Immoral Maize: Extract from Don't Worry, It's Safe to Eat by Andrew Rowell

Immoral Maize from Don't Worry, It's Safe to Eat by Andrew Rowell Reprinted with permission Earthscan Ltd, 2003, ISBN-13: 978-1853839320

I don’t want to be a martyr by any means, but I cannot avoid now realising that this is a very, very well concerted and coordinated and paid for campaign to discredit the very simple statement that we made. – Ignacio Chapela

Current gene-containment strategies cannot work reliably in the field. – Nature Biotechnology, Editorial [1]

In the autumn of 2000 a graduate student from the University of California held a workshop for local peasant farmers in the beautiful mountainous region of Sierra Norte de Oaxaca in southern Mexico. The graduate, David Quist, hoped to show the farmers how to test their seeds for GM. To do this he thought he would show them the difference in the purity of the local maize, called criollo, compared to the maize that had been shipped in from the USA, where some 40 per cent is GM. The US maize would test positive for GM and, naturally, the Mexican maize would be negative, he thought. But Quist was wrong. For some reason, instead of the local maize being negative, it kept coming up positive. [2]

Quist was visiting the region because his supervisor, Dr Ignacio Chapela, who was originally from Mexico City, had been working with the campesinos or peasant farmers in Oaxaca for over 15 years, assisting them in community sustainable agriculture.

Quist was told by Chapela to bring the samples back to the USA, where the two would repeat the experiments and test the native maize ‘landraces’ for contamination by GMOs. Although there had been a moratorium on the commercial growing of GM in Mexico since 1998, there was general concern that GM maize was coming across the border from the USA, either as seed or as ‘food aid’ and that it was contaminating the indigenous species.

This was seen as a worry for various reasons, the main one being that contamination threatens Mexico’s unique maize genetic diversity. Mexico is the traditional home of corn, where the plant was first domesticated some 10,000 years ago. It is an important crop for a quarter of the nation’s 10 million small farmers and corn tortillas are a central part of nation’s diet. But now due to NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), the country is a net importer of the crop. With some 5 million tonnes coming in from the USA every year, and because there is no mandatory labelling, there is no way of knowing if this corn is GM or not. [3]

Greenpeace had launched a campaign in Mexico in January 1999 warning the Mexican Government that GM maize imports from the USA ‘would end up polluting Mexican corn varieties’. ‘The aim was to stop the imports’, says Hector Magallon Larson, from Greenpeace Mexico. ‘Greenpeace wanted to highlight the inconsistency of the Mexican government stance of supporting a moratorium but allowing millions of tonnes of GE corn to pour over the border.’

The campaign was not well received in official circles. ‘The main response came from the Minister for Agriculture,’ says Hector Magallon Larson. ‘He said these corn imports were only for human food and animal feed, so the corn shouldn’t be planted. They also said that the corn was treated with a fungicide that made the seed sterile so it couldn’t grow.’

Greenpeace took samples of corn imported from the USA in March 1999, analysing samples from three different boats docked in Veracruz. The results showed that it was Bt corn made by Novartis. The campaigning group even planted some of the seeds and grew them, making sure to harvest them before they released pollen. Then they took the GM corn to the Ministry of Agriculture. ‘We told them it could grow, but they said it would not happen. They have done nothing to stop or solve the problem,’ says Magallon Larson. Despite Greenpeace’s concerns, Dr Chapela says that: ‘We were not expecting to find transgenics when we went looking for them in Oaxaca’.

Although they were working in Mexico, Chapela’s and Quist’s academic base is in Berkeley, where Chapela is an assistant Professor. Although a microbial ecologist by training, he had served on the prestigious National Research Council’s Committee on Environmental Impacts Associated with the Commercialization of Transgenic Plants, whose report was published in 2002 by the National Academy Press. [4] Both scientists had sprung to prominence in 1988 as two of the key opponents of a multi-million dollar alliance between Novartis and the University of Berkeley. Unbeknown to Chapela and Quist at the time, their opposition to the Novartis deal would come back to haunt them after their research was published. The ensuing saga led to the most acrimonious fight between opponents and proponents of GM since the Pusztai affair. It also laid bare a central strategy of the biotechnology industry: that of GM contamination, and raised questions about what many believe is one of its Achilles’ heels: that it could be inherently unstable. The argument over whether Quist and Chapela were attacked because they did bad science or because they questioned GM continues to run and run.

Back in the laboratory, Quist and Chapela starting using the standard amplification technique for DNA called polymerase chain reaction. Known as PCR for short, it is used to test ‘for the presence of a common element in transgenic constructs’ and in this case that was the promoter for the CaMV virus. The CaMV, the promoter at the heart of the Pusztai controversy, is seen as an ideal marker to tell if transgenic contamination has occurred. [5] But the PCR technique can also be problematic, as the amplification process can cause ‘false positives’ where simple contamination in the lab can seem to be part of the transgenic DNA. So researchers can believe they are looking at genetic contamination when in fact they are looking at experimental contamination.

Chapela and Quist also analysed control samples that came from maize grown in Peru and from seeds from the Sierra Norte de Oaxaca region in Mexico taken in 1971, long before the introduction of GM crops. They found positive PCR amplification in four of the six samples of the Oaxaca maize, but no contamination in the Peruvian maize or the older sample. [6]

They then undertook a further similar analysis, called inverse PCR, so that they could establish the precise position of the transgenic sequences. They were able to identify the DNA fragments flanking the CaMV promoter sequence through inverse PCR tests, known as iPCR. The fragments were scattered about in the genome, suggesting a random insertion of the transgenic sequence into the maize genome. [7]

So essentially, Quist and Chapela reached two conclusions. The first was that GM contamination had occurred in Mexican maize and the second was that the GM DNA seemed to be randomly fragmented in the genome of the maize. If the first point was contentious, the second was explosive, as it suggested that transgenic DNA was not stable. Quist and Chapela knew that if the research was published it would cause an international outcry, so they wanted to make sure that their research was correct. The biotech industry had hardly recovered from the StarLink scandal in the USA, and GM contamination of Mexican maize would represent a ‘nightmare’ scenario for the industry. [8]

‘I repeated the tests at least three times to make sure I wasn’t getting false-positives’, says Quist. [9] Convinced of their findings, Chapela shared the preliminary results with various Mexican government officials who started to do their own testing. He also approached the scientific journal Nature with a view to publishing the work.

‘I had been talking to government officials, because I thought it was the responsible thing to do, even though it was preliminary research’, recalls Dr Chapela. [10] At one meeting the aide to the Biosafety Commissioner, Fernando Ortiz Monasterio, told Chapela that his boss wanted to see him. ‘The guy just sat outside the door and when I came out, he almost took me by the hand and put me in a taxi with him to see his boss,’ he says.

A Hollywood script-writer could have conceived what happened next. Chapela was hauled up to Monasterio’s ‘office’ on the 12th floor of an empty building. ‘The office space was absolutely empty’, recalls Chapela. ‘There were no computers, no phones, the door was off its hinges, there were cardboard boxes as a table. The official is there with his cell-phone beside him. We are alone in the building. His aide was sitting next to me, blocking the door.’

With obvious emotion, Dr Chapela recalls what happened next. ‘He spent an hour railing against me and saying that I was creating a really serious problem, that I was going to pay for. The development of transgenic crops was something that was going to happen in Mexico and elsewhere. He said something like I’m very happy it’s going to happen, and there is only one hurdle and that hurdle is you.’

Sitting stunned, Chapela replied: ‘So you are going to take a revolver out now and kill me or something, what is going on?’ Then Monasterio offered Chapela a deal: ‘After he told me how I had created the problem, he said I could be part of the solution, just like in a typical gangster movie. He proceeded to invite me to be part of a secret scientific team that was going to show the world what the reality of GM was all about. He said it was going to be made up of the best scientists in the world and you are going to be one of them, and we are going to meet in a secret place in Baja, California. And I said, “who are the other scientists”’, and he said “Oh I have them already lined up, there are two from Monsanto and two from DuPont”. And I kept saying “Well that is not the way I work, and I wasn’t the problem, and the problem is out there”.’

Then events took a very sinister turn. ‘He brings up my family’, recalls Chapela. ‘He makes reference to him knowing my family and ways in which he can access my family. It was very cheap. I was scared. I felt intimidated and I felt threatened for sure. Whether he meant it I don’t know, but it was very nasty to the point that I felt “why should I be here, listening to all this and I should leave”.’

Monasterio later admitted to the BBC that he had met Chapela, but vehemently denied threatening him in any way. He said that the meeting had taken place not on the 12th floor, but on the ‘5th floor of our offices, which is an office of the Ministry of Health, in the southern part of town where we work’. He said that at the meeting they had discussed ‘the issues of the presence of maize, the importance of publishing, that what we were doing is research, and that when we have the results from our own researchers, we will share with him’. [11]

Chapela was told by Monasterio that he was in charge of biosecurity and ‘I’ll tell you what biosecurity is really about, it is about securing the investment of people who have put their precious dollars into securing this technologies, so my job is to secure their investment’.

‘I think first he was trying to intimidate me into not publishing,’ says Chapela. Once Monasterio realized that Chapela was going to try and publish his results, that ‘very night he called a meeting with Greenpeace and the people from Codex and people from the Senate to divulge the results’.

The reason that Monasterio wanted the results made public was simple: ‘I had said to him’, says Chapela, ‘that if the information was released before it was published in Nature then Nature would think twice about publishing it’. ‘He fed it directly to Greenpeace, which is a lot easier to discredit than Nature,’ says Chapela, adding that Monasterio knew that ‘the media coverage would seriously threaten publication in Nature’. Monasterio denies breaking any confidentiality agreement by divulging the results early. [12]

But the threats intensified against Chapela, who received a letter from an agricultural under-secretary, saying that the government had ‘serious concerns’ about the ‘consequences that could be unleashed’ from his research. Moreover the government, would ‘take the measures it deems necessary to recuperate any damages to agriculture or the economy in general that this publication’s content could cause’. [13] ‘He signed it before the publication is out and it is obvious that he is trying to intimidate me into not publishing’, says Chapela, who believes that the approach is not surprising, as the Agriculture Ministry itself is ‘riddled with conflicts of interest. There are just working as spokespeople for DuPont, Syngenta and Monsanto’.

In contrast to the agricultural officials, others were worried, and started to replicate the research. As Quist and Chapela outline: ‘During the review period of this manuscript, the Mexican government … established an independent research effort. Their results, published through official government press releases, confirm the presence of transgenic DNA in landrace genomes in two Mexican states, including Oaxaca’. [14] On 17 September 2001, Mexico’s Secretary for Environmental and Natural Resources released partial results of its own study, confirming that transgenic maize had been found in 15 of 22 areas tested in Oaxaca and nearby Puebla. [15]

Just over two months later, Chapela’s team published in Nature. ‘We report’, wrote Chapela and Quist, ‘the presence of introgressed transgenic DNA constructs in native maize landraces grown in remote mountains in Oaxaca, Mexico, part of the Mesoamerican centre of origin and diversification of this crop’. In plain English, they were reporting contamination of native corn by its GM equivalent.

The scientists were both ‘surprised and dismayed’ over their findings, but admitted they had no way of knowing whether the contamination was from a loose implementation of the moratorium or due ‘to introgression before 1998 followed by the survival of transgenes in the population’. [16]

‘Whatever the source, it’s clear that genes are somehow moving from bioengineered corn to native corn’, says Chapela. ‘This is very serious because the regions where our samples were taken are known for their diverse varieties of native corn, which is something that absolutely needs to be protected. This native corn is also less vulnerable to disease, pest outbreaks and climatic changes.’ [17]

Once again it was time to shoot the messenger. ‘We are just facing every single level of intimidation and aggression that you can imagine’, says Chapela. ‘It is obviously very well funded and very well coordinated’. ‘The main attack, the most damaging attack’ came ‘from my own colleagues within the university’, says Chapela, ‘who are mad at me because I stood up against Novartis coming in with US$50 million and buying the whole college. It has to be said that the immediate consequences might be very dire for me as my tenure is being reviewed.’

Chapela says that because of his stand against Novartis: ‘They are saying that we are activists, that we are anti-biotech’. Ironically before joining the staff at Berkeley Chapela had worked for Sandoz, which later merged with Ciba-Geigy to form Novartis. [18]

Some of the most virulent attacks came via the AgBioView discussion group and AgBioWorld.org website run by C S Prakash, who is a Professor of Plant Molecular Genetics at Tuskegee University, Alabama. Prakash’s foundation and website are an influential talking shop for GM scientists world-wide and a key place to influence other scientists. But the underlying reason for its existence is the promotion of biotechnology and the website features a Declaration in Support of Agricultural Biotechnology, signed by more than 3300 scientists from around the world, including 19 Nobel Prize winners.

Prakash calls the Quist and Chapela study ‘flawed’, saying that the ‘results did not justify the conclusions’. He says that they were ‘too eager to publish their results because it fitted their agenda’. A co-founder of the AgBioWorld Foundation, is Gregory Conko, from the right-wing free enterprise think-tank the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), based in Washington. The CEI has a long history of working with the antienvironmental ‘Wise Use’ movement, and is a key player in the backlash against people speaking out on environmental issues. [19]

Prakash says that the AgBioWorld website ‘played a fairly important role in putting public pressure on Nature, because we have close to 3700 people on AgBioView, our daily newsletter, and immediately after this paper was published, many scientists started posting some preliminary analysis that they were doing’.

‘It was not just the paper from Chapela that was damaging from the point of view of biotechnology’, says Prakash. ‘But a large number of media interviews, where he claimed that Mexican biodiversity was contaminated, the ability to feed its people was threatened, really outlandish claims that probably irked many of the scientists.’

The first attack came on Prakash’s website within hours. But it was not a scientist who fuelled the attacks, but someone called Mary Murphy. ‘The activists will certainly run wild with news that Mexican corn has been “contaminated” by genes from GM corn not currently available in Mexico... It should also be noted that the author of the Nature article, Ignacio H Chapela, is on the Board of Directors of the Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA), an activist group’ wrote Murphy.

Chapela was ‘not exactly what you’d call an unbiased writer’. [20] The next AgBioView bulletin led with a posting from someone called Andura Smetacek, under the head-line ‘Ignatio Chapela – activist FIRST, scientist second’. It read: ‘Chapela, while a scientist of one sort, is clearly first and foremost an activist’. ‘Searching among the discussion groups of the hard-core anti-globalization and anti-technology activists Chapela’s references and missives are but a mouse click away.’

Smetacek argued that the article was ‘not a peer-reviewed research article subject to independent scientific analysis’. Her email included detailed information on the author and tried to undermine his credibility. ‘A good question to ask of Chapela would be how many weeks or months in advance did he begin to coordinate the release of his “report” with these fear-mongering activists [Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth]? Or more likely, did he start earlier and work with them to design his research for this effect?’ [21] In the space of an email, peer-reviewed research becomes non peer-reviewed research designed by ‘hard-core’ environmental groups.

In the next bulletin, on 30 November, other contributors continued the theme started by Smetacek and Murphy, questioning Quist and Chapela’s ‘activist’ links and their research. ‘Mary Murphy’s comment echoes my reaction when I read the news reports… This alarmist reporting of preliminary, incomplete research is just another example of the nutty illogic of the anti-GE luddites.’ [22]

These attacks by Smetacek and Murphy were sent immediately after the publication of the Nature article. Their character assassinations set the tone for others to follow, as we shall see. They had moved the debate from the message to the messengers and it was time for character assassination. Even the journal Science noted the part played by what it called, ‘widely circulating anonymous emails’ accusing researchers, Ignacio Chapela and David Quist, of ‘conflicts of interest and other misdeeds’. [23] Some scientists though, were alarmed at the personal nature of the attacks. ‘To attack a piece of work by attacking the integrity of the workers is a tactic not usually used by scientists’, wrote one. [24]

A virtual world

So who are Mary Murphy and Andura Smetacek, who between them have posted over 60 articles on the Prakash site? Mary Murphy’s email is mmrph@hotmail.com, which seems like just another hotmail address. However, on one occasion, Murphy posted a fake article claiming that Greenpeace had changed its stance on GM due to extra strength GM marijuana. Although Murphy used her hotmail address mmrph@hotmail.com, she left other identifying details, including ‘bw6.bivwood.com’. [25]

Bivwood is the email address for Bivings Woodall, known as the Bivings Corporation, a PR company with offices in Washington, Brussels, Chicago and Tokyo. Bivings has developed ‘internet advocacy’ campaigns for corporate America [26] and has been assisting Monsanto on internet PR ever since the biotech company identified, in 1999, that the net had played a significant part in its PR problems in Europe. While Bivings claims its work for Monsanto is an example of how it approaches contentious issues in a ‘calm and rational way’, it uses the internet’s ‘powerful message delivery tools’ for ‘viral dissemination’.

As it outlines: ‘Message boards, chat rooms, and listservs are a great way to anonymously monitor what is being said. Once you are plugged into this world, it is possible to make postings to these outlets that present your position as an uninvolved third party.’ [27]

But evidence points to the fact that Bivings, or those who have had access to its email accounts, has covertly smeared biotech industry critics via a website called CFFAR (Center for Food and Agricultural Research), although no such organization appears to exist, as well as articles and attacks posted to listservs under aliases. The attack on the Nature piece is a continuation of this covert campaign. [28]

Andura Smetacek is the original source of a letter that was published in The Herald newspaper in Scotland under the name of Professor Tony Trewavas, a pro-GM scientist from the University of Edinburgh. This letter was the subject of a legal action between Greenpeace, its former director Peter Melchett and the newspaper. The case went to the High Court and resulted in Peter Melchett being paid damages, which he donated to various environmental groups, and an apology from The Herald. [29]

Trewavas has always denied that he wrote the defamatory letter, and Andura Smetacek has acknowledged that ‘I am the author of the message, which was sent to AgBioWorld. I’m surprised at the stir it has caused, since the basis for the content of the letter comes from publicly available news articles and research easily found on-line’. [30]

Despite the email address, Andura Smetacek is also a ‘front email’. Although in early postings to the AgBioView list, she listed her address as London, in a dispute with The Ecologist magazine Andura left a New York phone number. However, enquiries have discovered that there is no person of that name on the electoral roll or other public records in the USA. Despite numerous requests to give an employer or verify a land address for The Ecologist, Smetacek has refused to do so. [31] Subsequent attempts by both British and American journalists to track down Smetacek have also elicited no answers. [32]

The first exposé of the Bivings connection to the Nature article was published by myself in the Big Issue magazine, and by the anti-GM campaigner, Jonathan Matthews, in The Ecologist magazine. [33] Bivings denied being involved in the dirty tricks campaign, saying that the reports were ‘baseless’ and ‘false’, and merited ‘no further discussion’. [34] Environmental commentator George Monbiot subsequently published two articles in The Guardian. ‘The allegations made against the Bivings Group in two recent columns are completely untrue,’ responded Gary Bivings, President of the Group. Bivings also contended that ‘the ‘fake persuaders’ mentioned in the articles – Mary Murphy and Andura Smetacek – are not employees or contractors or aliases of employees or contractors of the Bivings Group. In fact, the Bivings Group has no knowledge of either Mary Murphy or Andura Smetacek’. [35]

BBC Newsnight then took up the story. A spokesperson for Bivings admitted to a researcher from Newsnight that ‘one email did come from someone “working for Bivings” or “clients using our services”’. But once again they denied an orchestrated covert campaign. [36] Bivings later argued that they had ‘never made any statements to this effect’, saying that BBC Newsnight had been ‘wrong’. [37]

Gary Bivings also denied any involvement with the CFFAR website. But the website is registered to an employee of Bivings, who was a Monsanto web-guru. Furthermore, Bivings denied any involvement with the AgBioWorld Foundation, yet Jonathan Matthews had received an error message whilst searching the AgBioWorld database that a connection to the Bivings server had failed. Internet experts believed that this message implied that Bivings was hosting the AgBioView database. These experts also noticed technical similarities between the CFFAR, Bivings and AgBioWorld databases. [38]

Prakash, however, denied receiving funding or assistance for the AgBioWorld Foundation and denied working with any PR company, saying that he is ‘pro-the technology not necessarily the companies’. There were other tell-tell signs to be found, too. For people who had been so prolific in their attack against Chapela, Mary Murphy and Andura Smetacek suddenly disappeared. Murphy’s last posting was on 8 April, just a few days before the Big Issue piece went out. That same month, April 2002, Bivings had posted an article by their contributing editor, Andrew Dimmock, called ‘Viral Marketing: How to Infect the World’ on the web.

However, after the story broke in the UK press, Bivings changed their on-line version. Out went the sentence ‘There are some campaigns where it would be undesirable or even disastrous to let the audience know that your organization is directly involved’ and out went the ‘anonymously’. One sentence was changed from ‘present your position as an uninvolved third party’ to ‘openly present your identity and position’. [40] In the autumn of 2002, Bivings outlined how the term viral marketing had been ‘unfairly vilified’ in the press, it was nothing more than ‘wordof- mouth advertising via the internet’. [41]

Why would a company that had nothing to do with the Nature attack, suddenly change articles on its website? Even more intriguing were the actions of a Biving’s web designer who lived in the locality of the server that had posted the ‘Mary Murphy’ emails. Having worked at Bivings for seven years, as a senior programmer, this person suddenly changed his online CV, deleting all references to Bivings. Suddenly he had spent the last seven years being a ‘Freelance Programmer/Consultant’. The only problem is that his old CV is still on-line in an archive site that repeatedly mentions that he had worked for Bivings.

There was one other slight but important change to the Bivings site that occurred after the publicity too. Bivings had listed 15 different Monsanto websites as clients, however this changed to just a direct link to Monsanto.com afterwards. Were Bivings trying to hide just how much work they did for Monsanto? Once again, you can see the old version on internet archive sites. [42] Finally, the CFFAR website was suspended, with the site hosting an inoffensive ‘holding page’, but once again it is still available on archive sites. [43] Monsanto denied that it employed Bivings to undertake this kind of work. ‘They don’t do PR’, said a Monsanto spokesperson. ‘We speak for ourselves on issues’. [44] This begs the question of what kind of work Monsanto do on the web, and finally solves the mystery of the identity of Andura Smetacek. The company has radically changed its on-line activities in the last few years. After Monsanto’s European PR took a ‘beating’ in 1999, Monsanto’s communications director said ‘maybe we weren’t aggressive enough. When you fight a forest fire, sometimes you have to light another fire’. [45]