A new pro-GMO propaganda campaign has been launched in which, in the words of a Washington Post article, “more then 100 Nobel laureates have signed a letter urging Greenpeace to end its opposition to genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

“The letter asks Greenpeace to cease its efforts to block introduction of a genetically engineered strain of rice that supporters say could reduce Vitamin-A deficiencies causing blindness and death in children in the developing world.”

In highly emotive language, the letter, published by a shadowy website called supportprecisionagriculture.org, claims, “Greenpeace has spearheaded opposition to Golden Rice, which has the potential to reduce or eliminate much of the death and disease caused by a vitamin A deficiency (VAD), which has the greatest impact on the poorest people in Africa and Southeast Asia.”

The letter calls upon Greenpeace “to cease and desist in its campaign against Golden Rice specifically, and crops and foods improved through biotechnology in general”, and upon governments to

“reject Greenpeace’s campaign against Golden Rice specifically, and crops and foods improved through biotechnology in general; and to do everything in their power to oppose Greenpeace’s actions and accelerate the access of farmers to all the tools of modern biology, especially seeds improved through biotechnology. Opposition based on emotion and dogma contradicted by data must be stopped.”

Whose ’emotion and dogma’ is it now?

The letter ends with an impassioned rhetorical question: “How many poor people in the world must die before we consider this a ‘crime against humanity’?”

The problem with this picture is that the “emotion and dogma” in this case do not belong to Greenpeace but to those who claim or imply that GM golden rice is ready to deploy and that only anti-GMO activists are holding it back.

That’s because in reality, as Prof Glenn Davis Stone pointed out in a peer-reviewed study co-authored with development expert Dominic Glover, GM golden rice still isn’t ready and there’s no evidence that activists are to blame for the delay.

In 2014 the body responsible for the rollout of golden rice, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), announcedthat the rice had given disappointing yields in field trials and needed further R&D to produce a crop that farmers would be willing to grow. Stone commented, “The rice simply has not been successful in test plots of the rice breeding institutes in the Philippines, where the leading research is being done.” Stone’s study showed that the rice is still years away from being ready.

And far from the rice being held up by over-stringent regulations fostered by over-zealous anti-GMO activists, as some pro-GMO campaigners have claimed, Stone pointed out that GM golden rice “has not even been submitted for approval to the regulatory agency, the Philippine Bureau of Plant Industry (BPI).”

Indeed, how could it have been submitted to regulators, given that IRRI says it’s not ready for release and that it hasn’t been tested for toxicity, let alone efficacy in combating vitamin A deficiency in the target malnourished populations?

As Greenpeace stated in its response to the campaign:

“Accusations that anyone is blocking genetically engineered ‘golden’ rice are false. ‘Golden’ rice has failed as a solution and isn’t currently available for sale, even after more than 20 years of research. As admitted by the International Rice Research Institute, it has not been proven to actually address Vitamin A deficiency. So to be clear, we are talking about something that doesn’t even exist.”

Authority over expertise

The laureates’ letter relies for its impact entirely on the supposed authority of the signatories. Unfortunately, however, none appear to have relevant expertise, as some commentators were quick to point out.

Philip Stark, associate dean, division of mathematical and physical sciences and professor of statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, revealed on Twitter his own analysis of the expertise of the signatories: “1 peace prize, 8 economists, 24 physicists, 33 chemists, 41 doctors”. He added that science is “about evidence not authority. What do they know of agriculture? Done relevant research? Science is supposed to be ‘show me’, not ‘trust me’… Nobel prize or not.”

Devon G. Peña, PhD, an anthropologist at the University of Washington Seattle and an expert in indigenous agriculture, posted a comment to the new campaign’s website in which he called the laureates’ letter “shameful”. He noted that the signatories were “mostly white men of privilege with little background in risk science, few with a background in toxicology studies, and certainly none with knowledge of the indigenous agroecological alternatives. All of you should be stripped of your Nobels.”

The lack of expertise among the letter signatories contrasts markedly with that of the man whose work the new propaganda campaign seems to be attempting to discredit.

Glenn Davis Stone – who has never opposed GM golden rice – is an expert on crop use and technology change among poor farmers, including rice farmers in the Philippines, the country targeted for the golden rice rollout – if it ever happens. He has been following the evidence on the progress of golden rice for years and has published extensively on the topic.

In other words, unlike the laureates, he knows what he’s talking about.

Who is behind the letter?

The new propaganda campaign is said to have been organized by Sir Richard J. Roberts. Roberts is a Nobel Laureate in physiology or medicine for the discovery of genetic sequences known as introns, and chief scientific officer for New England Biolabs.

According to their website, New England Biolabs are “a collective of scientists committed to developing innovative products for the life sciences industry… a recognized world leader in the discovery, development and commercialization of recombinant and native enzymes for genomic research.”

Given these facts, it is surprising that Roberts claims that he has “no financial interest in GMO research”.

According to the writer and researcher Colin Todhunter, Roberts has been propagandizing for GM food and crops in India. Todhunter says Roberts’ speech included emotional blackmail in the form of a claim that millions of people in the third world would die of starvation unless GM crops were introduced, as well as highly questionable assertions about the safety of the technology.

Conflicts of interest and bias aside, if you think it’s unlikely that Roberts alone would be able to mobilize over a hundred Nobel laureates to launch a campaign that gives patently false information about a GM crop that may never see the light of day in real farmers’ fields, you are not alone.

So who’s really behind the laureates’ letter? Some odd goings-on at the press conference announcing the letter may give a clue. Tim Schwab of the NGO, Food & Water Watch and a Greenpeace representative tried to attend the press event, held at the National Press Club.

However, Schwab reported, “We were barred at the door from entry – by none other than Jay Byrne, whose long relationship with Monsanto needs no elaboration.” Byrne is a former Monsanto PR man who now heads the PR firm to the biotech industry, v-Fluence.

Schwab commented that it was “a bizarre choice for this campaign to have Byrne play bouncer.” He added, “Byrne said only credentialed press were allowed to attend. Seconds later I saw a representative from CSPI (an NGO) entering the room. Byrne said some NGOs were invited to attend. Really? Why not Greenpeace – the subject of this campaign?”

Schwab tweeted, “Nobel laureate #gmo #goldenrice press event would be a lot more credible if industry guy wasn’t blacklisting NGOs.”

A further clue comes from the fact, just drawn to our attention, that while the website for the laureates’ letter is ‘supportprecisionagriculture.org’, the .com version, ‘supportprecisionagriculture.com’, reroutes to the Genetic Literacy Project (GLP).

US Right to Know calls the GLP an “agrichemical industry front group … with unknown funding that regularly attacks activists, journalists and scientists who raise concerns about the health and environmental risks of genetically engineered foods and pesticides.” Its executive director is Jon Entine.

Why now?

The timing of this press event may be significant. Could it be timed to coincide with the run-up to the GMO labelling vote in Senate, with the added ‘bonus’ of burying Stone’s inconvenient golden rice critique?

Whatever the answer to that question, the ‘supportprecisionagriculture.org’ campaign is shamelessly exploiting a group of Nobel laureates in a propaganda exercise that is actively misleading the public, the media, and governments.

Claire Robinson is managing editor at GMWatch, a public news and information service on issues surrounding GM crops and foods.

This article was originally published by GMWatch.

To blow your own trumpet can feel very un-British. As a nation, we typically shy away from talking about our accomplishments. We’d rather discuss what isn’t great or what we can do better, than what we excel at. And as a nation that is currently quite divided, it’s important to realise that there’s a lot that makes Britain great, particularly when it comes to renewable energy.

For many years, the UK has been quietly establishing itself as a renewable energy hub and dare I say it one of the world’s leaders in renewable energy development. While much of this activity is out of the public’s line of sight, investment in the UK’s renewable industry today is benefiting the entire population.

The UK is now home to Europe’s largest floating solar park in Walton-on-Thames, as well as the world’s largest offshore wind farm, Thanks to developments such as these, figures from the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) show that renewable energy accounted for a record breaking 25.1% of total electricity generation in the UK in the first quarter of 2016,

What’s more, we achieved a significant milestone earlier this year, after the UK briefly powered itself without burning any coal for the first time in more than 100 years.

Meanwhile, investment in renewable energy production is growing. Investment levels in the UK increased by around 25 per cent during 2015, despite the price of fossil fuels falling, according to the REN21 Global Status Report. As such, the UK is now ranked as Europe’s largest renewables investor and the fourth largest in the world, ahead of India and just behind China, the US, and Japan.

Fuelling further growth – how the UK can maintain its green credentials

Despite making great headway, the UK’s position at the forefront of the green revolution is not a certainty. Future growth can be threatened by the outcomes of the recent referendum and policy changes, which are impacting investor confidence. Without a stable regulatory backdrop, investors are less willing to make funding available for renewable energy projects in the UK.

This means that many planned developments may never be realised, while the UK’s 2020 emissions targets and those agreed at COP21 last year could quickly become unachievable.

To give investors the confidence to invest in long-term buy and hold assets, such as wind and solar projects, the government must support a stable environment that will attract institutional investors looking for reliable and long-term returns. But how can the regulatory and policy risks be mitigated?

1. Adopt a long-term approach. Investment cycles extend far beyond the four or five year terms that political parties are typically in power, and there must be a willingness to reconcile these two competing timeframes.

2. We must develop policies informed by international case studies. The stable investment environment in Germany is a good example to follow. The shift to the auction regime for solar has not been without its problems, but capacity deployment continues apace and investors benefit from a high degree of Government support and long-term policy certainty provided through the Energiewende.

 3. Communication, often one of the biggest stumbling blocks, must be improved. Governments can reduce uncertainties through better-communicating the rationale behind decisions – demonstrating they are driven by robust evidence rather than ideology.   

Provided political and regulatory risks are managed, energy infrastructure offers an attractive proposition for private capital. Renewable energy assets are a known quantum – providing long-term inflation-linked investment returns and could provide liability matching assets for pension schemes in particular. Institutional investors such as pension funds could make an enormous contribution to developing the clean energy sector of the future.

With a stable regulatory framework in place, renewable energy can offer attractive returns to institutional investors, as evidenced by three major pension funds in continental Europe recently announcing plans to boost investments in low-carbon industries by more than $31bn (£20bn) by 2020. Further inspiration can be sought from major retailers such as IKEA and Marks & Spencer, which have unveiled ambitious green investment plans.

Not only can renewable energy combat climate change, it has been proven to bring down the wholesale costs of electricity significantly, so it’s unsurprisingly popular with voters, as was shown in the DECC Wave 17 Attitude Tracking survey earlier this year.

The government must listen to the public, and take decisive steps to prevent global warming and encourage greater investment in new renewable energy projects, by establishing a more stable regulatory framework for renewable energy assets both operational and in development. Only then will institutional investors truly appreciate the compelling financial and climate case for investment.

With the official signing of the Paris Agreement, the UK has a responsibility to meet its 2020 emissions targets in what is a global effort to reduce carbon emissions. Here at Low Carbon, we believe that we must achieve a true low-carbon economy, and act now to stop or reverse climate change before the damage is irrevocable. Investment in renewables is indispensable to this process and goes hand-in-hand with the cultural shift that we need to take place, where we reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.

A broader, more diverse energy mix in the UK which includes solar and wind, for example, will not only benefit our environment but will also enhance the sustainability of our energy industry as a whole, making sure we don’t trail behind other countries in Europe and globally who already have this as a priority. In generating a quarter of the UK’s electricity supply, it is clear that renewable energy is a core, resilient electricity source that is here to stay, and we need to shout about this from the rooftops.

A new pro-GMO propaganda campaign has been launched in which, in the words of a Washington Post article, “more then 100 Nobel laureates have signed a letter urging Greenpeace to end its opposition to genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

“The letter asks Greenpeace to cease its efforts to block introduction of a genetically engineered strain of rice that supporters say could reduce Vitamin-A deficiencies causing blindness and death in children in the developing world.”

In highly emotive language, the letter, published by a shadowy website called supportprecisionagriculture.org, claims, “Greenpeace has spearheaded opposition to Golden Rice, which has the potential to reduce or eliminate much of the death and disease caused by a vitamin A deficiency (VAD), which has the greatest impact on the poorest people in Africa and Southeast Asia.”

The letter calls upon Greenpeace “to cease and desist in its campaign against Golden Rice specifically, and crops and foods improved through biotechnology in general”, and upon governments to

“reject Greenpeace’s campaign against Golden Rice specifically, and crops and foods improved through biotechnology in general; and to do everything in their power to oppose Greenpeace’s actions and accelerate the access of farmers to all the tools of modern biology, especially seeds improved through biotechnology. Opposition based on emotion and dogma contradicted by data must be stopped.”

Whose ’emotion and dogma’ is it now?

The letter ends with an impassioned rhetorical question: “How many poor people in the world must die before we consider this a ‘crime against humanity’?”

The problem with this picture is that the “emotion and dogma” in this case do not belong to Greenpeace but to those who claim or imply that GM golden rice is ready to deploy and that only anti-GMO activists are holding it back.

That’s because in reality, as Prof Glenn Davis Stone pointed out in a peer-reviewed study co-authored with development expert Dominic Glover, GM golden rice still isn’t ready and there’s no evidence that activists are to blame for the delay.

In 2014 the body responsible for the rollout of golden rice, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), announcedthat the rice had given disappointing yields in field trials and needed further R&D to produce a crop that farmers would be willing to grow. Stone commented, “The rice simply has not been successful in test plots of the rice breeding institutes in the Philippines, where the leading research is being done.” Stone’s study showed that the rice is still years away from being ready.

And far from the rice being held up by over-stringent regulations fostered by over-zealous anti-GMO activists, as some pro-GMO campaigners have claimed, Stone pointed out that GM golden rice “has not even been submitted for approval to the regulatory agency, the Philippine Bureau of Plant Industry (BPI).”

Indeed, how could it have been submitted to regulators, given that IRRI says it’s not ready for release and that it hasn’t been tested for toxicity, let alone efficacy in combating vitamin A deficiency in the target malnourished populations?

As Greenpeace stated in its response to the campaign:

“Accusations that anyone is blocking genetically engineered ‘golden’ rice are false. ‘Golden’ rice has failed as a solution and isn’t currently available for sale, even after more than 20 years of research. As admitted by the International Rice Research Institute, it has not been proven to actually address Vitamin A deficiency. So to be clear, we are talking about something that doesn’t even exist.”

Authority over expertise

The laureates’ letter relies for its impact entirely on the supposed authority of the signatories. Unfortunately, however, none appear to have relevant expertise, as some commentators were quick to point out.

Philip Stark, associate dean, division of mathematical and physical sciences and professor of statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, revealed on Twitter his own analysis of the expertise of the signatories: “1 peace prize, 8 economists, 24 physicists, 33 chemists, 41 doctors”. He added that science is “about evidence not authority. What do they know of agriculture? Done relevant research? Science is supposed to be ‘show me’, not ‘trust me’… Nobel prize or not.”

Devon G. Peña, PhD, an anthropologist at the University of Washington Seattle and an expert in indigenous agriculture, posted a comment to the new campaign’s website in which he called the laureates’ letter “shameful”. He noted that the signatories were “mostly white men of privilege with little background in risk science, few with a background in toxicology studies, and certainly none with knowledge of the indigenous agroecological alternatives. All of you should be stripped of your Nobels.”

The lack of expertise among the letter signatories contrasts markedly with that of the man whose work the new propaganda campaign seems to be attempting to discredit.

Glenn Davis Stone – who has never opposed GM golden rice – is an expert on crop use and technology change among poor farmers, including rice farmers in the Philippines, the country targeted for the golden rice rollout – if it ever happens. He has been following the evidence on the progress of golden rice for years and has published extensively on the topic.

In other words, unlike the laureates, he knows what he’s talking about.

Who is behind the letter?

The new propaganda campaign is said to have been organized by Sir Richard J. Roberts. Roberts is a Nobel Laureate in physiology or medicine for the discovery of genetic sequences known as introns, and chief scientific officer for New England Biolabs.

According to their website, New England Biolabs are “a collective of scientists committed to developing innovative products for the life sciences industry… a recognized world leader in the discovery, development and commercialization of recombinant and native enzymes for genomic research.”

Given these facts, it is surprising that Roberts claims that he has “no financial interest in GMO research”.

According to the writer and researcher Colin Todhunter, Roberts has been propagandizing for GM food and crops in India. Todhunter says Roberts’ speech included emotional blackmail in the form of a claim that millions of people in the third world would die of starvation unless GM crops were introduced, as well as highly questionable assertions about the safety of the technology.

Conflicts of interest and bias aside, if you think it’s unlikely that Roberts alone would be able to mobilize over a hundred Nobel laureates to launch a campaign that gives patently false information about a GM crop that may never see the light of day in real farmers’ fields, you are not alone.

So who’s really behind the laureates’ letter? Some odd goings-on at the press conference announcing the letter may give a clue. Tim Schwab of the NGO, Food & Water Watch and a Greenpeace representative tried to attend the press event, held at the National Press Club.

However, Schwab reported, “We were barred at the door from entry – by none other than Jay Byrne, whose long relationship with Monsanto needs no elaboration.” Byrne is a former Monsanto PR man who now heads the PR firm to the biotech industry, v-Fluence.

Schwab commented that it was “a bizarre choice for this campaign to have Byrne play bouncer.” He added, “Byrne said only credentialed press were allowed to attend. Seconds later I saw a representative from CSPI (an NGO) entering the room. Byrne said some NGOs were invited to attend. Really? Why not Greenpeace – the subject of this campaign?”

Schwab tweeted, “Nobel laureate #gmo #goldenrice press event would be a lot more credible if industry guy wasn’t blacklisting NGOs.”

A further clue comes from the fact, just drawn to our attention, that while the website for the laureates’ letter is ‘supportprecisionagriculture.org’, the .com version, ‘supportprecisionagriculture.com’, reroutes to the Genetic Literacy Project (GLP).

US Right to Know calls the GLP an “agrichemical industry front group … with unknown funding that regularly attacks activists, journalists and scientists who raise concerns about the health and environmental risks of genetically engineered foods and pesticides.” Its executive director is Jon Entine.

Why now?

The timing of this press event may be significant. Could it be timed to coincide with the run-up to the GMO labelling vote in Senate, with the added ‘bonus’ of burying Stone’s inconvenient golden rice critique?

Whatever the answer to that question, the ‘supportprecisionagriculture.org’ campaign is shamelessly exploiting a group of Nobel laureates in a propaganda exercise that is actively misleading the public, the media, and governments.

Claire Robinson is managing editor at GMWatch, a public news and information service on issues surrounding GM crops and foods.

This article was originally published by GMWatch.

To blow your own trumpet can feel very un-British. As a nation, we typically shy away from talking about our accomplishments. We’d rather discuss what isn’t great or what we can do better, than what we excel at. And as a nation that is currently quite divided, it’s important to realise that there’s a lot that makes Britain great, particularly when it comes to renewable energy.

For many years, the UK has been quietly establishing itself as a renewable energy hub and dare I say it one of the world’s leaders in renewable energy development. While much of this activity is out of the public’s line of sight, investment in the UK’s renewable industry today is benefiting the entire population.

The UK is now home to Europe’s largest floating solar park in Walton-on-Thames, as well as the world’s largest offshore wind farm, Thanks to developments such as these, figures from the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) show that renewable energy accounted for a record breaking 25.1% of total electricity generation in the UK in the first quarter of 2016,

What’s more, we achieved a significant milestone earlier this year, after the UK briefly powered itself without burning any coal for the first time in more than 100 years.

Meanwhile, investment in renewable energy production is growing. Investment levels in the UK increased by around 25 per cent during 2015, despite the price of fossil fuels falling, according to the REN21 Global Status Report. As such, the UK is now ranked as Europe’s largest renewables investor and the fourth largest in the world, ahead of India and just behind China, the US, and Japan.

Fuelling further growth – how the UK can maintain its green credentials

Despite making great headway, the UK’s position at the forefront of the green revolution is not a certainty. Future growth can be threatened by the outcomes of the recent referendum and policy changes, which are impacting investor confidence. Without a stable regulatory backdrop, investors are less willing to make funding available for renewable energy projects in the UK.

This means that many planned developments may never be realised, while the UK’s 2020 emissions targets and those agreed at COP21 last year could quickly become unachievable.

To give investors the confidence to invest in long-term buy and hold assets, such as wind and solar projects, the government must support a stable environment that will attract institutional investors looking for reliable and long-term returns. But how can the regulatory and policy risks be mitigated?

1. Adopt a long-term approach. Investment cycles extend far beyond the four or five year terms that political parties are typically in power, and there must be a willingness to reconcile these two competing timeframes.

2. We must develop policies informed by international case studies. The stable investment environment in Germany is a good example to follow. The shift to the auction regime for solar has not been without its problems, but capacity deployment continues apace and investors benefit from a high degree of Government support and long-term policy certainty provided through the Energiewende.

 3. Communication, often one of the biggest stumbling blocks, must be improved. Governments can reduce uncertainties through better-communicating the rationale behind decisions – demonstrating they are driven by robust evidence rather than ideology.   

Provided political and regulatory risks are managed, energy infrastructure offers an attractive proposition for private capital. Renewable energy assets are a known quantum – providing long-term inflation-linked investment returns and could provide liability matching assets for pension schemes in particular. Institutional investors such as pension funds could make an enormous contribution to developing the clean energy sector of the future.

With a stable regulatory framework in place, renewable energy can offer attractive returns to institutional investors, as evidenced by three major pension funds in continental Europe recently announcing plans to boost investments in low-carbon industries by more than $31bn (£20bn) by 2020. Further inspiration can be sought from major retailers such as IKEA and Marks & Spencer, which have unveiled ambitious green investment plans.

Not only can renewable energy combat climate change, it has been proven to bring down the wholesale costs of electricity significantly, so it’s unsurprisingly popular with voters, as was shown in the DECC Wave 17 Attitude Tracking survey earlier this year.

The government must listen to the public, and take decisive steps to prevent global warming and encourage greater investment in new renewable energy projects, by establishing a more stable regulatory framework for renewable energy assets both operational and in development. Only then will institutional investors truly appreciate the compelling financial and climate case for investment.

With the official signing of the Paris Agreement, the UK has a responsibility to meet its 2020 emissions targets in what is a global effort to reduce carbon emissions. Here at Low Carbon, we believe that we must achieve a true low-carbon economy, and act now to stop or reverse climate change before the damage is irrevocable. Investment in renewables is indispensable to this process and goes hand-in-hand with the cultural shift that we need to take place, where we reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.

A broader, more diverse energy mix in the UK which includes solar and wind, for example, will not only benefit our environment but will also enhance the sustainability of our energy industry as a whole, making sure we don’t trail behind other countries in Europe and globally who already have this as a priority. In generating a quarter of the UK’s electricity supply, it is clear that renewable energy is a core, resilient electricity source that is here to stay, and we need to shout about this from the rooftops.

A new pro-GMO propaganda campaign has been launched in which, in the words of a Washington Post article, “more then 100 Nobel laureates have signed a letter urging Greenpeace to end its opposition to genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

“The letter asks Greenpeace to cease its efforts to block introduction of a genetically engineered strain of rice that supporters say could reduce Vitamin-A deficiencies causing blindness and death in children in the developing world.”

In highly emotive language, the letter, published by a shadowy website called supportprecisionagriculture.org, claims, “Greenpeace has spearheaded opposition to Golden Rice, which has the potential to reduce or eliminate much of the death and disease caused by a vitamin A deficiency (VAD), which has the greatest impact on the poorest people in Africa and Southeast Asia.”

The letter calls upon Greenpeace “to cease and desist in its campaign against Golden Rice specifically, and crops and foods improved through biotechnology in general”, and upon governments to

“reject Greenpeace’s campaign against Golden Rice specifically, and crops and foods improved through biotechnology in general; and to do everything in their power to oppose Greenpeace’s actions and accelerate the access of farmers to all the tools of modern biology, especially seeds improved through biotechnology. Opposition based on emotion and dogma contradicted by data must be stopped.”

Whose ’emotion and dogma’ is it now?

The letter ends with an impassioned rhetorical question: “How many poor people in the world must die before we consider this a ‘crime against humanity’?”

The problem with this picture is that the “emotion and dogma” in this case do not belong to Greenpeace but to those who claim or imply that GM golden rice is ready to deploy and that only anti-GMO activists are holding it back.

That’s because in reality, as Prof Glenn Davis Stone pointed out in a peer-reviewed study co-authored with development expert Dominic Glover, GM golden rice still isn’t ready and there’s no evidence that activists are to blame for the delay.

In 2014 the body responsible for the rollout of golden rice, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), announcedthat the rice had given disappointing yields in field trials and needed further R&D to produce a crop that farmers would be willing to grow. Stone commented, “The rice simply has not been successful in test plots of the rice breeding institutes in the Philippines, where the leading research is being done.” Stone’s study showed that the rice is still years away from being ready.

And far from the rice being held up by over-stringent regulations fostered by over-zealous anti-GMO activists, as some pro-GMO campaigners have claimed, Stone pointed out that GM golden rice “has not even been submitted for approval to the regulatory agency, the Philippine Bureau of Plant Industry (BPI).”

Indeed, how could it have been submitted to regulators, given that IRRI says it’s not ready for release and that it hasn’t been tested for toxicity, let alone efficacy in combating vitamin A deficiency in the target malnourished populations?

As Greenpeace stated in its response to the campaign:

“Accusations that anyone is blocking genetically engineered ‘golden’ rice are false. ‘Golden’ rice has failed as a solution and isn’t currently available for sale, even after more than 20 years of research. As admitted by the International Rice Research Institute, it has not been proven to actually address Vitamin A deficiency. So to be clear, we are talking about something that doesn’t even exist.”

Authority over expertise

The laureates’ letter relies for its impact entirely on the supposed authority of the signatories. Unfortunately, however, none appear to have relevant expertise, as some commentators were quick to point out.

Philip Stark, associate dean, division of mathematical and physical sciences and professor of statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, revealed on Twitter his own analysis of the expertise of the signatories: “1 peace prize, 8 economists, 24 physicists, 33 chemists, 41 doctors”. He added that science is “about evidence not authority. What do they know of agriculture? Done relevant research? Science is supposed to be ‘show me’, not ‘trust me’… Nobel prize or not.”

Devon G. Peña, PhD, an anthropologist at the University of Washington Seattle and an expert in indigenous agriculture, posted a comment to the new campaign’s website in which he called the laureates’ letter “shameful”. He noted that the signatories were “mostly white men of privilege with little background in risk science, few with a background in toxicology studies, and certainly none with knowledge of the indigenous agroecological alternatives. All of you should be stripped of your Nobels.”

The lack of expertise among the letter signatories contrasts markedly with that of the man whose work the new propaganda campaign seems to be attempting to discredit.

Glenn Davis Stone – who has never opposed GM golden rice – is an expert on crop use and technology change among poor farmers, including rice farmers in the Philippines, the country targeted for the golden rice rollout – if it ever happens. He has been following the evidence on the progress of golden rice for years and has published extensively on the topic.

In other words, unlike the laureates, he knows what he’s talking about.

Who is behind the letter?

The new propaganda campaign is said to have been organized by Sir Richard J. Roberts. Roberts is a Nobel Laureate in physiology or medicine for the discovery of genetic sequences known as introns, and chief scientific officer for New England Biolabs.

According to their website, New England Biolabs are “a collective of scientists committed to developing innovative products for the life sciences industry… a recognized world leader in the discovery, development and commercialization of recombinant and native enzymes for genomic research.”

Given these facts, it is surprising that Roberts claims that he has “no financial interest in GMO research”.

According to the writer and researcher Colin Todhunter, Roberts has been propagandizing for GM food and crops in India. Todhunter says Roberts’ speech included emotional blackmail in the form of a claim that millions of people in the third world would die of starvation unless GM crops were introduced, as well as highly questionable assertions about the safety of the technology.

Conflicts of interest and bias aside, if you think it’s unlikely that Roberts alone would be able to mobilize over a hundred Nobel laureates to launch a campaign that gives patently false information about a GM crop that may never see the light of day in real farmers’ fields, you are not alone.

So who’s really behind the laureates’ letter? Some odd goings-on at the press conference announcing the letter may give a clue. Tim Schwab of the NGO, Food & Water Watch and a Greenpeace representative tried to attend the press event, held at the National Press Club.

However, Schwab reported, “We were barred at the door from entry – by none other than Jay Byrne, whose long relationship with Monsanto needs no elaboration.” Byrne is a former Monsanto PR man who now heads the PR firm to the biotech industry, v-Fluence.

Schwab commented that it was “a bizarre choice for this campaign to have Byrne play bouncer.” He added, “Byrne said only credentialed press were allowed to attend. Seconds later I saw a representative from CSPI (an NGO) entering the room. Byrne said some NGOs were invited to attend. Really? Why not Greenpeace – the subject of this campaign?”

Schwab tweeted, “Nobel laureate #gmo #goldenrice press event would be a lot more credible if industry guy wasn’t blacklisting NGOs.”

A further clue comes from the fact, just drawn to our attention, that while the website for the laureates’ letter is ‘supportprecisionagriculture.org’, the .com version, ‘supportprecisionagriculture.com’, reroutes to the Genetic Literacy Project (GLP).

US Right to Know calls the GLP an “agrichemical industry front group … with unknown funding that regularly attacks activists, journalists and scientists who raise concerns about the health and environmental risks of genetically engineered foods and pesticides.” Its executive director is Jon Entine.

Why now?

The timing of this press event may be significant. Could it be timed to coincide with the run-up to the GMO labelling vote in Senate, with the added ‘bonus’ of burying Stone’s inconvenient golden rice critique?

Whatever the answer to that question, the ‘supportprecisionagriculture.org’ campaign is shamelessly exploiting a group of Nobel laureates in a propaganda exercise that is actively misleading the public, the media, and governments.

Claire Robinson is managing editor at GMWatch, a public news and information service on issues surrounding GM crops and foods.

This article was originally published by GMWatch.

To blow your own trumpet can feel very un-British. As a nation, we typically shy away from talking about our accomplishments. We’d rather discuss what isn’t great or what we can do better, than what we excel at. And as a nation that is currently quite divided, it’s important to realise that there’s a lot that makes Britain great, particularly when it comes to renewable energy.

For many years, the UK has been quietly establishing itself as a renewable energy hub and dare I say it one of the world’s leaders in renewable energy development. While much of this activity is out of the public’s line of sight, investment in the UK’s renewable industry today is benefiting the entire population.

The UK is now home to Europe’s largest floating solar park in Walton-on-Thames, as well as the world’s largest offshore wind farm, Thanks to developments such as these, figures from the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) show that renewable energy accounted for a record breaking 25.1% of total electricity generation in the UK in the first quarter of 2016,

What’s more, we achieved a significant milestone earlier this year, after the UK briefly powered itself without burning any coal for the first time in more than 100 years.

Meanwhile, investment in renewable energy production is growing. Investment levels in the UK increased by around 25 per cent during 2015, despite the price of fossil fuels falling, according to the REN21 Global Status Report. As such, the UK is now ranked as Europe’s largest renewables investor and the fourth largest in the world, ahead of India and just behind China, the US, and Japan.

Fuelling further growth – how the UK can maintain its green credentials

Despite making great headway, the UK’s position at the forefront of the green revolution is not a certainty. Future growth can be threatened by the outcomes of the recent referendum and policy changes, which are impacting investor confidence. Without a stable regulatory backdrop, investors are less willing to make funding available for renewable energy projects in the UK.

This means that many planned developments may never be realised, while the UK’s 2020 emissions targets and those agreed at COP21 last year could quickly become unachievable.

To give investors the confidence to invest in long-term buy and hold assets, such as wind and solar projects, the government must support a stable environment that will attract institutional investors looking for reliable and long-term returns. But how can the regulatory and policy risks be mitigated?

1. Adopt a long-term approach. Investment cycles extend far beyond the four or five year terms that political parties are typically in power, and there must be a willingness to reconcile these two competing timeframes.

2. We must develop policies informed by international case studies. The stable investment environment in Germany is a good example to follow. The shift to the auction regime for solar has not been without its problems, but capacity deployment continues apace and investors benefit from a high degree of Government support and long-term policy certainty provided through the Energiewende.

 3. Communication, often one of the biggest stumbling blocks, must be improved. Governments can reduce uncertainties through better-communicating the rationale behind decisions – demonstrating they are driven by robust evidence rather than ideology.   

Provided political and regulatory risks are managed, energy infrastructure offers an attractive proposition for private capital. Renewable energy assets are a known quantum – providing long-term inflation-linked investment returns and could provide liability matching assets for pension schemes in particular. Institutional investors such as pension funds could make an enormous contribution to developing the clean energy sector of the future.

With a stable regulatory framework in place, renewable energy can offer attractive returns to institutional investors, as evidenced by three major pension funds in continental Europe recently announcing plans to boost investments in low-carbon industries by more than $31bn (£20bn) by 2020. Further inspiration can be sought from major retailers such as IKEA and Marks & Spencer, which have unveiled ambitious green investment plans.

Not only can renewable energy combat climate change, it has been proven to bring down the wholesale costs of electricity significantly, so it’s unsurprisingly popular with voters, as was shown in the DECC Wave 17 Attitude Tracking survey earlier this year.

The government must listen to the public, and take decisive steps to prevent global warming and encourage greater investment in new renewable energy projects, by establishing a more stable regulatory framework for renewable energy assets both operational and in development. Only then will institutional investors truly appreciate the compelling financial and climate case for investment.

With the official signing of the Paris Agreement, the UK has a responsibility to meet its 2020 emissions targets in what is a global effort to reduce carbon emissions. Here at Low Carbon, we believe that we must achieve a true low-carbon economy, and act now to stop or reverse climate change before the damage is irrevocable. Investment in renewables is indispensable to this process and goes hand-in-hand with the cultural shift that we need to take place, where we reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.

A broader, more diverse energy mix in the UK which includes solar and wind, for example, will not only benefit our environment but will also enhance the sustainability of our energy industry as a whole, making sure we don’t trail behind other countries in Europe and globally who already have this as a priority. In generating a quarter of the UK’s electricity supply, it is clear that renewable energy is a core, resilient electricity source that is here to stay, and we need to shout about this from the rooftops.