A woman harvests crops in Kenya. Biotech firms
are piling pressure
on farmers to grow
GMO crops. (Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images)
Blakk Rasta is a Ghanaian musician and broadcast journalist. He is also careful about what he eats. He says he has been a vegan for 25 years and does not eat white wheat, fish, “anything that is canned or processed,” or drink iced water.
This has made him an avid, if amateur, researcher of food and how it is grown. It’s also made him a target for an industrialised smear campaign with big backing in the United States.
That campaign published over 500 often-derogatory profiles of scientists, environmentalists and journalists in Africa, Europe and Asia with the aim of branding them as cynical actors who profit from protest.
With his often angry broadcasts about genetically modified food, Blakk Rasta is an obvious target. He often speaks with anger, likening GMOs to “colonialism” by “people who come and spawn your land [and] feed you on something that you don’t want to eat”.
In heated moments, he might even refer to GMO science as “terrorist agricultural practices”. Blakk Rasta’s ire is directed at the giant corporations that profit from GMOs, but nuance can get lost amid the titanic battle that is being fought over what people eat.
Genetic modification is nearly as old as agriculture itself, and it’s often indigenous.
Africans have been grafting and crossbreeding for millennia to get crops that are hardier and feed more people. In Africa, the growth of some settled civilisations is largely thanks to such cultivation practices.
Early in the first millennium AD, people living in the Congo Basin created dozens of new banana varieties. A few centuries later, their descendants settled on the northern shores of Lake Victoria where bananas grow very well.
The banana varieties created by their ancestors and the economic activities they supported — food production, beer brewing, crafts makings — became a bedrock of the economies and cultural expressions of lakeside civilisations including the Baganda, Basoga and Bagwere in present-day Uganda.
Blakk Rasta’s concerns about GMOs are caused by the industrial nature of the modern process, dominated by multinational firms. He accuses them of “looking at business more than humanity”. This is a very rich industry that is used to getting its way.
Mariam Mayet, who heads the African Centre for Biodiversity, said: “They will not tolerate any kind [of dissent] — they don’t want to have an honest conversation. They don’t want criticism.
“They believe there’s only one narrative, and it’s their narrative. They don’t want to engage with us on these issues.”
Mayet has been fighting Big Agriculture for decades. Two weeks after the industry’s covert smear campaign was revealed, the biodiversity centre won a nine-year court case in South Africa against Monsanto (now Bayer). This set aside approval for a genetically modified variety of maize, critiquing the original approval process.
That’s significant because the country ranks as one of the top 10 in the world for uptake of modified crops. Such victories are rare.
“The industry has so much power over our governments. They have power over the research world. They have power over regulation. They got deregulation,” Mayet said weeks before the court win, when she learnt that she and the centre were among those profiled by the smear campaign.
The campaign wrote and distributed more than 3 500 profiles on people and organisations who have been critical of GMOs and factory-made pesticides, branding them as being “opportunistic stakeholders” in a “protest industry”.
These profiles were shared on Bonus Eventus, a closed, invite-only network that gathers powerful decision makers in national regulatory agencies, multilateral funding bodies, academia, and international agribusiness.
It was set up by v-Fluence, a PR firm founded by Jay Byrne, a former communications executive at Monsanto, the controversial agrichemical firm bought by Bayer in 2016. It has over a thousand members.
From 2013 to 2019 v-Fluence was paid over $400 000 to “monitor” the critics of “modern agricultural approaches”.
The money came from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) through the International Food Policy Research Institute as part of a US government project to introduce genetically modified crops to countries in Africa and Asia.
The founder of v-Fluence, Byrne, told Lighthouse Reports, the investigative outlet that led the media consortium, that his company had not received funds from USAID. He added that his firm is “an information collection, sharing, analysis, and reporting provider” trying to “promote understanding of all the various stakeholders, positions, research … impacting food and agriculture”.
But a lawsuit in the US paints Byrne’s professional history in more ominous hues. Biochemical giant Syngenta, one of Byrne’s longtime clients, is being sued in the US, by more than 5,000 people, for allegedly suppressing information linking its herbicide to Parkinson’s disease. It denies the charge.
One of the lawsuits names v-Fluence and Byrne as having played a critical role in the information suppression. Byrne denies the allegations in that suit.
Partners: Lighthouse Reports, Africa Uncensored, Le Monde, The Guardian, ABC News, The Wire, The New Lede, The New Humanitarian.
This article first appeared in The Continent, the pan-African weekly newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian. It’s designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy here