Review 573: LobbyWatch – American lobbyist in Europe: Jack Bobo

This LobbyWatch Review shines a spotlight on a lobbyist who for nearly a quarter of a century has crisscrossed the globe working assiduously to influence governments, shape national legislation and international treaties, and sway audiences and media coverage on the GMO issue.

Curiously, despite a remarkable level of access and influence, facilitated by extremely powerful backers, his activities have largely escaped critical scrutiny. Unlike, say, Kevin Folta, his collusion with industry has not been splashed across the front page of the New York Times. Nor, unlike CS Prakash, has he featured in dirty tricks exposés in the Guardian. Yet the scale of his involvement with industry and in behind the scenes chicanery makes Folta and Prakash’s hidden interests and dodgy antics look like something out of kindergarten.

In an effort to put right this lack of scrutiny, here is the abridged version of our longer and more detailed profile of this veteran American lobbyist now based in Europe. The longer version that we’ve just published also includes multiple links to sources.

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American biotech lobbyist drives GMO deregulation discussions in UK, EU

Suddenly Jack Bobo is everywhere, with a position at the University of Nottingham apparently created for him. By Jonathan Matthews and Claire Robinson.

A UK-based academic “has been named as the world’s leading expert on science communication”, according to the recent headline of an article that claims, “Professor Jack Bobo, Director of the Food Systems Institute at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom… has been recognized globally for his innovative work in science communication. Due to his prestige, it was recently announced that the World Food Prize Foundation in Iowa, United States will award him the Borlaug CAST Communication Award in October.”

What the article doesn’t say is that “the world’s leading expert on science communication” has also been dubbed “Mr GMOs” and has spent almost his entire career promoting the interests of the biotech industry. Nor does it say that the organisation (CAST) giving him that communication award has BASF, Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta and their agrochemical industry lobby CropLife America among its “sustaining members”, “grantors” and “event sponsors”. The article also fails to mention that previous recipients of the same award have included such controversial industry-linked GMO promoters as Kevin Folta, CS Prakash, Sarah Evanega, and Alison Van Eenennaam.

Similarly, Jack Bobo’s billings as a speaker at the many UK and EU events he has been popping up at since taking up his position at Nottingham rarely give any real sense of the man, his mission, or who Bobo has really served for the last quarter century.

Washington’s corridors of power

So who is Jack Bobo? In 2002, following a two year stint providing “legal analysis and research on a wide variety of issues related to the biotechnology and agriculture industries” for an international law firm advising multinational corporations, Jack Bobo took on the role that would make his name as one of the world’s leading GMO spin doctors.

As he told the US Congress in 2021: “I served for 12 years as the senior advisor for global biotechnology at the US Department of State... During that time, I traveled to approximately 50 countries meeting with ministers, parliaments, executives, scientists and students to discuss biotechnology policy and regulations. I also participated in and/or led numerous biotech trade negotiations. In 2015 I was recognized by Scientific American as one of the one hundred most influential people in biotechnology.”

Bobo’s notable degree of influence stemmed not just from his own gifts of advocacy and persuasion but from his position as a senior official of a global superpower aggressively promoting biotechnology as a key US strategic interest.

Promoting the biotech industry’s agenda worldwide

An insight into just how high the promotion of GMO crops is on the US foreign policy agenda was provided by the publication – during Bobo’s time directing biotechnology trade policy there – of a trove of State Department cables, obtained by WikiLeaks. What emerges from the cables overall, to quote the food and farming researcher and writer Tom Philpott, is that “the US State Department has been essentially acting as a de facto global-marketing arm of the ag-biotech industry,” with its officials literally being instructed to “encourage the development and commercialization of ag-biotech products” worldwide.

The leaked cables also talk of the State Department deploying “a host of other USG [US Government] agencies, international organizations, NGOs and industry” to promote acceptance of GMOs. The same cable makes clear that while the State Department has a whole section of staff “available as appropriate to advocate in host capitals, troubleshoot problematic legislation, and participate as public speakers on ag-biotech”, the GMO lobbying show had only one star: “In particular, this is the key role of the State Department’s Senior Advisor for Biotechnology, Jack Bobo.”

According to a multi-award-winning French documentary, Bobo’s leading role in this global campaign led some to dub him “Mr GMOs”. And for Bobo and the US government, the film says, GMOs “are like weapons or oil – a power asset.”

Man on a mission

Only a few of Bobo’s own lobbying trips to “approximately 50 countries” feature in the cables leaked to Wikileaks, but they contain enough detail to show how closely he coordinated with industry and how they colluded to undermine local democratic opposition.

In Bucharest in 2009, for instance, Bobo was eager to help Romania’s “pro-biotech” government push GMO crops both nationally and within the EU. At one of Bobo’s meetings, we learn from a leaked cable, a senior Romanian official expressed his “frustration” that “government officials must advocate for agricultural biotechnology”. He thought “industry should better organize biotech supporters to ensure their voices lead public debate”, thus allowing the government to play the “mediator” and so win more public trust. Bobo then met with “industry representatives from Monsanto and Syngenta”, who “agreed that organizing a group of pro-biotech supporters would be beneficial and could help support Romania”.

The cables also expose even more direct US involvement in creating proxies in Romania. To up the ante on a previous government that was less “pro-biotech” than the one Bobo liaised with in 2009, the State Department helped set up a pressure group to aggressively campaign for GMO crops, as another leaked cable explains: “the Biotech Farmers Association (BFA), a local non-governmental organization (NGO) established last fall with the assistance of the [US] Embassy, is actively lobbying GOR [Government of Romania] officials in support of GM soybeans. When asked what they would do if the GOR does not approve GM soybeans for 2006, one farmer told EconOff [the US consulate’s Economics Office] that they would plant anyway and create a political and legal crisis.”

“A nasty piece of work”

Underhand tactics also impacted the work of the Codex Committee on Food Labelling (CCFL), where Bobo led the US effort to try and block the development of labelling guidelines for GMO food products. We gained some insight into this prolonged campaign of obstruction by Bobo’s team when we interviewed a US scientist and international expert who monitored CCFL’s work and had observer status at its meetings. He bluntly described Bobo to us as “a nasty piece of work” and gave us examples of the kind of arm twisting engaged in behind the scenes in the US effort to undermine support for the guidelines.

In his own case, for instance, the scientist was told he was “a traitor” for supporting GMO labelling. He said another observer with a good working knowledge of the local language of one of the African CCFL delegates had discovered in conversation that the US had threatened to cut off food aid to his country if he voted in favour of the labelling guidelines. It was also very noticeable, our source said, that the “postage stamp countries” (microstates) invariably lined up with the US when it came to voting, in a way that left little doubt that they had been leaned on. Thanks to such hardball tactics, it took nearly two decades before the CCFL finally managed to develop labelling guidelines that got approved.

Why were Bobo and his colleagues so determined to obstruct that process? As Codex is recognised as the standard-setting organisation for food labelling issues by the World Trade Organisation, approved Codex guidelines could inhibit the US’s ability to threaten countries wishing to introduce GMO labelling with a legal challenge at the WTO. And without being able to block or weaken labelling in this way, it would be harder for the US to force GMO foods onto unwilling consumers.

Spinning through the revolving door

In July 2015 Bobo moved directly from serving as spin doctor in chief in the State Department’s global marketing of “ag-biotech” to lobbying directly for a DC-based corporation trying to punt everything biotech, from GMO apples and GMO salmon to GMO mosquitoes, gene therapy and animal cloning.

A report in a German daily in 2016 captures Intrexon’s Chief Communications Officer in full evangelical mode: “Jack Bobo was on a mission when he entered the windowless meeting room in Washington. The message he delivered this spring was a simple one: only genetic engineering can heal the rift between agriculture and the environment. But this could only happen if people first began to accept genetic engineering. He believes that ‘the [GMO Arctic] apple is the product that may be able to sway consumers’. Bobo, however, is required to voice such opinions since he is a lobbyist for the US genetic engineering company Intrexon.”

Three years later, Bobo was still singing from the same hymn sheet, as a leading Canadian farm publication reported: “Jack Bobo doesn’t hold back when talking about the Arctic Apple. He believes the non-browning apple could change how people think and talk about genetically modified food. ‘I like to say it’s the most important GMO in the history of the world.’”

Industry advocacy in Washington

But Intrexon’s spinmeister didn’t just earn his pay waxing lyrical about GMO Granny Smiths. He also served on the board of its GMO salmon subsidiary, AquaBounty. And here his deep familiarity with Washington’s halls of power paid dividends.

According to a CV he submitted to Congress, Bobo:
• Worked with members of Congress to amend Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act to allow Emergency Use Authority for New Animal Drugs [read: GMO animals like AquaBounty’s GMO salmon].
• Worked with members of Congress to remove Appropriations language requiring mandatory labeling of genetically engineered salmon.
• Worked with FDA and senior White House officials to finalize approval of [AquaBounty’s GMO] AquAdvantage salmon.

And as a result of the salmon approval, which critics panned as characterised by “sloppy science and deficient data”, AquaBounty’s GMO salmon finally hit the US market in June 2021. But by then, Bobo was long gone.

Leaving a sinking ship

The GMO salmon made no more market impact than the commercial release of GMO apples changed the GMO debate. As for Intrexon itself, shortly after Bobo’s departure, it began offloading all its GMO subsidiaries – apples, salmon, mosquitoes, the lot.

The simplest way to understand Intrexon’s parting of the ways with “Mr GMOs” and its GMO subsidiaries is by tracking its stock price. It had hit an all-time high not long after Bobo joined Intrexon, closing at $67.99 in August 2015. But by the time of his departure in April 2019 it had crashed below $5 and was showing no signs of breaking its fall.

Within a year Intrexon no longer existed, having changed its name to Precigen and morphed into a company focused solely on biopharmaceuticals. Jack Bobo had also had a relaunch – this time with the help of a far bigger corporation.

The future of food: “funded, in part, by Bayer”

“I am Jack Bobo, CEO of Futurity, a food foresight company,” Bobo told a joint meeting in 2021 of two Congressional sub-committees that were looking into the future of biotechnology. The CV accompanying his testimony explained that Futurity “advises companies, foundations and governments on emerging food trends”.

Although the same document speaks of his “joining” Futurity, we could find no evidence of the company existing independently of him. The company’s website futurityfood.com appears to be a vehicle almost solely for promoting Jack Bobo in his latest spin-doctor incarnation as a consultant, course provider, speaker-for-hire, and more generally as a “food futurist” and “global thought leader” helping firms stay ahead of future food trends.

Tucked away down at the bottom of each page of futurityfood.com is the following small-print message in the faintest of greyscale: “This project was funded, in part, by Bayer, though Futurity is solely responsible for the views expressed. Copyright 2020 Futurity Foods”.

Champion of transparency

As a hugely experienced speaker-for-hire, Bobo found no shortage of takers, even at $10,000-$15,000 a pop plus expenses. But when the CEO of Futurity was flown to a New Zealand Wine conference, one wine producer angrily demanded to know why New Zealand Wine was “spending significant money to fly a GMO spin doctor from the United States”.

There were also serious questions about how much anyone could trust what this “GMO spin doctor” had to say. At a biotech conference in New Zealand three years earlier, while still lobbying for Intrexon, the local media had reported Bobo’s pitch on GMOs as “you can’t have [consumer] trust without transparency”. Yet until recently Bobo had been a key player in a prolonged global campaign of aggressive opposition to GMO labelling.

With equal shamelessness, four years later, when asked about whether AquaBounty’s salmon should be labelled, Futurity’s CEO said, “it’s best to be transparent and hope that people don’t really care [that it’s GMO]”. Yet on the 2021 CV that he submitted to Congress nine months later, Bobo listed under “Accomplishments” his work with members of Congress on removing the requirement for “mandatory labeling of genetically engineered salmon”. That behind the scenes work on keeping consumers in the dark was almost certainly undertaken after publicly promoting the message “you can’t have trust without transparency”.

Big Green Bobo

In 2022, Bobo took a job with a US environmental group. But this was not the radical departure it might seem.

That’s because his new employer, the Nature Conservancy (TNC), is a multibillion-dollar green goliath, long wracked by scandal and controversy, and well known for not just accepting money from environmental destroyers, including millions from Monsanto, but for giving them a say in how it is run.

Corporate influence flows through both TNC’s board, on which the likes of Dow Chemical’s former Chairman and CEO, Michael Liveris, has sat alongside investment bankers and other corporate bigwigs, and via its Business Council, which has included a long list of hugely controversial corporations, such as BP, 3M, Cargill, Chevron, Shell, Dow Chemical and – once again – Monsanto.

TNC has even turned to Monsanto for staffing, including Monsanto’s Michael Doane, who, after 16 years with the corporation in “a variety of roles in sales, product development and industry relations”, including trying unsuccessfully to launch Roundup Ready wheat onto the market, was appointed TNC’s Global Managing Director for Food and Freshwater Systems in 2019. It’s in this context that in 2022 Jack Bobo was appointed to work with Doane, among others, as TNC’s Director of Global Food and Water Policy.

In this role, as Bobo told an interviewer, he saw his job in relation to international treaties as balancing the conservation goals of environmental groups with encouraging recognition of the importance of not obstructing agriculture, i.e. intensive high-input agriculture, from keeping people fed and creating a sustainable future. In Bobo’s view, “When we farm more intensely in the United States, there’s less deforestation in Brazil”.

From Big Green to academe

In a still more radical departure in 2023, Bobo, whose employers had always previously been headquartered inside the Beltway – the interstate highway encircling the US capital – unexpectedly became the Director of the University of Nottingham’s new Food Systems Institute – a position that was apparently created especially for him.

Although Bobo’s admirers have hailed him as not just “the world’s leading expert on science communication” but a “renowned international scholar”, in reality his career has previously involved no academic posts of any kind. In addition, although “Professor Bobo” has several degrees, there are no science ones above undergraduate level, bar an MSc in environmental science. And the US scientist who encountered Bobo at Codex told us this lack of serious scientific expertise clearly showed whenever biotech issues needed discussing in any depth.

So why has Nottingham gone to the trouble of creating this director’s post specially for him? The answer may be provided by the Food Systems Institute’s “Future Proteins Hub”. The Hub website lists Bobo as one of its “experts” and says, “Our vision is to see a new protein economy by 2050”. Among the “major sources of protein” the Hub will be focussing on to realise its vision are “single organisms” (read: bacteria, or other single-celled organisms, genetically engineered to excrete proteins via synthetic biology) and “cultivated meat” (read: lab-grown meat).

Clearly, Bobo’s BSc in biology provides him with no credible expertise in regard to these or any other alternative proteins, but he has been involved in advising the lab-grown meat sector on issues like whether their product is best promoted to consumers as “clean meat” or “craft meat” – Bobo’s preference is for “craft” because it “evokes craft breweries and hand-jarred pickles”. And this surely explains Bobo’s relevant expertise and appeal. Nottingham wants a spin doctor to market the new institute and its output, not to mention provide “high-level advice to policymakers working on food, agriculture and other related issues”. And in that regard, Bobo really does have a noteworthy CV. He’s been enthusiastically pushing the interests of the biotech industry and related food and agriculture businesses for most of his career and on an international stage, and he is an impressively networked, experienced, and polished “influencer” as a result.

Boosting Bobo’s influence

Nottingham aren’t the only ones to appreciate Bobo’s merits in this regard, particularly now that this American biotech evangelist can be packaged as a UK university-based expert. This surely explains the recent lining up of Bobo for the Borlaug CAST Communication Award and the paeans of praise to his scholastic renown and global prestige.

And it doesn’t hurt that Bobo seems ready to clamber onto almost any available public platform. But amidst a whole flurry of gigs since his Nottingham appointment, what remains a mystery is why the UK and the EU would want to be advised on food and agriculture policy by an American lobbyist with such an obvious agenda and such a dubious track record.

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