Val Giddings: Top Operative for the Agrichemical Industry

Posted on November 9, 2018 by Stacy Malkan

Val Giddings, PhD, is a key player in agrichemical industry efforts to oppose transparency and safety regulations for genetically engineered foods and pesticides. Emails obtained by U.S. Right to Know and posted in the UCSF Chemical Industry Documents Library indicate that Dr. Giddings helped set up a corporate front group and played a key behind-the-scenes role in other activities to push the deregulatory agenda of the world’s largest agrichemical companies.

Dr. Giddings is a former vice president at the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), a trade group for agrichemical and biotechnology companies. He now runs the consulting firm PrometheusAB, and is a senior fellow at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF).

ITIF is a think tank funded by the pharmaceutical, wireless, telecom, film and biotech industries, best known for opposing “net neutrality” and promoting the agenda of the tech industry. The group moved into biotechnology in 2011 with Dr. Giddings. Members of Congress who serve as “honorary co-chairs” of ITIF, including U.S. Reps Anna Eshoo (D-CA), Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Chris Coons (D-DE), appear to be endorsing and assisting the tobacco tactics that Dr. Giddings has used to advance agrichemical industry interests.

Cooked up academic front group to discredit Monsanto critics

Emails obtained by U.S. Right to Know indicate that Dr. Giddings played a central role in setting up Academics Review as a front group that falsely claimed to be independent while taking agrichemical industry funds and trying to keep corporate fingerprints hidden.

Other key planners were Jay Byrne, a former director of corporate communications at Monsanto; Bruce Chassy, PhD, professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and Eric Sachs, PhD, director of regulatory policy and scientific affairs at Monsanto.

Academics Review falsely claims on its website that it does not accept corporate money or solicit donations for specific activities; but according to tax forms, most of the funding for Academics Review came from the Council for Biotechnology Information, a trade group funded and run by the world’s largest chemical companies: BASF, Bayer/Monsanto, DowDuPont and Syngenta/ChemChina.

Timeline of key events for Academics Review:

March 11, 2010: Byrne and Dr. Chassy discussed setting up Academics Review as a front group to target critics of GMOs and pesticides with help from Dr. Giddings. Byrne said he and Dr. Giddings could serve as “commercial vehicles” to connect corporate entities to the project “in a manner which helps ensure the credibility and independence (and thus value) of the primary contributors/ owners…” Byrne noted he was developing for Monsanto a list of agrichemical industry critics to target:

March 24, 2010: Dr. Chassy launched the Academics Review website along with David Tribe, PhD, senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne, Australia, with both men listed as cofounders.

November 23, 2010: Dr. Giddings and Dr. Chassy discussed which companies and industry groups might “pony up” for Academics Review to refute a paper that criticized genetically engineered soy.

“I bet we could generate some respectable support for it,” Dr. Giddings wrote to Dr. Chassy.
Chassy responded in part, “I bet our friends at Monsanto would be willing to write the rebuttal and pay us to post it.”
Giddings wrote, “I think the soybean guys might be willing to pony up a chunk to underwrite a rebuttal … If we do this right we can leverage the AcaRev Brand here a bit.”

A week later, Dr. Chassy asked Eric Sachs if Monsanto planned to refute the soy paper, and told Sachs: “The US Soybean Board is going to entertain a proposal from me and Graham Brookes to respond to the piece.” (Academics Review posted a response from Chassy and Brookes in 2012 with no disclosure about funders.)

November 30, 2010: In the email exchange with Dr. Chassy, Eric Sachs of Monsanto said he could help motivate the pesticide and GMO industry trade groups to support Academics Review. “The key will be keeping Monsanto in the background so as not to harm the credibility of the information,” Sachs wrote.

August 2011: Dr. Giddings submitted a proposal to the agrichemical industry-funded trade group CBI for the project: “what we do over the next year is directly a function of the support we can raise,” he wrote to CBI Managing Director Ariel Gruswich, in an email copied to Drs. Chassy and Tribe. Gruswich urged the men to join a phone call with her group: “I really believe that hearing directly from you all will increase the likelihood of support among the companies,” she wrote. Tax records show the corporate-funded CBI gave Academics Review $650,000 from 2014 to 2016 for “scientific outreach.”

April 2014: Academics Review published a report attacking the organic industry as a marketing scam, and claimed to be an independent group with no conflicts of interest. See: “Monsanto fingerprints found all over attack on organic food,” by Stacy Malkan, Huffington Post

Industry-funded “boot camps” trained scientists, journalists how to spin GMOs and pesticides

Over $300,000 of the chemical industry funds Dr. Giddings helped raise for Academics Review went to pay for two conferences called the “Biotech Literacy Project” boot camps, held at the University of Florida in 2014 and UC Davis in 2015, according to tax records. The boot camps – organized by Academics Review and another industry front group, Genetic Literacy Project – trained journalists and scientists how to reframe the debate about GMOs and pesticides.

See: “Flacking for GMOs: How the Biotech Industry Cultivates Positive Media – and Discourages Criticism,” by Paul Thacker, The Progressive

Deregulating GMOs: “blow the whole damn thing up”

In emails dated February 2015, Dr. Giddings discussed with several academics a plan to write five journal papers arguing for the need to deregulate the biotech industry. Dr. Giddings wrote that the papers should capture, “what I call Henry’s ‘Blow the whole damn thing up’ argument, which is a case I do think should be made.” University of Arizona law professor Gary Marchant, who initiated the email exchange, explained, “paper 1 is intended to be the blow the whole damn thing up topic.”

Alan McHughen, a public sector educator at UC Riverside and “ambassador expert” for the agrichemical industry-funded marketing campaign GMO Answers, offered to write paper 1. Henry Miller, MD, said he could help but had too much on his plate to be primary author. (A month later, Miller posted an article in Forbes that the New York Times later revealed had been ghostwritten by Monsanto.)

Others copied on the email about the journal papers were Drew Kershen of the University of Oklahoma College of Law; Guy Cardineau, Yvonne Stevens and Lauren Burkhart of Arizona State University; Steven Strauss of Oregon State University; Kevin Folta of University of Florida; Shane Morris of Natural Resources Canada; Alison Van Eenennaam of UC Davis; Joanna Sax of the California Western School of Law; and Thomas Reddick of the Global Environmental Ethics Council.

Coordinated scientist sign-on letter against Seralini study

In September 2012, Dr. Giddings coordinated a scientist sign-on letter urging Wallace Hayes, editor-in-chief of Food and Chemical Toxicology, to reconsider a September 2012 paper by the French researcher Gilles-Éric Séralini that reported tumors in rats fed a diet of Roundup-tolerant GM corn. The paper was retracted a year later and later republished in another journal.

To help coordinate the sign on letter, Dr. Giddings used AgBioChatter – a private liserver that pro-industry academics, senior agrichemical industry staffers and their PR operatives used to coordinate messaging and lobbying activities. One professor who signed the letter, Chris Leaver, noted that he had “been doing behind the scenes briefing via Sense About Science” about the Séralini study. Sense About Science has a long history of spinning science for the benefit of corporate interests.

Signers of the letter to Food and Chemical Toxicology were Robert Wager, Alda Lerayer, Nina Fedoroff, Giddings, Steve Strauss, Chris Leaver, Shanthu Shantharam, Ingo Potrykus, Marc Fellous, Moises Burachik, Klaus-Dieter Jany, Anthony Trewavas, C Kameswara Rao, C.S. Prakash, Henry Miller, Kent Bradford, Selim Cetiner, Alan McHughen, Luis De Stefano-Beltrán, Bruce Chassy, Salbah Al-Momin, Martina Newell-McGloughlin, Klaus Ammann, Ronald Herring, Lucia de Souza.

Related: “Unearthed emails: Monsanto connected to campaign to retract GMO paper,” Retraction Watch

Suggested attractive “mommy farmers” should pitch GMOs

In conversations with a Monsanto lobbyist about how to defeat GMO labeling campaigns in Colorado and Oregon in 2014, Dr. Giddings suggested that good-looking “mommy farmers” would be the best messengers to allay concerns about genetically engineered foods. “What the situation requires is a suite of TV spots featuring attractive young women, preferably mommy farmers, explaining why biotech derived foods are the safest & greenest in the history of ag and worthy of support,” Dr. Giddings wrote to Lisa Drake, Monsanto’s lead for government affairs.

In a September 2015 front-page New York Times story, three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Eric Lipton described the emails:

“In this extended email exchange, some of the scientists and academicswho have been recruited to help Monsanto push its cause question whether they are the best messengers. Two suggest that Monsanto run more television ads featuring farmers instead. The Monsanto lobbyist replies that polling shows that the public believes scientists. In fact, the company has already run TV ads featuring female farmers.”

See: “Food industry enlisted academics in GMO labeling war, emails show,” by Eric Lipton, New York Times.

Agrichemical Trade Groups: Biotechnology Innovation Organization and Council for Biotechnology Information

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Posted on March 1, 2018 by Stacy Malkan

BIO – key facts

The Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO), formerly the Biotechnology Industry Organization, is a trade association representing over 1,000 companies and industry groups including pesticide, pharmaceutical and biotech corporations. The group markets genetic engineering as a solution to “heal the world, fuel the world, feed the world,” and it organizes lobbying committees in 15 policy areas including food and agriculture, health care policy, technology transfer, finance and taxes. BIO was a leading opponent of labeling genetically engineered foods in the United States. In its tax filing for the year ending December 2016, BIO reported annual expenses exceeding $79 million.

Council for Biotechnology Innovation – key facts

Founded in 2000, the Council for Biotechnology Information (CBI), is a trade association funded by the largest chemical companies (BASF, Bayer/Monsanto, DowDuPont, Syngenta) to promote biotechnology in agriculture. BIO and CBI share some staff and finances, according to tax filings. CBI reported over $4 million in annual expenses in its tax filings for the year ending December 2016. Since 2013, CBI has spent more than $11 million on Ketchum public relations firm to run GMO Answers, a marketing campaign to promote and defend GMOs and pesticides.

A Short Report on Journalists Mentioned in our FOIA Requests

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Posted on September 28, 2015 by Gary Ruskin

Also see: Buckraking on the Food Beat: When is it a conflict of interest?
Washington Post Food Columnist Goes to Bat for Monsanto

On September 23rd, Washington Post food columnist Tamar Haspel admitted to receiving “plenty” of money from pro-agrichemical industry sources.

Following her admission, I thought it might be useful to report on journalists – including Haspel — mentioned in the documents we have received from state public records requests.

U.S. Right to Know is conducting an investigation of the food and agrichemical industries, their PR firms and front groups, and the professors who speak for them.

So far, three reporters come up in interesting ways: Amy Harmon, Keith Kloor and Tamar Haspel. These reporters appear in the context of Jon Entine, who is perhaps the leading PR operative working to promote the views of the agrichemical industry, and its pesticides and GMOs.

Entine is founder and executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project, which, along with the PR firm Ketchum’s GMO Answers, are the agrichemical industry’s two most visible front groups. Entine is also founder and president of the PR firm ESG MediaMetrics, whose clients have included the agrichemical giant Monsanto.

Amy Harmon

Amy Harmon is a reporter for the New York Times. She was part of a Times team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001, and in 2008 she won a Pulitzer for explanatory reporting.

On September 23, 2013 at 7:44pm, Jon Entine emailed Renee Kester: “FYI, I think I’ve talked Amy Harmon into doing a Hawaii Hawaii [sic] story. . . and I gave her your and Kirby’s email information, so she may call at some point if she indeed pursues this.” Kirby Kester is president of the Hawaii Crop Improvement Association, an agrichemical industry front group.

On January 4, 2014, the New York Times published a front-page article by Amy Harmon, titled “A Lonely Quest for Facts on Genetically Modified Crops.” The story is datelined from Kona, Hawaii.

In 2014, Harmon won second place for the Society of Environmental Journalists “Kevin Carmody Award for Outstanding In-depth Reporting, Large Market” for “The Facts About GMOs,” a series that included the article “A Lonely Quest for Facts on Genetically Modified Crops.”

On September 30^th, Harmon is scheduled to speak to the Cornell Alliance for Science, a group funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to promote GMOs. The group is running a petition against U.S. Right to Know’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

Keith Kloor

Keith Kloor is a freelance journalist who has written for Nature, Science Insider, Discover, Slate and other outlets. Kloor has written many pro-GMO articles that have been featured by Jon Entine’s Genetic Literacy Project.

Kloor is mentioned in two places in the FOIA documents.

In one email, Jon Entine refers to Keith Kloor as a “very good friend of mine”.

In another email, on October 18, 2014, Dr. Channapatna Prakash, a GMO advocate and dean at Tuskegee University, emails Adrianne Massey of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), along with several others, to forward an alert from Lorraine Thelian, vice chairman of the PR firm Ketchum that “the hacker community Anonymous is planning a series of attacks on biotechnology and food industry websites…Trade association and corporate websites of CBI [Council for Biotechnology Information] members are being targeted in this planned attack.” Dr. Prakash writes, “Adrianne I have copied Kevin Folta, Karl von Mogel, David Tribe and Keith Kloor here as well.”

Dr. Prakash cc’d the email to Jay Byrne (former director of corporate communications for Monsanto), Jon Entine, Bruce Chassy (agrichemical industry advocate) Val Giddings (former VP of BIO), Henry Miller (agrichemical industry advocate), Drew Kershen (agrichemical industry advocate), Klaus Ammann, Piet van der Meer, Martina Newell-McGloughlin (agrichemical industry advocate), Karl Haro von Mogel (member of the board of directors of Biology Fortified, a pro-GMO website), Kevin Folta (agrichemical industry advocate), Keith Kloor and David Tribe (agrichemical industry advocate).

Keith Kloor was the only journalist who received this email.

The email implies that Kloor works closely with the agrichemical industry’s prominent advocates.

Kloor has written three articles that were critical of U.S. Right to Know’s FOIA requests, in Science Insider, Discover and Nature.

On March 23rd, 2015, Kloor gave a talk for the Cornell Alliance for Science, which is hosting a petition against U.S. Right to Know’s FOIA requests.

Tamar Haspel

Tamar Haspel is a columnist at the Washington Post. She has written many columns for the Post defending or praising GMOs that have later been featured by Jon Entine’s Genetic Literacy Project.

In 2015, Haspel won the James Beard Foundation Award for her Post columns.

In June 2014, Haspel spoke to a pro-industry conference about “How can scientists best engage the GMO debate with a skeptical public?” The conference was coordinated by Jon Entine and Cami Ryan, who is currently social sciences lead for Monsanto. The conference was led by two agrichemical industry front groups, the Genetic Literacy Project and Academics Review, along with the University of Florida, which receives major funding from agrichemical companies, as noted in a September 6 article in the New York Times.

Haspel also moderated a panel organized by the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, which “provides long-term economic and societal benefits to North Carolina through support of biotechnology research, business, education and strategic policy statewide.”

In a September 23 chat hosted by the Washington Post, answering a question about whether she receives money from industry sources, Ms. Haspel wrote that, “I speak and moderate panels and debates often, and it’s work I’m paid for.” Later that day, I asked Ms. Haspel on Twitter how much money she had received from the agrichemical industry and its front groups. She replied, “Since any group believing biotech has something to offer is a ‘front group,’ plenty!”

Is it appropriate for a Washington Post columnist to write glowing columns about GMOs while appearing at such pro-industry conferences? Is it a conflict of interest for Haspel to accept money from agrichemical company interests that she covers as part of her beat as a Post food columnist? How much money has Haspel received from agrichemical industry interests?

Some journalists have criticized journalists for “buckraking” on speakers’ circuits. For example, former Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee said, “I wish it would go away. I don’t like it. I think it’s corrupting. If the Insurance Institute of America, if there is such a thing, pays you $10,000 to make a speech, don’t tell me you haven’t been corrupted. You can say you haven’t and you can say you will attack insurance issues in the same way, but you won’t. You can’t.”

Haspel wrote in the Washington Post that she will only speak at events where “if for-profit companies are involved in the event (which they often are), they can’t be the only voice. So, I will speak at a conference co-sponsored by, say, Monsanto and the USDA and NC State University, but not an event sponsored by Monsanto alone.” However, at the June 2014, conference at which Haspel spoke, no consumer advocates were slated to speak, only pro-industry advocates.

On October 16, Haspel is scheduled to speak to the Cornell Alliance for Science, a pro-GMO group that is hosting a petition against U.S. Right to Know’s FOIA requests.

Haspel has been critical of the U.S. Right to Know FOIA requests. On August 17, on Twitter, she wrote: “The money/time/brainpower wasted on @garyruskin’s mean-spirited, self-interested attack on @kevinfolta! Can we move on to something useful?” Others did not agree with her news judgment. On September 6^th, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Eric Lipton wrote an article largely based on our FOIA requests – especially of University of Florida Professor Kevin Folta – which ran on the front page of the Sunday New York Times. The article revealed how Folta, who repeatedly denied ties to Monsanto, in fact had received an undisclosed $25,000 grant, as well as writing assignments from the company, and worked closely with it and its PR firm Ketchum, which ghostwrote text for him and organized media and lobbying meetings for him.

U.S. Right to Know is a consumer advocacy group. We try to expose what the food industry doesn’t want us to know. We believe it is useful for the public to see how the food and agrichemical companies do their public relations work. That is one way we can help consumers to assess the claims and information they receive from the companies involved in our food production, their PR firms and operatives, and the journalists who work with them.

An Open Letter to Professor Kevin Folta on FOIA Requests

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Posted on February 12, 2015 by Gary Ruskin

Dear Professor Folta:

Yesterday there was some news coverage and commentary about our use of the state Freedom of Information Acts to obtain the correspondence of professors who wrote for the agrichemical industry’s PR website, GMO Answers. We’re glad to have a public conversation about this topic with the professors involved. We believe that transparency and open dialogue are fundamental values by which we must operate in a democratic society and a truly free market. To that end, I thought it would be useful to explain why we FOIA.

Since 2012, the food and agrichemical industries have spent at least $103 million dollars on a massive PR and political campaign to deceive the public about genetically engineered foods. As the public relations firm Ketchum bragged in a recent video, “positive media coverage had doubled” on GMOs following this PR campaign, and it has put agrichemical industry spin front and center in the debate over GMOs. The purpose of this PR campaign is to repel grassroots efforts to win GMO labels that are already required in 64 countries, and to extend the profit stream from GMOs, and the pesticides that go with them, for as long as possible – not to foster an authentic public dialogue about GMOs.

This anti-consumer campaign has been dirty in more ways than one. It has been packed with numerous deceptions and well-documented efforts to trick voters. In connection with such efforts, the Washington State Attorney General is suing the Grocery Manufacturers Association for the largest instance of campaign money laundering in the history of the state.

At U.S. Right to Know, we believe the food and agrichemical industries must have a lot to hide, because they spend so much money trying to hide it. We try to expose what they’re hiding.

As part of our effort, we made the state FOIA requests to obtain the correspondence of professors who wrote for the agrichemical industry’s PR website, GMO Answers.

These professors are public employees. They are paid by the taxpayers to work for the public good; their university affiliations give them the status of “independent” experts, and they are often quoted in the media as independent experts. But when these professors are closely coordinating with agrichemical corporations and their slick PR firms to shape the public dialogue in ways that foster private gain for corporations, or when they act as the public face for industry PR, we have the right to know what they did and how they did it.

Through the FOIA requests, we are attempting to understand the work these professors did for Ketchum, (as well as agrichemical companies such as Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer, BASF, DuPont and Dow; trade groups like the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the Biotechnology Industry Organization and the Council for Biotechnology Information; other PR firms like Fleishman Hillard and Ogilvy & Mather, and the political firm Winner & Mandabach) on the GMO Answers website which was created as a PR tool for the agrichemical companies.

There are reasons to be concerned about GMO Answers. The website was created by and is run by the public relations firm Ketchum, which also represents Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. Ketchum is linked to an espionage effort conducted years ago against nonprofit organizations concerned with GMOs, including the Center for Food Safety and Friends of the Earth. Ketchum also targeted Greenpeace with espionage.

The professors whose documents we requested are using the prestige of our public universities to burnish the image of an industry that has repeatedly hidden from consumers and workers the truth about the dangers of their products and operations. Entire books have been written documenting their reprehensible conduct. Public relations on behalf of private corporations is not academic work. It is not work for the public good. It is the use of public funds for private gain.

Federal and state Freedom of Information Acts exist, in part, to uncover such potential misuse of public funds for private ends.

We are also interested in failures of scientific integrity. To use one obvious example, one of the professors whose records we requested closely mirrored industry talking points in an op-ed he wrote against GMO labeling for the Woodland Daily-Democrat. Did that professor write the op-ed himself? Or was it written by a PR firm hired by the agrichemical industry?

Repeating industry talking points is not integrity in science; in fact, it is the opposite.

We believe that transparency and openness are good remedies for the lack of integrity in science.

We are glad to live in America, where the tools of the FOIA are open to all citizens. And so our work is guided by the ideals of James Madison: “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

Sincerely,

Gary Ruskin
Executive Director
U.S. Right to Know

Hillary Clinton’s Two Missteps

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Posted on January 14, 2015 by Gary Ruskin

As the 2016 campaign shapes up, it’s interesting to watch the candidates for clues about their food politics. Thus far, Hillary Clinton has made two missteps.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Clinton’s team has hired Wendy Clark, a senior vice president at Coca-Cola. As our nation struggles with an epidemic of obesity, type 2 diabetes and other food-related diseases, we don’t need a Coke executive whispering in the ear of the presumptive Democratic favorite. And Coca-Cola has given more than $5 million to the Clinton Foundation.

Speeches matter too. On June 25, 2014, Clinton gave the keynote address to the Biotechnology Industry Organization, and essentially endorsed genetically engineered crops. She told the biotech crowd: “I stand in favor of using seeds and products that have a proven track record, you say, and are scientifically provable [sic] to continue to try to make the case to those who are skeptical.”

Thus far, the tea leaves suggest that Ready For Hillary also means Ready for Monsanto and for the Obesity Lobby.