The profiling is part of an effort – that was financed, in part, by US taxpayer dollars – to downplay pesticide dangers, discredit opponents and undermine international policymaking, according to court records, emails and other documents obtained by the non-profit newsroom Lighthouse Reports.
It collaborated with the Guardian, the New Lede, Le Monde, Africa Uncensored, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and other international media partners on the publication of this investigation.
The efforts were spearheaded by a “reputation management” firm in Missouri called v-Fluence. The company provides services that it describes as “intelligence gathering”, “proprietary data mining” and “risk communications”.
The revelations demonstrate how industry advocates have established a “private social network” to counter resistance to pesticides and genetically modified (GM) crops in Africa, Europe and other parts of the world, while also denigrating organic and other alternative farming methods.
More than 30 current government officials are on the membership list, most of whom are from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).
Records show that Jay Byrne, a former Monsanto executive and founder of v-Fluence, led the effort. Byrne advised US officials and attempted to sabotage opposition to products created by the world’s largest agrochemical companies.
He and v-Fluence are named as co-defendants in a case against the Chinese-owned agrochemical firm Syngenta. They are accused of helping Syngenta suppress information about risks that the company’s paraquat weedkillers could cause Parkinson’s disease, and of helping “neutralize” its critics. (Syngenta denies there’s a proven causal link between paraquat and Parkinson’s.)
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The network can't be publicly accessed because it blocks Google.
Reputation-management company chief Jay Byrne, the brains behind Bonus Eventus, has years of experience working for the chemical industry and government.
Public spending records show his company v-Fluence received subcontracts funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) worth more than $400,000 from approximately 2013 through 2019 for services that included counteracting "opportunistic stakeholders" critical of "modern agriculture approaches" in Africa and Asia.
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The making of an Agribusiness Apologist - Mother Jones
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Meet Jay Byrne
... George Monbiot described a covert tactic that agrichemical corporations and their PR operatives have been using for decades to promote and defend their products: creating fake personalities and fake websites to silence critics and influence online search results.
Monbiot reported that “fake citizens” (people who did not actually exist) “had been bombarding internet listservers with messages denouncing the scientists and environmentalists who were critical of GM crops” – and the fake citizens had been traced back to Monsanto’s PR firm Bivings.
“At the end of last year, Jay Byrne, formerly [Monsanto’s] director of internet outreach, explained to a number of other firms the tactics he had used at Monsanto. He showed how, before he got to work, the top GM sites listed by an internet search engine were all critical of the technology. Following his intervention, the top sites were all supportive ones (four of them established by Monsanto’s PR firm Bivings). He told them to ‘think of the internet as a weapon on the table. Either you pick it up or your competitor does, but somebody is going to get killed.’
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