This is a very long article, but the power of the arguments warrants
including all these details.

Corporations have no sense of shame.

Tom Mathews
Chapter Corporate Accountability Issue Chair

Subj:    "The Fake Parade"
Date:   02-12-04 15:09:30 EST
From:   [log in to unmask] (Jim Diamond)
Sender: [log in to unmask] (Biotech Forum)
Reply-to:   [log in to unmask] (Biotech Forum)
To: [log in to unmask]

        The following is reposted from another list; the source was given as
<A HREF="http://www.freezerbox.com/">
www.freezerbox.com</A>.  Freezerbox is an e-zine which I've not previously
seen
but looks interesting.
                Jim Diamond

The Fake Parade
BY JONATHAN MATTHEWS
ENVIRONMENT | 12.3.2002
"Carrying his placard the man in front of me was clearly one of the poorest
of the poor. His shoes were not only threadbare, they were tattered, merely
rags barely being held together."

So begins a graphic description of a demonstration that took place at the
Earth Summit in Johannesburg.. The protesters were "mainly poor, virtually
all black, and mostly women... street traders and farmers" with an
unpalatable message. As an article in a South African periodical put it,
"Surely this must have been the environmentalists' worst nightmare. Real poor
people marching in the streets and demanding development while opposing the
eco-agenda of the Green Left."

And seldom can the views of the poor, in this case a few hundred
demonstrators, have been paid so much attention. Articles highlighting the
Johannesburg march popped up the world over, in Africa, North America, India,
Australia and Israel. In Britain even The Times ran a commentary, under the
heading, "I do not need white NGOs to speak for me".

With the summit's passing, the Johannesburg march, far from fading from view,
has taken on a still deeper significance. In the November issue of the
journal Nature Biotechnology, Val Giddings, the President of the Biotech
Industry Organization (BIO), argues that the event marked "something new,
something very big" that will make us "look back on Johannesburg as something
of a watershed eventa turning point." What made the march so pivotal, he
said, was that for the very first time, "real, live, developing-world
farmers" were "speaking for themselves" and challenging the "empty arguments
of the self-appointed individuals who have professed to speak on their
behalf."

To help give them a voice, Giddings singles out the statement of one of the
marchers, Chengal Reddy, leader of the Indian Farmers Federation.
"Traditional organic farming...," Reddy says, "led to mass starvation in
India for centuries... Indian farmers need access to new technologies and
especially to biotechnologies."

Giddings also notes that the farmers expressed their contempt for the "empty
arguments" of many of the Earth Summiteers by honoring them with a "Bullshit
Award" made from two varnished piles of cow dung. The award was given, in
particular, to the Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva, for her role in
"advancing policies that perpetuate poverty and hunger"

A powerful rebuke, no doubt. But if anyone deserves the cow dung, it is the
President of BIO, for almost every element of the spectacle he describes has
been carefully contrived and orchestrated. Take, for instance, Chengal Reddy,
the "farmer" that Giddings quotes. Reddy is not a poor farmer, nor even the
representative of poor farmers. Indeed, there is precious little to suggest
he is even well-disposed towards the poor. The "Indian Farmers Federation"
that he leads is a lobby of big commercial farmers in Andhra Pradesh. On
occasion Reddy has admitted to knowing very little about farming, having
never farmed in his life. He is, in reality, a politician and businessman
whose family are a prominent right-wing political force in Andhra Pradeshhis
father having coined the saying, "There is only one thing Dalits (members of
the untouchable caste) are good for, and that is being kicked".

If it seems open to doubt that Reddy was in Johannesburg to help the poor
speak for themselves, the identity of the march's organizers is also not a
source of confidence. Although the Times' headline said "I do not need white
NGOs to speak for me", the media contact on the organizers' press release was
"Kendra Okonski", the daughter of a US lumber industrialist who has worked
for various right wing anti-regulatory NGOsall funded and directed, needless
to say, by "whites". These include the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a
Washington-based "think tank" whose multi-million dollar budget comes from
major US corporations, among them BIO member Dow Chemicals. Okonski also runs
the website Counterprotest.net, where her specialty is helping right wing
lobbyists take to the streets in mimicry of popular protesters.

Given this, it hardly needs saying that Giddings' "Bullshit Award" was far
from, as he suggests, the imaginative riposte of impoverished farmers to
India's most celebrated environmentalist. It was, in fact, the creation of
another right-wing pressure groupthe Liberty Institutebased in New Delhi
and well known for its fervent support of deregulation, GM crops and Big
Tobacco.

The Liberty Institute is part of the same network that organized the rally:
the deceptively-named "Sustainable Development Network." In London, the SDN
shares offices, along with many of its key personnelincluding Okonskiwith
the International Policy Network, a group whose Washington address just
happens to be that of the CEI. The SDN is run by Julian Morris, its
ubiquitous director, who also claims the title of Environment and Technology
Programme Director for the Institute of Economic Affairs, a think tank that
has advocated, amongst other interesting ideas, that African countries be
sold off to multinational corporations in the interests of "good government".


The involvement of the likes of Morris, Okonski and Reddy doesn't mean, of
course, that no "real poor people," were involved in the Johannesburg march.
There were indeed poor people there. James MacKinnon, who reported on the
summit for the North American magazine Adbusters, witnessed the march first
hand and told of seeing many impoverished street traders, who seemed
genuinely aggrieved with the authorities for denying them their usual trading
places in the streets around the summit. The flier distributed by the march
organizers to recruit these people played on this grievance, and presented
the march as a chance to demand, "Freedom to trade". The flier made no
mention of "biotechnology" or "development", nor any other issue on the
"eco-agenda of the Green Left".

For all that, there were some real farmers present as well. Mackinnon says he
spotted some wearing anti-environmentalist t-shirts, with slogans like "Stop
Global Whining." This aroused his curiousity, since small-scale African
farmers are not normally to be found among those jeering the "bogus science"
of climate change. Yet here they were, with slogans on placards and T-shirts:
"Save the Planet from Sustainable Development", "Say No To Eco-Imperialism",
"Greens: Stop Hurting the Poor" and "Biotechnology for Africa". On
approaching the protesters, however, Mackinnon discovered that all of the
props had been made available to the marchers by the organizers. When he
tried to converse with some of the farmers about their pro-GM T-shirts, "They
smiled shyly; none of them could speak or read English."

Another irresistible question is how impoverished farmersaccording to
Giddings, there were farmers on the march from five different countries
afforded the journey to Johannesburg from lands as far away as the
Philippines and India. Here, too, there is reason for suspicion. In late 1999
the New York Times reported that a street protest against genetic engineering
outside an FDA public hearing in Washington DC was disrupted by a group of
African-Americans carrying placards such as "Biotech saves children's lives"
and "Biotech equals jobs." The Times learned that Monsanto's PR company,
Burston-Marsteller, had paid a Baptist Church from a poor neighborhood to bus
in these "demonstrators" as part of a wider campaign "to get groups of church
members, union workers and the elderly to speak in favor of genetically
engineered foods."

The industry's fingerprints are all over Johannesburg as well. Chengal Reddy,
the "farmer" that the President of BIO singled out as an example of farmers
from the poorer world "speaking for themselves", has for at least a decade
featured prominently in Monsanto's promotional work in India. Other groups
represented on the march, including AfricaBio, have also been closely aligned
with Monsanto's lobbying for its products. Reddy is known to have been
brought to Johannesburg by AfricaBio.

And here lies the real key to the President of BIO's account of the march,
and specifically to the attack on Vandana Shiva. Monsanto and BIO want to
project an image of GM crop acceptance with a Southern face. That's why
Monsanto's Internet homepage used to be adorned with the faces of smiling
Asian children. So when an Indian critic of the biotech industry gets
featured, as Shiva was recently, on the cover of Time magazine as an
environmental hero, the brand is under attack, and has to be protected.

The counterattack takes place via a contrarian lens, one that projects the
attackers' vices onto their target. Thus the problem becomes not Monsanto
using questionable tactics to push its products onto a wary South, but
malevolent agents of the rich world obstructing Monsanto's acceptance in a
welcoming Third World. For this reason the press release for the "Bullshit
Award" accuses Shiva, amongst other things, of being "a mouthpiece of western
eco-imperialism". The media contact for this symbolic rejection of
neocolonialism? The American, Kendra Okonski. The mouthpiece denouncing an
Indian environmentalist as an agent of the West is a...Western mouthpiece.

The careful framing of the messages and the actors in the rally in
Johannesburg provides but one particularly gaudy spectacle in a continuing
fake parade. In particular, the Internet provides a perfect medium for such
showcases, where the gap between the virtual and the real is easily erased.

Take the South-facing website Foodsecurity.net, which promotes itself as "the
web's most complete source of news and information about global food security
concerns and sustainable agricultural practices". Foodsecurity.net claims to
be "an independent, non-profit coalition of people throughout the world".
Despite its global reach, however, Foodsecurity.net's only named staff member
is its "African Director", Dr. Michael Mbwille, a Tanzanian doctor who's
forever penning articles defending Monsanto and attacking the likes of
Greenpeace.

The news and information at Foodsecurity.net is largely pro-GM articles,
often vituperative in content and boasting headlines like "The Villainous
Vandana Shiva" or "Altered Crops Called Boon for Poor". When one penetrates
beyond the news pages, the content is very limited. A single message graces
the messageboard posted by an [log in to unmask];the domain name of The
Bivings Group, an internet PR company that numbers Monsanto among its
clients. There's also an event posting from an Andura Smetacek, recently
identified in an article in The Guardian as an e-mail front used by Monsanto
to run a campaign of character assassination against its scientific and
environmental critics.

The site is registered to a Graydon Forrer, currently the managing director
of Life Sciences Strategies, a company that specializes in "communications
programmes" for the bio-science industries. A piece of information that is
not usually disclosed in Graydon Forrer's self-presentation is that he was
previously Monsanto's director of executive communications. Indeed, he seems
to have been working for the company in 1999the same year the site of this
"independent, non-profit coalition of people throughout the world" was first
registered. Foodsecurity's "African Director", Dr. Mbwille, is not,
incidentally, in Africa at the moment. He is enjoying a sabbatical observing
medical practice in St. Louis, Missourithe home town, as it happens, of the
Monsanto Corporation.

Foodsecurity.net forms but one of a whole series of websites with undisclosed
links to biotech industry lobbyists or PR companies, as our previous research
has demonstrated. But despite the virtual circus oscillating about him, if
the President of BIO were really interested in hearing poor "live,
developing-world farmers... speaking for themselves", he need look no further
than Chengal Reddy's home state of Andhra Pradesh. Here small-scale farmers
and landless laborers were consulted as part of a meticulously conducted
"citizens' jury" on World Bank-backed proposals to industrialize local
agriculture and introduce GM crops. Having heard all sides of the argument,
including as it happens the views of Chengal Reddy, the jury unanimously
rejected these proposals, which are likely to force more than 100,000 people
off the land. Similar citizens' juries on GM crops in Brazil and in the
Indian state of Karnataka have come to similar conclusionssomething that the
President of BIO is almost certainly aware of.

But rainchecks on the real views of the poor count for little in a world
where "something new, something very big" and "a turning point" in the global
march towards our corporate future, turns out to be Monsanto's soapbox behind
a black man's face.




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