Is USAID a slush fund, as I noted a few days ago? Of course. USAID laundered money to PR firm to smear GMO activists

So much for helping poor Asians and Africans. H/T to Organic Consumers Association and GM Watch

https://gmwatch.org/en/106-news/latest-news/20475

The story is convoluted. A group of journalists dug through masses of public spending data to find this. I bet there are plenty more buried nuggets. Using a PR firm and NGO whose directors are former Monsanto employees, USAID paid to create a secret database on 3,000 people identified as being antithetical to the advance of GMOs.

…As part of their wider investigation, Lighthouse and their partners established from public spending records that between 2013 and 2019, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) paid over $400,000 to v-Fluence for services including “enhanced monitoring” of critics of “modern agriculture approaches”, by which they mean GMOs and pesticides. As part of this “enhanced monitoring”, Bonus Eventus was established as a means of sharing the profiles.

The precise route by which the USAID money was channelled to v-Fluence was via the USAID-funded Program for Biosafety Systems (PBS), which promotes the adoption of GM crops in African and Asian countries. Interestingly, the director of PBS is Judy Chambers, whose career has not only repeatedly interconnected – in a world of revolving doors – with that of v-Fluence’s boss Jay Byrne, but has involved a shared focus on GMO acceptance.

Chambers was already serving as senior biotechnology advisor at USAID when Byrne also went to work there as a communications director in the early 1990s. Then in 1997, Byrne and Chambers both moved to Monsanto – Chambers as director for international government affairs and Byrne as director of corporate communications. The year after Byrne moved from working directly for Monsanto to setting up v-Fluence, Chambers left Monsanto to carry on working for USAID before moving to the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), where she manages the PBS for USAID. It was IFPRI’s name on the contract that enabled US tax dollars to be funnelled through the PBS to v-Fluence.