PR firm v-Fluence is run by former Monsanto communications chief Jay Byrne. By Jonathan Matthews and Claire Robinson
Covert PR operations involving the secret profiling of over 3,000 people and organisations considered “critics” of the pesticide industry recently made headlines around the world. The secret profiles, including ones on GMWatch and its co-directors, are said to include private and personal, even intimate, information that lawyers say violate privacy laws in several countries and regions, such as the UK, the European Union, Kenya and India. They also include false, misleading and malicious claims (examples below), clearly designed to damage the reputations of those targeted.
This was all uncovered during a year-long in-depth investigation led by Lighthouse Reports, a Netherlands-based consortium of journalists that work on collaborative public interest investigations with the world’s leading media. The main breakthrough came when the investigators managed to penetrate the private social network, known as Bonus Eventus, where the profiles were being shared. This enabled them to not only access these secret dossiers, but to identify the Bonus Eventus network’s members and work out exactly who had done the profiling.
In response to the news, Reporters Without Borders (RSF), an organisation which defends independent journalism and fights against propaganda and disinformation, has called for all those involved in the profiling to be brought to justice.
US government financed Poison PR
The most explosive discovery to emerge from the Poison PR investigation was that this toxic covert operation, involving secretly monitoring and vilifying critics of GMOs and pesticides at a scale and to a level of detail considered reminiscent of the Stasi, had been funded with hundreds of thousands of US taxpayer dollars.
The Guardian columnist George Monbiot called the US government’s funding of “attacks, denial and outright lies to protect the pesticides industry from its critics” a “deeply shocking and appalling story”. The president of the Environmental Working Group, Ken Cook was also taken aback by his government’s involvement: “I thought I knew how the world worked with regard to pesticide company and pesticide lobby advocacy but this is a completely new dimension. This is sort of ‘the deep state does pesticides’.” And the European Parliament has been urged to call for an immediate investigation into what lawyers are saying are clear breaches of European privacy laws, as well as evidence of foreign interference in critical EU policy making.
Usual suspects
What came as no surprise to us at GMWatch was the identity of the little-known American “reputation management” firm that has been running this government-funded project: v-Fluence. We were equally unsurprised to learn that the still ongoing project was the brainchild of v-Fluence’s founder and CEO – former Monsanto corporate communications director Jay Byrne. That’s because for well over two decades we have been tracking Byrne and the firm that he founded on leaving Monsanto. And pretty much everything about these latest revelations tallies with Byrne’s long record of covert campaigns of character assassination.
The lowdown on Poison PR
For legal and ethical reasons, it has not been possible for Lighthouse Reports and its media partners to simply release all the material that they have uncovered during the course of their investigation into v-Fluence and the Bonus Eventus project. So what follows is mostly an overview of the details to be gleaned from the reports in Le Monde (in a 3-part series), The Guardian, The New Humanitarian, ABC News, The New Lede, and The Wire. Additionally, some related documents, which are in the public domain due to freedom of information requests, have been posted online by The New Lede in their Poison PR media library. (There are links to all of these and more throughout this article as well as in the Resources section at the end.)
So what is Bonus Eventus?
Bonus Eventus is “a private social networking portal” set up to suppress criticism and opposition to GMOs and pesticides around the world, while denigrating agroecology and other alternatives to industrial agriculture. And this secure online space for influential GMO and pesticide supporters, including government officials from multiple countries and even regulators, is where the secret profiles are shared.
But a standard internet search won’t help you find the gateway to its operations. That’s because search engines have been blocked from accessing its website. And even if someone types bonuseventus.org into their browser, they will just find a website of only a few pages, none of which link or make reference to the portal.
The website’s home page currently proclaims that Bonus Eventus “is grounded in scientific integrity” and that “At Bonus Eventus, we believe in the principles of transparency and accountability”. But the Wayback Machine has repeatedly archived this page since 2013 and for its first couple of years it showed only a giant tulip. Then, for several more, it bore just the single sentence: “Bonus Eventus is a community platform supporting independent initiatives in support of favorable outcomes in food and agriculture”.
The archived pages show that, despite the more recent talk of “transparency”, at no point has there been a link from these publicly accessible pages to where invitation-only members can log in for the real action.
Inside Bonus Eventus
This is the missing link to the portal where members gain password-protected access to what Le Monde calls “a vast list of pro-agrochemical propaganda designed to influence public debate”. This includes not just the 3,000-plus secret dossiers on “critics”, but an extensive list of fact sheets providing talking points for defending GMOs and pesticides in blogs, articles, and on social media, as well as the opportunity to have private group discussions that – if you are a government official or some other public employee – can’t be unearthed by freedom of information requests.
According to ABC News, an Australian academic who is a member of Bonus Eventus told ABC that some academics in the US were using the site precisely for this reason – to avoid their email exchanges being subject to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) applications.
There is also apparently a regularly updated indexing of online content concerning GMOs and pesticides, with some of the items tagged “favorable” and “credit BE [Bonus Eventus],” suggesting, says Le Monde, that v-Fluence takes credit for these items’ production or publication. These are “commentaries, blog posts, opinion pieces or press interviews produced or co-produced by people registered on Bonus Eventus. The content highlights the pesticide industry’s favourite angles of attack: Much of it specifically targets the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the bête noire of the agrochemical giants.”
Network members also receive Byrne’s regular Bonus Eventus newsletters.
How was the toxic profiling funded?
As part of their wider investigation, Lighthouse and their partners established from public spending records that between 2013 and 2019, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) paid over $400,000 to v-Fluence for services including “enhanced monitoring” of critics of “modern agriculture approaches”, by which they mean GMOs and pesticides. As part of this “enhanced monitoring”, Bonus Eventus was established as a means of sharing the profiles.
The precise route by which the USAID money was channelled to v-Fluence was via the USAID-funded Program for Biosafety Systems (PBS), which promotes the adoption of GM crops in African and Asian countries. Interestingly, the director of PBS is Judy Chambers, a former Monsanto director whose career has not only repeatedly intersected – in a world of revolving doors – with that of v-Fluence’s boss Jay Byrne, but has involved a shared focus on GMO acceptance.
Chambers was already serving as senior biotechnology advisor at USAID when Byrne also went to work there as a communications director in the early 1990s. Then in 1997, Byrne and Chambers both moved to Monsanto – Chambers as director for international government affairs and Byrne as director of corporate communications. The year after Byrne moved from working directly for Monsanto to setting up v-Fluence, Chambers left Monsanto to carry on working for USAID before moving to the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), where she manages the PBS for USAID. It was IFPRI’s name on the contract that enabled US tax dollars to be funnelled through Chambers’ PBS to v-Fluence.
Who exactly has been profiled?
The so-called industry “critics” profiled in the Bonus Eventus database include around 3,000 organisations and 500 individuals. The organisations include public research bodies, foundations, professional organisations, and NGOs. The latter include household names like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, as well as less well known or more specialist organisations like PAN India and GMWatch.
The bulk of the 500 or so profiled individuals are scientists and academics, though they also include journalists, campaigners, politicians, lawyers, UN human rights experts, and even musicians – practically anyone of note who has been critical of GMOs and pesticides.
What’s in the profiles?
Le Monde says that the scale and detail of the profiling is “unprecedented”. For organisations, this includes details of their sources of funding, their key personnel, policy positions taken, and related controversies. But some of the files on individuals, as we shall see in the examples that follow, contain information on their families, including in some cases not just spouses but the identities of their children and other relatives, aspects of their private lives, income and assets, including estimated house values, their home addresses, mobile phone numbers, criminal records, and even political opinions. That’s quite apart from the more malicious and misleading content.
Many profiles include a “CRITICISMS” section with quotes from hostile blogs and articles. We understand that in the case of GMWatch, for instance, the three items quoted in this section of our profile are by Mark Lynas, Kevin Folta and Stephan Neidenbach – all people whose activities we have criticised and whose subsequent attacks on us we have refuted. The most substantial of the quotes used in our profile comes from a Neidenbach piece written as payback for our reporting on his aggressive trolling. It levels wild and defamatory accusations against us that we have comprehensively debunked. But our Bonus Eventus profile, needless to say, only quotes Neidenbach’s accusations. (We have long suspected that some of these accusations may in any case have been fed to Neidenbach by Byrne associates.)
Unsurprisingly, Le Monde concludes that the content of the Bonus Eventus profiles “should be treated with caution: most of the people to whom Lighthouse Reports, Le Monde and their partners have shown their files have protested that they contain false or misleading allegations”.
UN experts, journalists and environmentalists profiled
Among those mentioned by name in media reports as being profiled on Bonus Eventus are two UN experts, Hilal Elver and Baskut Tuncak, the Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva (the subject of a derogatory profile of over 8,000-words), the Indian ecologist and seed conservator Debal Deb, the award-winning Nigerian environmentalist Nnimmo Bassey, and the well known New York Times contributors Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman.
Pollan’s profile, according to The Guardian, includes “a long list of criticisms and details such as the names of his siblings, parents, son and brother-in-law”. Pollan commented, “It’s one thing to have an industry come after you after publishing a critical article. This happens all the time in journalism. But to have your own government pay for it is outrageous. These are my tax dollars at work.”
Mark Bittman’s profile, according to The Guardian, is 2,000 words long and includes “a description of where he lives, details of two marriages and personal hobbies, and an extensive criticisms section”. Bittman said of his profile, “It’s filled with mistakes and lies.” More broadly, he said, it was a “terrible thing” that taxpayer dollars were being used to help a PR firm “work against sincere, legitimate and scientific efforts to do agriculture better”.
Both Lighthouse Reports and two of the other journalists involved in reporting on the profiling can also be found among the secret files. They are Stéphane Foucart, science journalist at Le Monde, who won the European Press Prize in the Investigative Reporting category in 2018 for pieces he co-authored on the Monsanto Papers; and Carey Gillam, who reports for The Guardian US and won the 2018 Rachel Carson Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists for her book Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science.
In an interview about Bonus Eventus, Gillam said of her own profile: “I see information about a horse that my daughter had when she was very young, and about a situation that my husband was involved in in 1999, which is actually before I met my husband, well before. You know, things like that. And then there are crazy sort of allegations, that people are involved as collaborators with Russia. They have that for multiple people. I’m one of the Russian collaborators, according to this file on me.”
Which scientists have been profiled?
As already mentioned, the bulk of those profiled on Bonus Eventus are scientists. Among those named in the articles:
Professor Tyrone Hayes, biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, famous for his research – originally funded by Novartis/Syngenta – showing the endocrine disrupting impacts of Syngenta’s flagship herbicide atrazine. According to Le Monde: “Hayes has a Bonus Eventus profile, in which he is portrayed less as a scientist than as a profit-driven activist, paid by lawyers to testify in lawsuits against firms, or as a consultant.” But Hayes told Le Monde that these were “glaring misrepresentations”: “I have never been paid as an expert witness or litigation consultant by anyone and I have never received salary, income, or consulting fees from any NGO. I have never received consultant fees or [been] personally paid to do science for any organisation except Novartis/Syngenta.”
Dr Melissa Perry, American epidemiologist and Dean of the College of Public Health at George Mason University, who co-authored the first major synthesis of the scientific literature on the health effects of neonicotinoid insecticides. According to Le Monde, “her file lists malicious rumours about her scientific integrity, most taken from blogs and confidential sites. It also contains private information – her personal address, the identity of her spouse and the value of her home are all disclosed.”
Professor Gilles-Éric Séralini, French molecular biologist at University of Caen best known for a study on the effects of a GMO and a glyphosate-based herbicide that was the subject of a virulent retraction campaign that appeared to be orchestrated by Jay Byrne and v-Fluence. According to Le Monde, “On Bonus Eventus, the contents of his file go well beyond scientific criticism. It suggests that Séralini is close to a Christian Vitalist sect, an unsubstantiated allegation.”
Professor Dave Goulson, British expert on pollinators at the University of Sussex whose studies and books have drawn attention to the catastrophic effects of pesticides like neonicotinoids. Goulson told Le Monde that his profile aggregated elements extracted from “blogs by people funded directly or indirectly by Monsanto (now Bayer of course) and/or other giants of agro-industry”. He explained: “When using social media, these people also amplify each-other’s posts in what appears to be a coordinated way. They do not present evidence or scientific argument, it is simply a smear campaign intended to destroy the reputation of their target.”
According to The Wire, the social anthropologist Aninhalli Vasavi and the ecologist Sultan Ahmed Ismail are among the Indian researchers targeted simply because they were among the 251 scientists and experts who wrote to the Indian Prime Minister urging his government to follow the recommendations of a Supreme Court-appointed expert committee that called for a halt to GMO field trials until regulatory gaps were addressed.
Scientists who are not named
In the case of some scientists, the profiling appears so detailed and personal that they have not been named in any of the articles. (These examples are all taken from Le Monde):
* A “famous British toxicologist – the author of numerous works on the health effects of pesticides”, where the profile includes, among other marital details, how his wife “suffered severe depression and psychiatric disorders for 20 years” and “took her own life”.
* An American agronomist whose “profile cites many selected blog entries, including one in which he is described as ‘a prostitute [who] works for organic pimps’.” It also lists his hobbies, pets, a traffic accident from 2018, the value and address of his home, his wife’s profession and the first names of his five children.
* A “biostatistician who held a senior position at the head of a major American research organisation” has a file “teeming with private details, including his cell phone number, his home address, the estimated value of his house when it was purchased in 2013, his brother’s profession... We also learn that he is ‘A registered Democrat, since 2007 [he] has contributed $1,550 to Democratic candidates and causes.’ This is followed by details of his donations to individual candidates. His file reaches far back into the past for any information that might prejudice him. ‘He has a criminal arrest booking and conviction record from April 1991 for criminal traffic violations in North Carolina to which he pled guilty to a lesser plea of speeding,’ one entry reads.”
Who are the members of Bonus Eventus?
About a quarter of the 1,000 or so invite-only network members are said to be past and present employees of the major agrochemical companies, including Syngenta, BASF, Bayer and Corteva, and their lobbyists, most notably CropLife. More worryingly, Le Monde and other outlets report that government officials, scientists, and even regulators, as well as other decision makers from around the world, are also members. This includes 30 current US government officials, most of whom are from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), as well as the State Department, and USAID.
As for the rest, according to Le Monde, “A significant proportion of subscribers are consultants, bloggers, experts, journalists and others. Among them are personalities who hold or have held influential positions in expert groups at the World Health Organization, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES, the ‘IPCC’ of biodiversity), the head of Australia’s pesticide registration authority, Kenya’s Ministry of Agriculture, Kenya’s National Biosafety Authority, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), and more. Over 60 nationalities are represented. There are Americans (450), Canadians (43), Kenyans (43), Swiss (29), British (29), Germans (20), French (16) and many others.”
According to ABC News, Australian academics attached to several Australian universities – some of whom have appeared in CropLife’s promotion of GMOs and agrochemicals – also have membership profiles on the Bonus Eventus social network.
Among the small number of members actually named in any of the articles is Kip Tom, who was the US representative to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) between 2019 and 2021.
USDA and Syngenta also clients of v-Fluence
Tracking and doxing critics of GMOs and pesticides is not all v-Fluence has been getting up to on behalf of the US government. It also emerged during this year-long investigation that Byrne’s firm was hired, together with another PR firm - the White House Writers Group - whose name was on the contract, by the US Department of Agriculture to assist their efforts to undermine the EU’s Green Deal, and in particular its Farm to Fork (F2F) policy of aiming to cut pesticide use by 50% by 2030. Le Monde has an excellent article on this.
v-Fluence has also had a long-term contract with Syngenta to defend their herbicide paraquat. This has led to Byrne and his firm being sued by victims of Parkinson’s disease who believe it was caused by their use of paraquat and who accuse Byrne and v-Fluence of working with Syngenta for 20 years to “neutralize critics” of paraquat and hide the risks of this highly toxic product, including its scientifically established links to Parkinson’s.
Africa Uncensored has published a 2-part documentary on v-Fluence’s campaign to keep dangerous pesticides like paraquat on the market in Kenya, showing how such pesticides are destroying the health and lives of African farmers. David Dickens, a lawyer from the Miller law firm in the US, which is suing Byrne and v-Fluence over its actions on paraquat, tells them, “Africa is a target for them [the industry] for a whole host of reasons. One is the regulatory environment isn’t as robust. A lot of the African nations look to the US EPA as to what they’re doing. So that’s where [with] the backing of the US government… Jay Byrne [is] coming in saying, ‘You should use GMOs and pesticides’.”
Reporters Without Borders slams v-Fluence as threat to press freedom
The international non-profit Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has condemned the Bonus Eventus project, saying, “These attacks pose a threat to press freedom and access to independent information.” The head of RSF's Global Challenges Desk, Arthur Grimonpont, said, “The practice of profiling and spreading rumours that could harm journalists’ integrity should never be allowed to flourish in a democratic state. A thorough investigation must be conducted to bring to justice all those involved in these outrageous violations of privacy and the reputation of environmental journalists. These manipulation techniques aimed at influencing the public debate are a direct attack on the public's right to reliable and independent information.”
European civil society groups condemn “foreign interference in crucial EU policy”
Civil society groups from across Europe have urged the European Parliament to call for an immediate investigation into possible breaches of European data protection rules (GDPR) in the light of the revelations to emerge from the Lighthouse Reports' investigation, including the targeting of hundreds of scientists, journalists and environmental activists by covert profiling and misinformation campaigns financed by the US government.
They also called on Members of the European Parliament to push for an investigation into foreign interference in the EU’s Farm to Fork (F2F) policy, via a US-financed influence and misinformation campaign involving v-Fluence, aimed at torpedoing F2F’s pesticide reduction plans.
Outrage and unease in the Global South
The Poison PR targeting of Debal Deb, the pioneering scientist whose seed conservation work has long been admired, has caused particular outrage. Madhusree Mukerjee, the well-known Indian-American physicist and writer, posted on Twitter/X, “Ecologist Debal Deb is on this poison-industry watchlist because he’s dedicated his life to rescuing almost-extinct strains of rice and restoring eco-friendly ways of cultivating them.” And the internationally acclaimed Indian writer Amitav Ghosh commented, “Debal Deb is one of India's most important environmentalists. His seed bank is an essential tool in creating resilience for farmers. It is shocking that someone like him is being targeted by industrial agriculture.”
Debal Deb himself said he had faced far worse, including direct threats against his mother and his colleagues. But others in the Global South expressed serious unease about the potential impact of being targeted by Bonus Eventus.
Hellen Ngema, a sustainable agriculture expert in Kenya, told The New Humanitarian that she felt “threatened” as a result of her personal details being revealed. She feared she could be targeted by “criminals, so that the voice of the people I represent – the smallholder farmers in Kenya – are not heard”.
Concerns were also expressed in India where, according to The Wire, scientists explained “how ‘critically profiling’ activists and scientists is detrimental to scientific temper in a democracy like India, especially at a time when there is ‘general hostility’ towards civil service organisations”.
This is no overstatement. Thousands of civil society organisations have been shut down or drained of resources in Modi’s India, where Amnesty International says “financial and investigative agencies of the government have been weaponized to harass, silence, and criminalize independent critical voices”, including even those of NGOs as prominent as Greenpeace India, Oxfam India, and Amnesty International India.
Narasimha Reddy Donthi, an independent policy analyst and consultant with PAN India, also told The Wire that this kind of profiling “can be threatening” and could further restrict the scope of their work amidst a dearth of funds and hostility towards civil society groups in India. The Wire says his concerns “are not unfounded given that these profiles are made accessible to individuals who influence policy making and have access to public representatives in India”.
Bonus Eventus members run for cover
Many of those listed as accredited members of Bonus Eventus, when contacted by Lighthouse Reports and its media partners about their involvement in its activities, have denied having anything to do with either the private network or v-Fluence beyond having signed up for v-Fluence’s regular news reviews. Many similarly claim to have never made use of the profiles and other network resources. This seems surprising, given that the Bonus Eventus newsletters they receive contain links to those resources, including the “stakeholder database”. The newsletters also include excerpts from the profiles in “Stakeholder Spotlights”, so exposing their readers to the Poison PR regardless of whether they log into the portal or not.
Kip Tom, the former US ambassador to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, claimed that he is “not a member or affiliated” with Bonus Eventus, but Le Monde notes, “documents consulted by Le Monde indicate that his [membership] profile has been completed and updated on the platform.”
According to The Guardian, even CropLife International, the major lobby for farm chemical and biotech companies, tried to distance itself, saying “it would ‘be looking into’ the issues raised in this piece, after reporters asked about the dozens of CropLife employees around the world who are listed as members of Bonus Eventus”.
The Wire reports one Indian member of Bonus Eventus, Anand Ranganathan, as denying he knew anything about his membership. Ranganathan said that though he is pro-GMO, that didn’t mean he supported or endorsed “any unethical and malicious practices or espionage against those who are anti-GMO… absolutely not and quite the opposite. I wholeheartedly condemn any such malpractice.”
Byrne and his associates say it’s all lies
For his part, v-Fluence’s boss, Jay Byrne, told Lighthouse Reports that the “claims and questions you have posed are based on grossly misleading representations, factual errors regarding our work and clients, and manufactured falsehoods”. He also dismissed the paraquat lawsuit he and v-Fluence are facing as “manufactured and false”.
Byrne claimed the Bonus Eventus profiles of “critics” are a collaborative wiki-based effort by the entire network of accredited Bonus Eventus members. However, according to Le Monde, “Lighthouse Reports, Le Monde and their partners were able to consult the modification logs for the files in question, and they indicate that a significant proportion of the information was entered by Byrne himself.”
Byrne has also claimed that the profiles “only contain publicly accessible and referenced information”. Publicly accessible, of course, doesn’t mean reliable, particularly if what is accessed and referenced is hostile blogs written by authors closely associated with the pesticide industry – or even with Jay Byrne himself.
As for accuracy, this can be poor to non-existent. The Bonus Eventus profiles of both directors of GMWatch, for instance, get even such basics as our dates of birth wrong – one by nearly a decade. And in a Bonus Eventus newsletter, a “Stakeholder Spotlight” on the Sustainable Food Alliance and the Sustainable Food Trust claims that these two organisations “are responsible for funding the UK NGO GMWatch”. Neither of them have ever funded GMWatch (our funders are listed here).
Byrne also denies having any contracts with the US government but, as we noted above, the taxpayer dollars were channelled to v-Fluence via the International Food Policy Research Institute, so it was IFPRI’s name on the contract. Regardless, David Zaruk, a former chemical industry lobbyist and a Byrne confidante, tweeted, “Every post by @LHreports syndicate makes the same point: #BonusEventus received taxpayers money. They had a year to show evidence of this. They could not prove it. But they still make this claim. Cunning or stupid? Liars in any case.” And Kevin Folta, another Byrne associate, added that if it were true that v-Fluence got taxpayers’ money, Lighthouse Reports would have published the grant numbers involved. Lighthouse Reports replied by linking to a page tracking those very grant numbers for the payments to v-Fluence.
Resources
There are many more points of interest in each of the individual reports on what v-Fluence has been up to and its damaging impact in different parts of the world, so here are links to most of the coverage of this scandal so far.
Poison PR articles
The Guardian: Revealed: the US government-funded ‘private social network’ attacking pesticide critics
(From Guardian US, so it’s from a primarily US and not a UK perspective. That may be why, as yet, nothing is known about the 29 British members of Bonus Eventus)
Le Monde (1): Investigation reveals mass profiling of ‘opponents’ of the agrochemical industry
(Subscription required for this excellent Le Monde 3-part series – links are to the English language versions)
Le Monde (2): Diving into the black box of global pesticide propaganda
(Particularly good on the dissemination of the Poison PR into the French media and how Bonus Eventus functions as a “content farm” and echo chamber, designed to produce, echo and amplify the same language)
Le Monde (3): How Trump’s administration tried to torpedo the EU Green Deal using influence and misinformation campaigns
(Describes the USDA-backed campaign v-Fluence was part of)
The New Lede: “Defend or be damned” – How a US company uses government funds to suppress pesticide opposition around the world
(Coverage overlaps with that of The Guardian but includes useful links)
ABC News: Former Monsanto exec’s invite-only social network reveals the dark tactics of the pro-chemical lobby
(Australian perspective)
The New Humanitarian: How the US agrochemical lobby is meddling in the future of Kenyan farming
(Kenyan/African perspective)
The Continent: Big Agriculture is watching critics, pesticides and GMO food
(African perspective. Article originally published here (pdf) - free download)
The Wire: How a US-based PR Firm is profiling activists, scientists opposing pesticides and GMO
(Indian perspective)
v-Fluence: Response to the Poison PR investigation
(Note Jay Byrne’s use throughout of exactly the type of smears found in the Poison PR files. Also see Le Monde’s debunking of his claims about Lighthouse Reports’ funding. More background on Byrne and his PR tactics here)
Poison PR media library
The New Lede: Documents obtained by Lighthouse Reports through Freedom of Information requests
(Some court documents are also in the media library)
Poison PR videos
Africa Uncensored: John-Allan Namu’s quick summary of the Poison PR investigation
(The whole story condensed into 1 minute 45 seconds!)
Environmental Working Group: A PR firm got your tax dollars to track and dox pesticide critics
(Ken Cook interviews Carey Gillam, who led the reporting for The Guardian and The New Lede)
Africa Uncensored: The secret network keeping harmful herbicides on sale – Part 1
(How v-Fluence and its partners have downplayed the risks of pesticides, and discredited environmentalists pushing for an end to their sale)
Africa Uncensored: The secret network keeping harmful herbicides on sale – Part 2
(Looks deeper into v-Fluence’s activities and their role in advancing the use of paraquat and other pesticides globally and particularly in Kenya)