculture”

“The claims by the Lighthouse NGO and other advocacy groups with whom they are collaborating are based on grossly misleading representations, factual errors regarding our work and clients, and manufactured falsehoods,” he said in a statement published on its website.

Byrne also denied the allegations in the lawsuit against him and Syngenta that is currently ongoing in the US.

Thin’s Pickings

CAP not Matching Europe’s Green Ambitions, say Auditors (again) - ARC2020
It’s not entirely a surprise but it’s still useful to have the European Court of Auditors validate civil society concerns that the 2023-2027 Common Agricultural Policy, the EU’s biggest budget item, “do not match the EU’s ambitions for the climate and the environment, and that key elements for assessing green performance are missing.”
Oliver Moore broke down the key elements of the report in this piece but if you want to go straight to the source, it is here.
This isn’t the first time the Court of Auditors have taken CAP (and its backers) to task. A 2021 special report also critised it, saying the $100 billion attributed to climate action “had little impact”.
Von der Leyen budgeted €149K to pay medieval history professor for farming report - Politico
”European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen allotted a salary 64 percent higher than the top rate set for advisers to pay a medieval history professor overseeing a landmark report on agriculture,” reported Eddy Wax.
This amounted to nearly €1,000 a day.
What is this landmark report on agriculture? I wrote about it a couple of weeks ago. You can find it here.
New Frontiers in the Fight Against Environmental and Wildlife Crimes - Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime
I moderated the launch of a new system to monitor illegal wildlife trade and new research on global trends around such crimes, as part of a project to track and expose environmental and wildlife crimes.
It’s two hours long but there were some very cool innovations and important conversations.

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Thin Ink