06/June/22

 

Just over two weeks ago Marc Fesneau became France’s new Minister of Agriculture. On June 1, Eléonore Leprettre, his former chief of staff, became Director of Communications and Public Affairs for Phyteis, France’s main lobby group for the pesticide industry, whose members include Bayer, BASF, Corteva and Syngenta, among others. France’s former Minister for Ecological Transition, Barbara Pompili, says she fears that the companies in question now enjoy “an extremely close entry point” to the Minister. France’s position on issues like the EU’s Farm to Fork policy with its proposals for large mandatory reductions in the use of agrichemicals – something the pesticide industry is ferociously attacking, will be of critical importance in the coming months. Le Monde (French language article)

 

 

Sarah Evanega has stepped down as founding director (2014-2022) of the Cornell Alliance for Science (CAS), a PR campaign and journalist training programme funded by the Gates Foundation, which works to increase acceptance of GM foods around the world. Evanega has claimed that CAS is entirely independent of industry but dozens of emails, obtained by US Right to Know, show CAS and Evanega coordinating closely with the biotech industry and its front groups on the industry’s PR initiatives. Evanega can no longer claim to be independent of industry as she has now taken up a position as Lead for Stakeholder Communications at crop gene editing firm, Pairwise, which genetically engineers fruits and vegetables and is in a strategic alliance that commits it to working “exclusively with Bayer” on corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton and canola crops. Evanega’s replacement at CAS is Sheila Ochugboju, who before becoming a communications specialist did research into Bt and scorpion toxin genes. GMWatch

 

 

In a series of virulent tweets, Géraldine Woessner, a journalist from the French weekly magazine Le Point, recently attacked the integrity of two studies on pesticides and their coverage in the media, particularly in the French daily Le Monde. But Le Monde has now published a piece exposing how Woessner’s attacks are “based on an accumulation of errors, omissions, false interpretations, misleading assertions and fanciful accusations of scientific fraud or collusion with the ‘organic lobby’”. To take just one example, Woessner calls the title of a Le Monde article (“Pesticide residues could cancel out health benefits of fruit and vegetables”) “misleading” by claiming the study it is reporting on “shows no such thing”. But the authors of the study, senior researchers from the Departments of Nutrition, Environmental Health and Epidemiology at Harvard, themselves write in their conclusions that their results suggest that “exposure to pesticide residues through diet may offset the beneficial effect of FV [fruits and vegetables] intake on mortality”. Le Monde (French language article)

 

 

Today Conservative MPs began casting their ballots in a no-confidence vote in the GMO-loving Prime Minister Boris Johnson, which could end in his immediate removal as party leader and signal the end of his time in power. A list has been published of seventy times Boris Johnson has lied to or misled Parliament as prime minister. On only one of those 70 occasions has he corrected the parliamentary record. Peter Oborne on Twitter @OborneTweets; Boris Johnson Lies