Politics and the Gardening Column Converge

President Trump has made lots of headlines in the past few weeks over his whirlwind of changes to the executive branch. This week, there’s been lots of talk about Trump’s efforts to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) as part of his “America First” agenda.

USAID is the international humanitarian and development arm of the U.S. government, at least on paper. According to a recent article on NBC News, “USAID delivers billions of dollars in humanitarian aid overseas, funding that advocates say provides a critical lifeline to more than 100 countries at only a small fraction of the overall federal budget.”

President Trump accuses the agency of being “run by a bunch of radical lunatics.” And Elon Musk, who heads up the President’s government efficiency initiative, called it a “criminal organization.”

By now you’re probably thinking, “Isn’t this supposed to be a gardening column?”

Well, this week I learned about some rather nefarious activity, if you ask me, on the part of USAID against gardeners like me. If you’ve read this column for any length of time, you probably know that I’m not the biggest fan of pesticides and herbicides. So I was quite surprised to discover that USAID was funding a project by the public relations company, v-Fluence, to discredit critics of pesticides.

According to the online publication Lighthouse Reports, USAID “channelled over $400,000 to v-Fluence for services including ‘enhanced monitoring’ of critics of ‘modern agriculture approaches.’ v-Fluence used the money to build a private social media network called Bonus Eventus.

According to Lighthouse Reports, Bonus Eventus members can “access profiles on more than 3,000 organisations and 500 people who have been critical of pesticides or Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). They come from all over the world and include scientists, UN human right experts, environmentalists, and journalists. Many of the profiles divulge personal details about the subjects, such as their home addresses and telephone numbers, and spotlight criticisms that disparage their work.”

Who runs v-Fluence? None other than Jay Byrne, a former communications executive at the agro-chemical firm Monsanto, which was bought by the German company Bayer in 2016.

If you search for Bonus Eventus online, the only thing you’ll find is a very basic website, bonuseventus.org, which describes itself as “a community platform supporting independent initiatives in support of favorable outcomes in food and agriculture.”

The website says it “provides monitoring of the media and social media landscape, as well as influential stakeholder activities.” But you’ll find no specific information about their “monitoring” efforts. For that, you’ll have to go to another website which does not appear on search engines: community. bonuseventus.org. There, you’ll find the Bonus Eventus portal login page. A banner on the login page mentions “Intelligence Briefings” and “Background on the Critics.”

But good luck logging in. You’ll have to have an invitation. I tried applying for an invitation. I’m not holding my breath.

To sum up, the U.S. government was funding a shadowy PR campaign to discredit people concerned about toxic chemicals and genetically modified organisms in their food. This is just one small project that USAID was funding. What else were they doing? I really hope the current administration shuts down this agency for good.