For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s Genetic Engineering page and our Millions Against Monsanto page.
Supposedly objective scientific and economic assessments of the benefits of genetically modified crops are often biased by the fact they are funded by the very organisations they analyse, argues Wenonah Hauter.

Wenonah Hauter is executive director of Food & Water Europe, a consumer rights group that promotes sustainable agriculture and resource use. Additional analysis and references related to this op-ed are available in Food & Water Europe’s report ‘Cooking the Books: A Methodological Critique of PG Economics’ 2011 Global Report on GM Crops’.

“The International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA) has done it again. Their annual ‘state of play’ report on genetically-modified (GM) agriculture, paid for by a host of vested interests including Monsanto, Bayer CropScience and CropLife International, uses inflated claims and sleight of hand to ‘demonstrate’ the alleged popularity of GM crops.

For example, having invented the concept of ‘trait hectares’ to calculate the global uptake of GM that even a child could see doesn’t add up (e.g., if one acre of crop has six stacked GM traits in it, the ISAAA counts it as 6 hectares of GM), this year the ISAAA once again relies on material from the controversial Brookes and Barfoot team behind the pro-GM consultancy PG Economics.

PG Economics, which claims to be ‘objective and focused on using reliable and substantiated facts,’ in fact has significant ties to the biotech industry, calling into question the impartiality of its analysis, which has time and time again been challenged on their manipulation of data.