Against this backdrop, the Gates Foundation is doubling down on its investment in the Cornell Alliance for Science (CAS), a public relations campaign launched in 2014 with a Gates grant and promises to “depolarize the debate” around GMOs. With the new $10 million,
CAS plans to widen its focus “to counter conspiracy theories and disinformation campaigns that hinder progress in climate change, synthetic biology, agricultural innovations and other key issues.”
But CAS has become a polarizing force and a source of misinformation as it trains fellows around the world to promote and lobby for genetically engineered crops in their home countries, many of them in Africa.
Numerous academics, food groups and policy experts have called out the
inaccurate and misleading messaging of CAS and its messengers. Community groups working to regulate pesticides and biosafety have accused CAS of
using bully tactics in Hawaii and
exploiting farmers in Africa in its aggressive promotional and lobby campaigns.
A
July 30 article by Mark Lynas, a Cornell visiting fellow who works for CAS, illuminates the controversy over the group’s messaging. Citing a recent
meta-analysis on conservation agriculture, Lynas claimed, “agro-ecology risks harming the poor and worsening gender equality in Africa.” His analysis was widely panned by experts in the field.
Marc Corbeels, the agronomist who authored the meta-analysis, said Lynas made “
sweeping generalizations” about his work. Other academics described Lynas’ article as “
really flawed,” “
deeply unserious,” “
demagogic and non-scientific,” an erroneous conflation that jumps to “
wild conclusions,” and
“an embarrassment for someone who wants to claim to be scientific.”
The article
should be retracted, said Marci Branski, a former USDA climate change specialist and
Marcus Taylor, a political ecologist at Queen’s University.
Debate over agroecology heats up
The controversy resurfaced this week over a webinar CAS is hosting
Thursday Oct. 1 on the topic of agroecology. Citing concerns that the Cornell-based group is “not serious enough to engage in an open, unbiased” debate, two food-system experts withdrew from the webinar earlier this week.
The two scientists said they agreed to participate in the webinar after seeing each other’s names among the panelists; “that was enough for both of us to trust also the organization behind the event,” wrote
Pablo Tittonell, PhD, Principal Research Scientist in Argentina’s National Council for Science and Technology (CONICET) and
Sieglinde Snapp, PhD, Professor of Soils and Cropping Systems Ecology at Michigan State University, to panel moderator Joan Conrow, editor of CAS.
“But reading some of the blogs and opinion pieces issued by the Alliance, the publications by other panelists, learning about the biased and uninformed claims against agroecology, the ideologically charged push for certain technologies, etc. we came to the conclusion that this venue is not serious enough to engage in an open, unbiased, constructive and, most importantly, well informed scientific debate,” Tittonell and Snapp wrote to Conrow.
“We therefore withdraw from this debate.” Conrow has not responded to requests for comment.
The webinar will go forward with
Nassib Mugwanya, a 2015 CAS global leadership fellow and doctoral student at North Carolina State University, who has also been accused of making unfair attacks on agroecology. In a
2019 article for the Breakthrough Institute, Mugwanya argued, “traditional agricultural practices can’t transform African agriculture.”
The article reflects typical biotech industry messaging: presenting GMO crops as the “pro-science” position while painting “alternative forms of agricultural development as ‘anti-science,’ groundless and harmful,”
according to an analysis by the Seattle-based Community Alliance for Global Justice.
“Particularly notable in the article,” the group noted, “are strong usages of metaphors (e.g., agroecology likened to handcuffs), generalizations, omissions of information and a number of factual inaccuracies.”
With Tittonell and Snapp off the roster at Thursday’s webinar, Mugwanya will be joined by Pamela Ronald, a professor of plant pathology at the University of California, Davis, who has
ties to pesticide industry front groups, and
Frédéric Baudron, senior scientist at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), a Gates
Foundation-funded group.
Asking for a ‘fair fight’
Mariam Mayet, executive director of the African Centre for Biodiversity, sees the ramped up PR campaigns as “evidence of desperation” that they “just cannot get it right on the continent.”
Her group has
for years been documenting “the efforts to spread the Green Revolution in Africa, and the dead-ends it will lead to: declining soil health, loss of agricultural biodiversity, loss of farmer sovereignty, and locking of African farmers into a system that is not designed for their benefit, but for the profits of mostly Northern multinational corporations.”
The Cornell Alliance for Science should be reigned in, Mayet said
in an August webinar about the Gates Foundation’s influence in Africa, “because of the misinformation (and) the way that they are extremely disingenuous and untruthful.” She asked, “Why don’t you engage in a fair fight with us?”
