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</div><div><a href="https://www.europeanpressprize.com/article/monsanto-papers/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">https://www.europeanpressprize.com/article/monsanto-papers/</a><div class="article-intro" style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(248, 248, 248); padding: 3rem 0px 0px; line-height: 1.35; position: relative; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased !important;">This piece by Stéphane Horel and Stéphane Foucart at Le Monde won the European Press Prize in the category Investigative Reporting in 2018. To see who's been nominated for the 2019 edition, click <a href="https://www.europeanpressprize.com/shortlist-european-press-prize-2019/" target="_blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">here</a>.

</div><div class="article-text" style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 1.6; margin: 0px auto; padding: 3rem 0px;"><h2 style="background-color: rgb(248, 248, 248); margin: 0px 0px 1.5rem; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.1;">In order to save glyphosate, the Monsanto corporation has undertaken an effort to destroy the
United Nations’ cancer agency by any means possible. Le Monde started the Monsanto papers, resulting in a dozen investigative articles exploring the many strategies used by Monsanto to interfere with science, influence the regulatory process and orchestrate PR campaigns to defend their products.</h2>These two articles uncover how Monsanto actively tried to undermine the credibility of the International Agency for Research on Cancer.<h2 style="background-color: rgb(248, 248, 248); margin: 3rem 0px 1.5rem; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.1;">The Monsanto Papers, Part 1 
— Operation: Intoxication.</h2>02/06/2017<blockquote style="background-color: rgb(248, 248, 248); letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 1.33; padding: 4rem 4rem 4rem 8rem; margin: 0px; max-width: 50vw;">“We have been attacked in the past, we have faced smear campaigns, but this time we are the target of an orchestrated campaign of an unseen scale and duration.”</blockquote>Christopher Wild’s smile quickly faded. Through the window of the high rise where the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) is headquartered, the rooftops of Lyon, France, spread out behind his tall figure. Christopher Wild is the director of the agency so he weighed every word—speaking with a seriousness appropriate for the situation. For the past two years, a blazing onslaught has targeted the institution he is running: the credibility and integrity of IARC’s work are being challenged, its experts are being denigrated and harassed by lawyers, and its finances weakened.For nearly half a century IARC has been charged, under the auspices of the World Health Organization (WHO), to draw up an inventory of carcinogens. But now the venerable agency is beginning to waver under the assault. The hostilities were launched on a specific date: March 20, 2015. On that day, IARC announced the conclusions of its “<a href="http://monographs.iarc.fr/ENG/Monographs/vol112/index.php" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">Monograph 112</a>“. The findings left the whole world stunned. Unlike the majority of regulatory agencies, IARC declared the most widely used pesticide on the planet to be genotoxic (it causes DNA damage), carcinogenic to animals, and a “probable carcinogen” for humans.The pesticide is glyphosate, the main component of Roundup, the flagship product of one of the world’s most well-known companies: Monsanto. Glyphosate is also the Leviathan of the agrochemical industry. Used for more than 40 years, it is present in no less than 750 products marketed by about 100 companies in more than 130 countries.<h6 style="background-color: rgb(248, 248, 248); margin: 3rem 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.2;">Glyphosate, the bedrock of Monsanto</h6>Between 1974, when it was placed on the market, and 2014, the use of glyphosate increased from 3,200 tons to 825,000 tons per year. A dramatic increase that is due to the massive adoption of seeds that are genetically modified to tolerate it – “Roundup Ready” seeds.Of all the agrochemical companies that could be affected by measures to restrict or ban the product, there is one whose very survival is at stake. Monsanto, which developed glyphosate, has made the chemical the bedrock of its economic model. The company has built its fortune selling Roundup and the seeds that go with it.So when IARC announced that glyphosate was “probably carcinogenic,” the American firm reacted with unprecedented brutality. In a company statement, it vilified IARC’s work as “junk science”— a selective “cherry-picking” of data, based on an “agenda driven bias,” all leading to a decision made after only “hours of discussion at a one-week meeting”Never before had a corporation so crudely challenged the integrity of an agency under the aegis of the United Nations. The battle was launched—the one taking place in the open at least.<h6 style="background-color: rgb(248, 248, 248); margin: 3rem 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.2;">A year’s work to evaluate the pesticide</h6>Because in its own offices Monsanto was dancing to a completely different tune. The company knew full well that IARC’s evaluation of glyphosate was carried out after a year of work by a group of experts, who then met for several days in Lyon to deliberate. IARC procedures require that the industries affected by the product under review have the right to attend this final meeting.For the evaluation of glyphosate, Monsanto had sent an “observer,” the epidemiologist Tom Sorahan, a professor at the University of Birmingham (UK), whom the company sometimes employs as a consultant. The report he sent to his bosses on March 14, 2015, assured them that everything was done according to the rules.“I found the Chair, sub-chairs and invited experts to be very friendly and prepared to respond to all comments I made,” wrote Mr Sorahan in an email sent to a Monsanto executive. The email appears in the “Monsanto Papers” —a collection of the company’s internal documents that a U.S. court started to make public in early 2017 as part of ongoing lawsuits.“The meeting followed the IARC guidelines,” the observer added. “Dr Kurt Straif, Head of the IARC Monographs Programme, has an intimate knowledge of the IARC rules and insists these are followed.”<h6 style="background-color: rgb(248, 248, 248); margin: 3rem 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.2;">Counter-attack</h6>The academic scientist, who has not responded to requests from Le Monde, seemed to be very embarrassed by the idea that his name might be associated with Monsanto’s response to the IARC decision: “I do not wish to be referenced in any document from your PA/PR people,” he wrote, though at the same time proposing that he would be “happy to assist in formulating statements that you may wish to make” in the inevitable counter-attack that the company was putting in place.A few months later, the non-American scientists who had been members of the IARC panel on glyphosate all received the <a href="https://www.scribd.com/document/349946295/Lettre-de-Hollingsworth-a-Consolato-Maria-Sergi" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">same letter.</a> Sent by Monsanto’s law firm, Hollingsworth, the letter told them to hand over all the files related to their work on “Monograph 112.”Drafts, comments, data tables … everything that had gone through the IARC computer system. “If you decline to provide the files,” the lawyers warned, “we request and instruct you to immediately take all reasonable steps in your power to preserve all such files intact pending formal discovery requests issued via a US Court.”“I found your letter intimidating and noxious,” said one of <a href="https://www.scribd.com/document/349947319/Lettre-de-Consolato-Maria-Sergi-a-Hollingsworth#from_embed" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">the scientists in his reply dated November 4, 2016</a>. “I find your approach reprehensive and lacking in common courtesy even by today’s standards.”Pathologist Consolato Maria Sergi, a professor at the University of Alberta in Canada continued: “I consider your letter pernicious because it maliciously seeks to instill some anxiety and apprehension in an independent group of experts.”Lettre de Hollingsworth à Consolato Maria Sergi by LeMonde.fr on <a href="https://www.scribd.com/document/349946295/Lettre-de-Hollingsworth-a-Consolato-Maria-Sergi" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">Scribd</a> <h6 style="background-color: rgb(248, 248, 248); margin: 3rem 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.2;">Intimidating maneuvers</h6>U.S. members of the IARC working group are being subjected to even more “intimidating” measures. In the U.S., the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, allows every citizen—under certain conditions—to request access to documents produced by public bodies and their officials: memos, emails, internal reports, etc.According to our information, since November 2015 the law firms Hollingsworth and Sidley Austin have filed five applications to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) alone where two of the group experts are employed.Applications on other scientists have also been made to the California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA),Texas A&M University and Mississippi State University. Some of these institutions have even been subpoenaed by Monsanto lawyers as part of ongoing glyphosate litigations – and therefore obliged to hand over some of their internal documents.Is the aim of these intimidating maneuvers to silence criticism? World-renowned scientists who are usually open to media requests did not respond to Le Monde’s requests—even for interviews off the record. Some did agree to speak but only from a private line outside office hours.Members of the U.S. Congress do not need to use FOIA to be able to hold federal scientific institutions accountable. Republican Jason Chaffetz, former member of the House of Representatives and former chair of the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee, <a href="https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2016-09-09-JC-MM-CL-to-Collins-NIH-Doc-Request-Process.pdf" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">wrote</a> to Francis Collins, the director of NIH, on September 26,
2016. IARC’s decisions have “generated much controversy and alarm,” he wrote. And despite its “record of controversy, retractions, and inconsistencies,” IARC receives “substantial taxpayer funding” from the NIH.In fact, 1.2 million euros out of IARC’s 40 million euros annual budget comes from a NIH grant. For this reason Jason Chaffetz asked the NIH director for details and justifications of all NIH expenditure related to IARC.<h6 style="background-color: rgb(248, 248, 248); margin: 3rem 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.2;">Characters that are almost out of a John Le Carré novel</h6>The same day, the Chaffetz letter was <a href="https://www.americanchemistry.com/Media/PressReleasesTranscripts/ACC-news-releases/ACC-Welcomes-House-Committee-Interest-in-IARC.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">applauded</a> by the American Chemistry Council (ACC). As the U.S. chemical industry’s powerful lobbying organization, of which Monsanto is a member, they “hope that it will shed light on the close and somewhat opaque relationship” between the IARC and American scientific institutions. The chemical lobby had found a valuable ally in Mr. Chaffetz. In March, the former congressman wrote to the head of another federal research organization – the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) – to ask her to account for the research that the institution has funded on the harmful effects of bisphenol A, a compound widely used in some plastics.What better way to neutralize an institution than to cut off its funding? In the months following the publication of “Monograph 112,” CropLife International, the organization that defends the interests of pesticide and seed companies around the world, approached some representatives of the 25 member states of IARC’s governing council to complain about the quality of the agency’s work.Known as “Participating States,” they contribute about 70 percent of IARC’s total budget. According to IARC, at least three of them—Canada, the Netherlands and Australia—were approached. None of them replied to Le Monde’s requests. Throughout 2016, characters who seemed to be almost out of a John Le Carré novel made their appearances in the glyphosate saga. In June, someone who presented himself as a journalist but did not announce or register himself as such attended the conference organized by IARC in Lyon for its fiftieth anniversary....</div></div><div>==</div><div>
</div>ref docs <div><a href="https://www.scribd.com/document/349946295/Lettre-de-Hollingsworth-a-Consolato-Maria-Sergi">https://www.scribd.com/document/349946295/Lettre-de-Hollingsworth-a-Consolato-Maria-Sergi</a></div>