| Welcome to our latest Lobbywatch Review, which delves into how a Bill Gates-backed pro-GMO propaganda group – the Alliance for Science – is campaigning for GMOs in Africa and Europe hand-in-glove with an ecomodernist outfit – RePlanet – that is not only lavishly funded with dirty money, but benefits from the presentational advice of Guardian columnist and author George Monbiot (see MONBIOT, REPLANET AND ASTROTURF). The common denominator in all this is Mark Lynas, Monbiot’s friend, RePlanet’s chief strategist, and the Alliance’s leading GMO promoter. In Europe, Bill Gates, Lynas, the Alliance and RePlanet have all been heavily involved in the lobby for GMO deregulation (see LOBBYING FOR GMOs IN EUROPE). Their goal is not just to remove controls on GMOs in European nations, but to encourage other countries, particularly in Africa, to follow suit and relax their own restrictions. To help overcome the strong opposition to this, the Gates-backed Alliance has for some time been working to brand all criticism of GMOs as “anti-science” and “misinformation” (see GMO MISINFORMATION). Their aim in doing so is to invalidate, and effectively censor, critical voices by encouraging lawmakers to disregard their concerns and to influence the media to cease to report them. As the investigative journalist Tim Schwab says of Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation in his excellent new book on them, “They don't want to win the debate on GMOs. They want to shut it down.” Finally, it may seem odd to link George Monbiot and the Microsoft cofounder but what increasingly connects them is their advocacy for high-tech solutions to environmental problems, with Monbiot, like Gates, embracing not just nuclear power but techno-foods, particularly fake meat and dairy. This has led Monbiot to work with his old friend Mark Lynas to rebrand ecomodernism so as to make RePlanet appear more of a citizens’ movement than a lavishly funded lobby group promoting the same agenda as the world’s most influential billionaire, with his monopolist-neoliberal outlook (see MONBIOT, REPLANET AND ASTROTURF). GMO MISINFORMATION
Last year the Alliance for Science’s chief lobbyist for GMOs, Mark Lynas, teamed up with two co-authors to publish a peer-reviewed article that equated people who criticise GMOs with those who spread “misinformation” on climate change, COVID, and vaccines. They claimed that “misinformation” about GMOs in the media has given rise to negative public attitudes and overly strict regulatory regimes. They singled out Africa as a continent where media “misinformation” is a particular problem and called this “a worrying finding given the potential for genetic engineering to deliver improved nutrition and food security in the continent”. In view of the partisan nature of this article, GMWatch was concerned to discover that it was being used to pressure African news organisations to adjust their coverage of GMOs and African governments to drop their restrictions and bans on them. Now a critical response to Lynas and his co-authors has passed a stringent peer review process and been published in the journal Environmental Sciences Europe. Agricultural GMOs and their associated pesticides: misinformation, science, and evidence is co-authored by GMWatch co-director Claire Robinson together with molecular geneticist Prof Michael Antoniou, sociologist Dr Irina Castro, and agroecologist Dr Angelika Hilbeck. In their paper, Antoniou et al show that Lynas et al’s article is so full of incorrect claims and methodological weaknesses that it is itself an example of misinformation. The principal funder of the Alliance for Science’s pro-GMO PR work is the Gates Foundation, which has invested heavily in GMOs and, in the past, directly in Monsanto, raising the question of whether the Alliance really promotes “science” or GMO industry profits. Since 2020, with the help of $10 million in new funding from the Gates Foundation, the Alliance has had an increasing focus on countering what it calls “conspiracy theories and disinformation campaigns”. The result has been not just a whole series of Alliance commentaries and surveys, in which Mark Lynas has increasingly been to the fore, but also their use as weapons by the Alliance in a concerted campaign to try and shape media coverage, especially on GMO crops, and with Africa as a key target. The Lynas et al article (see item above) that implies that misinformation never occurs in pro-GMO media coverage needs to be seen in this context. A good example of the article’s use as a campaigning tool is the press briefing held in Nairobi at the Africa Science Media Centre, which was itself established with funding from the Alliance for Science. The event was addressed by Lynas and the claims in Lynas et al’s article were used to push for increased media wariness of the “misinformation which is being pushed around by anti-GMO activists or anti-science advocates”. Ironically, Mark Lynas, who is leading the Alliance for Science’s campaign to counter misinformation, has himself been repeatedly called out for making inaccurate, misleading, and even totally false claims. This includes making claims about agriculture in Africa that are so deceptive that there have been calls by academics for their retraction. The Alliance for Science also stands accused of deliberately misleading people about the performance of GMO crops in Africa. Finally, Bill Gates, the man whose foundation is funding Lynas and the Alliance so handsomely to counter disinformation, has himself promoted GMO crops to Africans with claims that are wildly misleading. MONBIOT, REPLANET AND ASTROTURF
George Monbiot has attacked The Land magazine for having succumbed to “the current wave of conspiracism” in its criticism of his involvement with Mark Lynas and his ecomodernist group RePlanet, which claims to be a grassroots citizens’ movement for nuclear power, GMOs, and synthetic food. Monbiot took exception to an editorial in The Land that said, “RePlanet has all the hallmarks of a sophisticated astroturf organisation, whose real job is to advance industry interests, not least by weakening EU regulations around agrochemicals and ‘novel foods’.” Monbiot says that there is not “a shred of evidence” to support such a claim and that RePlanet, which claims to be exclusively funded by charitable foundations, is transparent about its funding. But a look into its finances shows that over 90% of RePlanet’s funding comes from Quadrature Climate Foundation (QCF), which derives its money from investments that include some of the most environmentally destructive corporations on the planet. The irony is that Monbiot has been among the most effective analysts of the appeal of ecomodernism to billionaires like Suneil Setiya, CEO of Quadrature Capital and trustee of QCF. RePlanet claim that they’re “entirely independent of industry and accept no funding from them”. And in tune with the “entirely independent”, “grassroots”, “citizens movement” image that they project, RePlanet have been soliciting your donations to help them send a delegation to the UN COP28 climate conference. RePlanet fail to mention that they’re already heavily funded (to the tune of over £1.5 million) by a Quadrature foundation whose money comes from financing, among other destructive industries, fossil fuel giants like Chevron, Valero, Halliburton and ConocoPhillips – the firm behind the massive project to drill undisturbed public land in the Arctic. RePlaneteers have also been helped to attend COP28 by Net Zero Nuclear (NZN) – a lobby co-founded by the World Nuclear Association, which “represents the global nuclear industry”. A British RePlaneteer similarly attended COP27 as part of a delegation from the Canadian Nuclear Association – “the national voice of the Canadian nuclear industry”. LOBBYING FOR GMOs IN EUROPE Although Africa is the principal target of the pro-GMO lobbying of Gates and the Alliance for Science, that doesn’t mean they aren’t actively promoting GMOs elsewhere in the world. In 2020, for instance, the Gates Foundation put a whopping $1.5 million of funding into a taskforce that then lobbied for European deregulation of new GMOs (involving gene editing, or in current EU-speak, new genomic techniques or NGTs). Mark Lynas of the Alliance for Science sat on this taskforce’s expert committee. On 24 October the Alliance for Science published a new report on the potential economic losses to the European economy of non-adoption of new GMOs (NGTs), a cost which, according to the report, will run into hundreds of billions of euros annually during the next decade. What makes this claim remarkable is that this is an almost entirely untried technology. It will also be remembered that the enormous advantages that the US was supposed to derive from older-style GMOs actually led American agriculture to fall behind Europe in measures of productivity and sustainability. The new report was co-authored by Mark Lynas and authors from the Breakthrough Institute, a think tank co-founded by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, who have been described as “lobbyists for techno-fixes who engage in endless battles with environmentalists”. On 25 October the EU-centric news site Euractiv hosted a major lobby event, sponsored by both the Alliance for Science and RePlanet. Called “New genomic techniques – What lies ahead?”, it featured a panel of speakers strongly in favour of GMO deregulation that included the director of the Alliance for Science, Sheila Ochugboju. Ochugboju presented the lavishly funded (c/o the Gates Foundation) Alliance as a grassroots initiative and she made clear why they were lobbying so hard for Europe to end its precautionary approach to GMOs: “We in the Alliance for Science who are fighting a science communications war against misinformation” come up against the “big loud voice in the global conversation” of Europe. Its style of regulation has an impact on the Global South, she emphasized, and so could “impede future technological advances [i.e. GMO uptake] there too”. The Alliance/Breakthrough report (see item above), warning Europe that it would lose trillions of euros if it didn’t deregulate new GMOs, was launched at this event. The Euractiv lobby event (item above) wasn’t the first time RePlanet and the Alliance for Science had teamed up to push GMOs. Back in March a campaign called give “Give Genes A Chance”, in which RePlanet is a prime mover, ran an event to “empower” early-career scientists to make their voices heard in support of GMO deregulation. As well as helping organise this event, RePlanet also provided several of the workshop leaders – variously wearing RePlanet and Alliance for Science hats. Which hat they actually wore differed in different versions of the programme. For instance, Paul Orcoza and Patricia Nanteza were listed on the event’s preliminary agenda as Alliance for Science speakers. This was later changed to RePlanet, but on the final version Orcoza was reverted back to the Alliance. Patricia Nanteza, who’s the director of RePlanet Africa, has also worked for the Alliance. Wearing her RePlanet hat, Nanteza organised pro-GMO protests in East Africa, which needless to say were supported by employees of the Alliance. .................................................................. We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible by readers’ donations. Please support our work with a one-off or regular donation. Thank you! |
