Profiling of pesticide industry opponents halted after company practices exposed
Carey Gillam, Margot Gibbs and Elena Debre
.webp)
The St. Louis, Mo-based company, v-Fluence, is shuttering
the service, which it called a “stakeholder wiki”, that featured personal
details about more than 500 environmental advocates, scientists, politicians
and others seen as opponents of pesticides and genetically modified (GM)
crops. Among those targeted was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump’s
controversial pick for Secretary of Health and Human Services.
The profiles often provided derogatory information about the
industry opponents and included home addresses and phone numbers and details
about family members, including children.
The profiles were provided to members of an invite-only web portal where v-Fluence also offered a range of other information to its roster of more than 1,000 members. The membership included staffers of US regulatory and policy agencies, executives from the world’s largest agrochemical companies and their lobbyists, academics and others.
The profiling was part of an effort 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. Lighthouse collaborated with The
New Lede, The Guardian, Le
Monde, Africa Uncensored, the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation and other international media partners on the
September 2024 publication of the investigation.
News of the profiling and the private web portal sparked
outrage and threats of litigation by some of the people and organizations
profiled.
London research professor Michael Antoniou, who was profiled
on the portal with derogatory information about his personal life and family
members, said he fears the actions to take down the profiles may be “too little
too late.”
“Those of us who were profiled still do not know who
accessed the information and how it was used,” he said. “Did it hinder us in
our careers or close doors that otherwise may have been open to us? The
fact that V-Fluence and the industries it serves resorted to these underhand
methods shows that they were unable to win on the level of the
science.”
V-Fluence not only has eliminated the profiling, but also
has made “significant staff cuts” in the wake of the public
exposure, according to Jay Byrne, the former Monsanto public
relations executive who founded and heads v-Fluence. Byrne blamed the company’s
struggles on “rising costs from continued litigator and activist harassment of
our staff, partners, and clients with threats and misrepresentations…”
He said the articles published about the company’s profiling
and private web portal were part of a “smear campaign” which was based on
“false and misleading misrepresentations” that were “not supported by any facts
or evidence”.
Adding to the company’s troubles, several corporate backers
and industry organizations have cancelled contracts with v-Fluence,
according a post in a publication for
agriculture professionals.
“Intelligence gathering”
Since its launch in 2001, v-Fluence has worked with the
world’s largest pesticide makers and provided self-described services that
include “intelligence gathering”, “proprietary data mining” and “risk
communications”.
One client of more than 20 years is Syngenta, a Chinese
government enterprise-owned company currently being sued by thousands of people
in the US and Canada who allege they developed the incurable brain disease
Parkinson’s from using Syngenta’s paraquat weed killers. The first US trial is
scheduled to get underway in March. Several others are scheduled over the
following months.
Byrne and v-Fluence are named as co-defendants in one of the
cases against Syngenta. They are accused of helping Syngenta suppress
information about risks that the company’s paraquat could cause Parkinson’s
disease, and of helping “neutralize” its critics. (Syngenta denies there’s a
proven causal link between paraquat and Parkinson’s.) Byrne disputes the
allegations in the lawsuit.
v-Fluence, which also had the former Monsanto Co. as a client, secured some funding
from the US government as part of a contract with a third party. Public
spending records show the US Agency for International Development (USAID)
contracted with a separate non-governmental organization that manages a
government initiative to promote GM crops in African and Asian nations.
That organization, the International Food Policy Research
Institute (IFPRI), then paid v-Fluence a little more than $400,000 from roughly
2013 through 2019 for services that included counteracting critics of “modern
agriculture approaches” in Africa and Asia.
The “private social network portal” set up by v-Fluence was
part of the contract, and was supposed to provide, among other things,
“tactical support” for efforts to gain acceptance for the GM crops. The company
called the platform “Bonus Eventus,” named after the Roman god of agriculture whose
name translates to “good outcome”.
A separate contract signed by the US Department of
Agriculture in the final months of President Donald Trump’s first term also
provided government employees with access to the portal, including the
“stakeholder backgrounders” on scientists and activists which v-Fluence says it
has now removed.
Kennedy’s profile described him as “an anti-vaccine,
anti-GMO and anti-pesticide activist litigator who espouses various health and
environmental conspiracy claims”.
Legal questions
After the operations were made public in articles by The New
Lede, the Guardian and media partners, v-Fluence engaged a law firm to conduct
an independent review of whether or not the profiling may have violated the
European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
The regulation is intended to protect an individual’s right over collection and
use of their personal data.
The analysis found that v-Fluence was “not subject to the
GDPR”, but recommended v-Fluence handle “EU personal data consistent with the
requirements of the GDPR in the event the Regulation is deemed to apply,” the
company said in a statement.
One of the recommendations was removing the profiles, the company
acknowledged.
v-Fluence will continue to “offer stakeholder research with
updated guidelines to avoid future misinterpretations of our work product,”
according to the company statement.
Wendy Wagner, a
law professor at the University of Texas with expertise in the regulation of
toxic substances, said there seemed to be little good reason to maintain such a
database other than to be used for harassing opponents.
“I’m quite familiar with corporate harassment of scientists who produce unwelcome research, and sometimes this includes dredging up personal information on the scientist to make their work look less credible,” Wagner said. “But I have not encountered the use of larger databases that track personal details of numerous critics of a corporation (including independent scientists and journalists). It is hard to see the relevance of personal details short of use as harassment.”
(Lighthouse journalists Margot Gibbs and Elena DeBre
co-authored this article.)
(This article is co-published with The Guardian.)
