Two former food industry websites -- Best Food Nation and the Grow America Project -- are being merged and re-birthed as a new front group, the Center for Food Integrity (CFI). CFI's web domain was registered earlier this month by Charlie Arnot, who runs a small Missouri-based PR firm, CMA Consulting. CFI, which lists Monsanto as one of its supporters, states that it aims "to build consumer trust and confidence in the contemporary U.S. food system." Joseph Mendelson, the legal director of the Center for Food Safety, a consumer group, told Food NavigatorUSA.com that CFI is simply "a PR entity to try and battle regulations designed to create a safer food supply ... This is a way for it to promote its agenda under a green wash label." Mendelson also believes that the CFI's name was "chosen to try to distract attention from groups like ours and to confuse consumers." (Note: Mendelson is on the Center for Media and Democracy's Board of Directors.)

When it comes to stealthy PR campaigns, the biotech industry has spared no expense. For the past six years, the UK-based public interest group GM Watch has been tracking and documenting biotech's dirty tricks, learning that the PR web reaches further than just GM food. Encompassing a broad range of front groups, industry-funded researchers, and internet campaigns, GM Watch's new website LobbyWatch provides a who's-who of PR operators in Europe and the rest of the world. LobbyWatch's groundbreaking research details how the Living Marxism network is bringing a "Wise Use"-type environmentalism (read: industry friendly) to Europe, how the European Science and Environment Forum was founded with money from tobacco giant Philip Morris, and many other stories.

The Canadian government, working closely with the biotech industry, is spending millions getting Canadians to accept genetically modified foods. Lyle Stewart describes the "spider's web of influence" that brings together the biotech and agri-food industries, large grocery distributors, the Hill & Knowlton PR firm, and industry-created front groups such as the Food Biotechnology Communications Network, and co-opted NGOs including the Consumers' Association of Canada.

Two weeks ago, Guardian columnist George Monbiot described how the Bivings Group, a PR company contracted to Monsanto, invented fake citizens to post messages on internet listservers. "These phantoms had launched a campaign to force Nature magazine to retract a paper it had published, alleging that native corn in Mexico had been contaminated with GM pollen," Monbiot writes in today's column. "But this, it now seems, is just one of hundreds of critical interventions with which PR companies hired by big business have secretly guided the biotech debate over the past few years. ... Bivings is the secret author of several of the websites and bogus citizens' movements which have been coordinating campaigns against environmentalists. One is a fake scientific institute called the 'Centre for Food and Agricultural Research.' Bivings has also set up the 'Alliance for Environmental Technology,' a chlorine industry lobby group. Most importantly, Bivings appears to be connected with AgBioWorld, the genuine website run by CS Prakash, a plant geneticist at Tuskegee University, Alabama. ... He set up AgBioWorld with Greg Conko of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the far-right libertarian lobby group funded by such companies as Philip Morris, Pfizer and Dow Chemical. ... Another US company, Berman & Co, runs a fake public interest site called ActivistCash.com ... The marketing firm Nichols Dezenhall set up a site called StopEcoViolence, another 'citizens' initiative,' demonizing activists. ... The hatred directed at activists over the past few years is, in other words, nothing of the kind. In truth, we have been confronted by the crafted response of an industry without emotional attachment."