Poison PR- How a US company has been using your tax dollars to suppress pesticide opposition around the world

See our investigative report today in The New Lede

Today The New Lede (TNL) is happy to share the results of a months-long reporting project conducted in collaboration with the non-profit Netherlands-based newsroom Lighthouse Reports. The investigative report, which we have dubbed “Poison PR,” was published this morning by The New Lede and also by the The Guardian. Several other international media partners are publishing their own related stories.

The New Lede (TNL) is also publishing a dedicated Poison PR page, where readers can scroll through many of the documents we used in reporting this story.

You will read about how a Missouri-based “reputation management” firm, which is accused of helping promote the use of a pesticide suspected of causing Parkinson’s disease, is at the center of a vast international campaign to downplay pesticide dangers. And you will learn that part of that work has been financed by US taxpayer dollars, according to documents uncovered in our investigation.

The firm at the heart of the work is v-Fluence Interactive, founded and run by former Monsanto executive Jay Byrne. 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 February. Several others are scheduled over the following months.

Byrne and v-Fluence have been subpoenaed and named as Syngenta co-defendants in at least one of the lawsuits, accused of helping the company fraudulently manipulate public information to conceal health risks of paraquat, and monitoring, profiling and working to “neutralize” critics of paraquat.

The work v-Fluence has been doing for Syngenta and other large agrochemical companies goes far deeper, as you will read. And you will learn that a cadre of other chemical industry allies are involved, as are officials within the US Department of Agriculture and other government agencies.

It’s jarring to read emails in which executives from companies such as Bayer, the German owner of Monsanto and the maker of glyphosate herbicides, participate in email chatter with a US government officer and industry allies that includes discussion of how to “neutralize” messaging they see as threatening their interests.

And it is alarming to see the hundreds of individuals secretly profiled by this group of chemical industry proponents. Personal details related to an individual’s marital problems, a past speeding ticket, identities of children and other relatives, personal phone numbers and home addresses are among the details included in the files created and shared with the members of a secretive

It all starts with a private portal called Bonus Eventus set up as a network for pesticide industry executives, government employees, academics and others.

The portal is used in a variety of ways, including to send out alerts on upcoming events and mobilize responses. The portal was used, for example, to attack our reporting on this story BEFORE our story was even published.

Earlier this week, days after we sent out emails alerting Byrne and others about our upcoming story and the findings of our investigation, the portal was put to use to spread false allegations against Lighthouse Reports, TNL Managing Editor Carey Gillam and others involved in the reporting.

The attacks were amplified on social media.

And this is all before our story was published.

To read the investigation and see the emails, visit The New Lede. And please share!