It's not every day that a good idea pops up. On the morning of March 11, 2010, Jay Byrne sent an email to one of his regular contacts, Bruce Chassy, a professor of nutrition at the University of Illinois and a leading advocate of biotechnology. A former Monsanto communications director and owner of a small PR firm called v-Fluence, Byrne told Chassy about a "much better concept" than the ideas then circulating to defend the interests of agribusiness in public debate.

"I'm compiling an 'opportunity' list, with targets like Vandana Shiva [an Indian environmental activist], Andrew Kimbrell [a lawyer and healthy food campaigner] and Ronnie Cummins [organic farming advocate]," Byrne writes. "And organizations which include Sierra Club [an environmental association], Greenpeace (...) Content which includes "Food, Inc." [a critical documentary on agribusiness], "The World According to Monsanto" [a 2008 documentary about Monsanto by journalist Marie-Monique Robin], and In Defense of Food [a book by Michael Pollan]." In essence, Byrne wanted to revive an old project he had developed for Monsanto. A system that "lists all the various areas of attack areas on ag-biotech and sources of those attacks and the response data available." "All of these individuals, organizations, content items and topic areas mean money for a range of well-heeled corporations," Byrne boasted in advance.

Obtained under the US Freedom of Information Act, this 2010 email is the first known written record of a proposed online platform designed to influence public debate on pesticides and genetically modified organisms (GMOs). It was christened Bonus Eventus, the Roman divine personification of agriculture, roughly translated as "favorable outcome." In its dealings with customers, v-Fluence is now promoting access to this "exclusive database," built around a "private social media network" that brings together hundreds of experts, consultants and chemical industry executives, all committed to the cause of pesticides and biotechnologies. And all benefiting from access to a vast documentary database, with detailed fact sheets on "critical" personalities, and thematic fact sheets packed with keywords.

Obtained by the Lighthouse Reports consortium of journalists and shared with Le Monde and other international media outlets, they reveal for the first time how this network functioned behind the scenes, targeting its opponents, producing and disseminating arguments that minimized the damage that synthetic inputs have on health and the environment, and casting doubt on the scientific consensus on the unsustainability of the dominant agricultural model. It was a worldwide campaign, and France, thanks to a few press titles and a handful of consultants and bloggers, has not been spared.

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