Haro Von Mogel Bak

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LI scrape 12/15

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mogel LI

Camille (Cami) D. Ryan

Steven Savage

Consultant, Blogger, Speaker

Jay Byrne

President at v-Fluence -- New media and research driven public affairs, issues management and strategy support.

Kevin Folta

Professor and Chair

Anastasia Bodnar

Plant genetics and science communication

German Muttoni

Corn Line Development Breeder at Monsanto

Özlem Vardi Özkirmizi

Elliot Heffner

Research Scientist at Pioneer Hi-Bred International Inc

L. Val Giddings

Senior Fellow at Information Technology & Innovation Foundation</p>

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<a href="http://www.gmwatch.eu/index.php/news/archive/2014/15367-meet-the-plush-gmo-mascot-frank-n-foode"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.gmwatch.eu/index.php/news/archive/2014/15367-meet-the-plush-gmo-mascot-frank-n-foode</font></a>

<h1 style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1; color: rgb(0, 153, 0);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Watch the Cato GMO Forum</font></h1>

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<div class="post-byline" style=" margin: 5px 0px 10px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">by <a href="http://www.biofortified.org/community/user/admin/" title="Posts by Karl Haro von Mogel" rel="author" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">Karl Haro von Mogel</a> on 25 June 2013</font></div>

<p style=" margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Earlier this month, Jon Entine, Kevin Folta, and I traveled to Washington D.C. to talk about genetically engineered crops at the Cato Institute, in a forum titled,<a href="http://www.cato.org/events/biotechnology-feeding-world-brave-new-world-agriculture" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 153);"><em> Biotechnology: Feeding the World, or a Brave New World of Agriculture?</em></a> <a href="http://www.biofortified.org/2013/06/cato-gmo-forum-live-2-pm-edt/" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">The forum</a>, as many of you know, was intended to be a debate between those in favor of using the technology, and those who were against it, <a href="http://www.biofortified.org/2013/05/anti-gmo-leaders-withdraw-from-great-biotech-debate/" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">but at the last minute the anti-GMO debaters pulled out</a>. So instead, I was invited to join Jon and Kevin to round out the numbers and talk about genetically engineered plants that many of you may not have heard about yet.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jon, Kevin and I got together the night before the forum to go over our presentations and main points, and Anastasia[Bodnar]  met up with us as well. It is nice to sit down and have dinner with people who you’ve known for years and talked about these issues extensively, and talk about where we want this discussion to go. I think there was a little contest to see who had the zaniest activist artwork to put in their presentations. And a little note – we didn’t know what the moderator was going to say or talk about, so keep that in mind when you watch the forum. Without any further ado, here it is!</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I had a great time being part of this, and I hope that the three of us inspired a few people to learn more about this topic. What did you think? Feel free to comment below and ask questions. I know several people want to see some of our presentation slides, and we’re thinking about ways we can extend this presentation like that. Kevin and I also plotted and planned ways that we could include anti-biotech activists in planning and executing research into GMOs that we would publish together. This was <a href="http://kfolta.blogspot.com/2013/05/you-asked-for-independent-replication.html" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">tried in one form already</a>, but we came up with some more ideas that we’ll develop and present down the road.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[jackie bodnar FW]</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.biofortified.org/2013/06/watch-the-cato-gmo-forum/</font></p>

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<div style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">FOOD INDUSTRY ENLISTED ACADEMICS</font></div>

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<div style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Parts of this were already known, but Lipton digs up further damning evidence and quotes from Folta. They include an email to Monsanto that solidly contradicts Folta’s previous denials of a relationship with Monsanto and the biotech industry:<span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> “I am grateful for this opportunity and promise a solid return on the investment,</span>” Folta wrote after receiving the $25,000 check, thereby showing both a clear understanding of his role and the purpose of the money. The article goes on to similarly expose Bruce <span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Chassy (Prof Emeritus, University of Illinois) and David Shaw (Mississippi State University)</span>. It also discussses, presumably for <b>“balance”, agronomist and GMO critic Charles Benbrook, then at Washington State University, who unlike the others openly acknowledged his funding.</b></font></div>

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<div style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What Lipton Missed</font></div>

<div style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But readers of the emails can find facts that are much more damaging to perceptions of academic independence than that contained in the main article.<span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">  For one thing, the money Folta received is insignificant besides the tens of millions his university was taking from Syngenta (>$10million), Monsanto(>$1million), Pioneer (>$10million), and BASF (>$1million)</span>. Money that it’s hard to believe did not have a role in protecting Kevin Folta as he roamed zealously (and often offensively) over the internet, via his twitter account, blog, podcast, and OpEds, squelching dissent and ridiculing GMO critics wherever he went.</font></div>

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<div style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Also missing from the main Times article is a sense of the extensive and intricate networking of a small army of academics furthering the interests of Monsanto and other parts of the chemical, agribusiness and biotech industries. Folta rarely acted alone. His networks are filled with economists, molecular biologists, plant pathologists, development specialists, and agronomists, many of them much more celebrated than Kevin Folta, but all of them in a knowing loop with industry and the PR firms. Their job was acknowledged openly in emails <span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">(“We are all bad-ass shills for the truth. It’s a pleasure shilling with you.” Or, as Folta himself put it: “I’m glad to sign on to whatever you like, or write whatever you like.”</span>).<b> More generally, the group’s role was to initiate academic publications and other articles and to firefight legislative, media and scientific threats to the GMO and pesticide industries, all the while keeping their industry links hidden.</b></font></div>

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<div style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The academics identified by these emails as cooperating with industry and PR firms include:</font></div>

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<div style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Profs. Bruce Chassy (University of Illinois) and Alan McHughen (University of California, Riverside) who worked together to destroy the credibility of Russian scientist and GMO critic Irina Ermakova. They persuaded the journal Nature Biotechnology to interview Ermakova about her research and describe it. This interview was followed by a detailed critique of her research (about which none of the authors were expert). Ermakova was neither told of the critique nor given a chance to answer it. This whole elaborate <span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">subterfuge required her to be sent a dummy proof of the article she thought she was publishing in the journal.</span></font></div>

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<div style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Prof. Calestuous Juma (Harvard University) longtime advocate of GMOs for Africa.</font></div>

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<div style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Prof. Wayne<span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Parrott (University of Georgia)</span> a serial intervener in academic GMO debates.</font></div>

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<div style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Prof. Roger Beachy (Danforth Center, formerly USAID). Beachy is the principal living exponent of a classic biotech strategy: to respond rapidly to a report or publication critical of some aspect of the technology with a multi-author “rebuttal” [Disclaimer: the inaugural report of the Bioscience Resource Project (on the genome damage caused by genetic engineering) was met, even before formal publication, with both barrels from 23 professors, including Roger Beachy (Altpeter et al 2005)].(2)</font></div>

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<div style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Prof. Ron Herring (Cornell) who has helped to promote GMOs in India and fought to defuse the farmer suicide debate in India.</font></span></div>

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<div style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Prof. CS Prakash (Tuskegee University) </span>is the convener of the influential listserv AgBioWorld. AgBioWorld was the all-important conduit for a petition signed by three thousand scientists calling for the retraction of a 2001 scientific paper showing <span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">GMO contamination of Mexican corn (</span>Quist and Chapela 2001). As detailed in an article called <span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Fake Persuaders, the scientists who initiated the petition, and made inaccurate and inflammatory statements about the authors, were not real people. However, their emails could be traced back to servers belonging to Monsanto or Bivings, a PR company that was working with Monsanto at the time.</span></font></div>

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<div style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Prof. Nina Fedoroff (Penn State) is the most prominent of all of the scientists looped into all of the Times emails. Nina Fedoroff was the 2011-2012 President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.</span> The AAAS is the foremost scientific body in the US. During her Presidency, Fedoroff, who is also a contributor to the NY Times, used her position to coordinate and sign a letter on behalf of 60 prominent scientists. This letter was sent to EPA as part of an effort to defeat a pesticide regulatory effort. The real coordinator was Monsanto but Fedoroff participated in phone conferences and email exchanges with them (including with the prominent lobbyist <span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Stanley Abramson) </span>and gets credit in the emails for “moving the ball far down the field”. Yet Nina Fedoroff is not once named in the main article and nowhere at all is her position noted.</font></div>

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<div style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So the story that academia’s most vocal GMO defenders, and some of its most prominent scientists, are copied into these emails is missing. The focus on individuals like Folta occludes a demonstration, for the first time ever, of long-suspected and intricate coordination and cooperation among them.</font></div>

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<div style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Also looped in to various of the emails are supposedly independent individuals and organisations who speak in favour of biotechnology, self-reportedly out of personal passion. These include Dr Steve Savage, <span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font color="#ff0000">Karl Haro von Mogel</font> of Biofortified, Mischa Popoff (of the <b>Heartland Institute) and Jon Entine</b> </span>(then affiliated with George Mason University and now head of the Genetic Literacy Project and a Forbes Magazine columnist). All are revealed, by the emails but not the article, as biotech insiders.</font></div>

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<div style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Cooperation among academics is not a crime. But these emails show, as in the EPA letter example, that a company (usually Monsanto, but also Dow and Syngenta and a PR firm, often several of them, plus sometimes the biotech lobbyists BIO or CropLife America) were invariably looped in to these emails, and further, that initiatives usually began with one of these non-academic entities, and were shepherded by them. Only rarely is there even a suggestion from the emails that the various academics were out in front, though that was always the intended impression of the result.</font></div>

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<div style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">But perhaps the biggest of all revelations within these emails is the connivance of senior university administrators, especially at Cornell University.</span> The NY Times article focuses on the misdeeds of Mississippi State University Vice President David Shaw. But, looped into one email string, along with the PR firm Ketchum and Jon Entine are various Cornell email addresses and names. These are ignored by Lipton, but the email addresses belong to very senior members of the Cornell administration. They include Ronnie Coffman (Director of Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Science) and Sarah Evanega Davidson (now director of the<span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Gates-funded Cornell <b>Alliance for Science).</b></span></font></div>

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