GMO industry and its supporters are behind the campaign
Cornell University is embarking on a campaign to “depolarize the charged debate” around GMO – supported by a $5.6 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and with the GMO industry as its partners.
Pro-GM campaigner Mark Lynas is a fellow of Cornell.
http://www.marklynas.org/about/
Cornell has given him a platform to promote his pro-GMO views.
http://www.gmwatch.org/index.php/bills-test/14961
1. Is Cornell the go-to university for industry science?
2. New Cornell Alliance for Science gets $5.6 million grant
1. Is Cornell the go-to university for industry science?
By Tim Schwab
Food & Water Watch, 28 Aug 2014
http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/blogs/is-cornell-the-go-to-university-for-industry-science/
Cornell University announced last week that it is embarking on a multi-million dollar campaign to “depolarize the charged debate” around GMOs. Can you guess who’s behind this effort? The biotech industry and its supporters.
The website for this project, the Cornell Alliance for Science, is pretty sparse, but it does note its pro-GMO partners, including the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA), which is funded by Monsanto, CropLife, and Bayer.
This use of surrogates is par for the course with the biotech industry. Sometimes called the soft lobby, corporations routinely engage neutral-appearing scientists and impartial-sounding front groups to help advance their political and economic agendas. Food & Water Watch detailed the enormous amount of industry research coming out of our public land-grant universities in our 2012 report, Public Research, Private Gain.
Cornell is no stranger to this science-for-sale approach. Earlier this year, Cornell economist William Lesser took money from a biotech front group to produce a questionable analysis showing that GMO labeling will be very costly for consumers. While he noted that the study reflected his personal opinions, not those of Cornell, GMO supporters began publicizing the findings of “the Cornell study” in their campaign to defeat state-labeling initiatives around the country. Independent studies, meanwhile, show that GMO labeling will not increase costs significantly — and perhaps not at all.
Cornell’s newest foray into the GMO debate, the “Alliance for Science,” will add to the confusion and distortion in the public discourse around GMOs. Rather than trying to promote a civil, honest, impartial dialogue about GMOs — as you would expect from a university like Cornell — the school has chosen to partner with some of the biotechnology industry’s most prominent supporters and defenders.
Incredibly, the Cornell Alliance strenuously asserts its impartiality, calling it a “radical collaboration” of proponents and opponents of GMOs dedicated to “promot[ing] equitable access to safe, nutritious, and sustainably produced food.” Though that quote sounds an awful lot like Food & Water Watch’s mission statement, it isn’t, and we won’t be joining the alliance’s “radical collaboration.”
The role of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in this effort should also be mentioned. Gates has awarded $5.6 million toward the Cornell Alliance, a mere drop in the ocean of the group’s pro-GMO “philanthropy”. The Foundation has tapped big names from the biotechnology industry to run its multi-billion-dollar agricultural development program, and, as Food & Water Watch showed in our report Biotech Ambassadors, Gates partners with biotech companies to develop GMOs for Africa — that African countries clearly do not want or need. The Gates Foundation has also invested tens of millions of dollars of its money into corporate agribusiness and biotech companies like Monsanto and Cargill.
At a time when the United States is clearly ready for a frank conversation about GMOs, evident in the state-level labeling ballot initiatives underway across the country, it is unfortunate that our most prominent philanthropists and universities would partner with industry to distort the public discourse. There is a vibrant scientific and public debate about the safety and necessity of GMOs in our food system that deserves a bigger public platform — sort of like what Gates and Cornell are trying to do, but without the obvious bias.
2. New Cornell Alliance for Science gets $5.6 million grant
By Stacey Shackford
Cornell Chronicle, 21 Aug 2014
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2014/08/new-cornell-alliance-science-gets-56-million-grant
A new international effort led by Cornell will seek to add a stronger voice for science and depolarize the charged debate around agricultural biotechnology and genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
Supported by a $5.6 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Cornell Alliance for Science will help inform decision-makers and consumers through an online information portal and training programs to help researchers and stakeholders effectively communicate the potential impacts of agricultural technology and how such technology works.
The project will involve developing multimedia resources, including videos of farmers from around the world documenting their struggles to deal with pests, diseases, crop failure and the limited resources available in the face of poverty and climate change.
“Proponents and opponents alike speculate whether biotech crops are of benefit to farmers, but rarely are those farmers engaged in the biotech discourse or their voices heard,” said Sarah Evanega, senior associate director of International Programs in Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS), who will lead the project.
“Our goal is to depolarize the GMO debate and engage with potential partners who may share common values around poverty reduction and sustainable agriculture, but may not be well informed about the potential biotechnology has for solving major agricultural challenges,” Evanega said. “For instance, pro-biotech activists share a lot of the same anti-pesticide, low-input, sustainable-agriculture vision as the organic movement.”
Evanega and her team hope to help engage such potential partners and foster more constructive policies about biotechnology as a useful tool to address major agricultural challenges.
The grant will allow the Cornell Alliance for Science to host annual conferences, short courses and semester-long CALS certificate programs in biotechnology leadership, among other activities.
Evanega said the initial concept was informed by a February 2014 gathering at Cornell of 34 representatives from public sector and not-for-profit organizations in 12 countries that discussed a new vision for biotechnology communications.
“Like elsewhere in the world, African scientists still find it challenging to effectively inform the public about their work and its relevance to society,” said Barbara M. Zawedde, coordinator of the Uganda Biosciences Information Center at the National Agricultural Research Organization. “Our effective communication will enable African farmers and citizens to exercise their sovereign right of informed decisions on whether to adopt certain crops and technologies depending on their needs and priorities.”
In part because of its land-grant heritage, CALS regularly hosts forums and media events about various agricultural technologies and the role they could play in providing sustainable solutions to major global challenges.
“Biotechnology is a potential game-changer for farmers in less developed countries and an important tool in the toolbox for addressing global challenges, such as persistent poverty, a changing and erratic climate, and the challenge of feeding 9 billion people by 2050,” said Kathryn J. Boor, the Ronald P. Lynch Dean of CALS. “Improving agricultural biotechnology communications is a challenge that must be met if innovations developed in public sector institutions like Cornell are ever to reach farmers in their fields.”
Stacey Shackford is a writer for the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.