Ronald A. Bailey
Ronald A. Bailey is author of Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse and The Law of Increasing Returns (a Cato Institute paper), and of articles such as 'Organic farming could kill billions of people' and 'Send in the Clones'. Bailey received funding for Eco-Scam from the Atlas Economic Research Foundation. It is The Atlas Economic Research Foundation UK that became the international Wise Use group – the International Policy Network.
He has long-standing connections to the Wise Use Movement and was a speaker at the 1997 Fly In for Freedom, the annual gathering of "wise use" activists sponsored by the Alliance for America.
According to PR Watch in 1995, Bailey edited a book, published by the CEI titled The True State of the Planet, “written to counter to the Worldwatch Institute’s influential annual State of the World reports”. Contributors to The True State of the Planet included a who's-who of the libertarian right: Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute, Terry L. Anderson of the Political Economy Research Center, Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute, Kent Jeffreys of the Heritage Foundation, and Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute.
Bailey is the science correspondent of the libertarian Reason Magazine, and an adjunct scholar with the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The CEI awarded him a Brookes Fellows scholarship. In 1995, CEI published a book edited by Bailey titled 'The True State of the Planet' whose contributors included a who's-who of the libertarian right, including Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute.
During the Mexican maize scandal Bailey published an article, 'Environmentalist Bio-fraud?' whose words closely echoed the personal attacks on scientist Ignacio Chapela initiated by Monsanto's PR proxy 'Mary Murphy'. For instance, Murphy had first pointed to Chapela serving 'on the Board of Directors of the Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA)' which she labelled 'an activist group'. Murphy went on to describe Chapela as, 'Not exactly what you'd call an unbiased writer.' Bailey's Reason article described Chapela as 'a board member of the activist group Pesticide Action Network of North America' and as 'not exactly the model of a dispassionate scientist'. (Environmentalist Biofraud?)
In another article, 'GM trade war' (National Post, Aug 9, 2002), Bailey recommends ways of forcing the EU to accept GM foods via Codex Alimentarius: 'What can Canada and the United States do to win this trade war and foster the spread of GM foods? ...All Codex standards must be agreed to by consensus of all the parties. All Canada and the United States have to do is call a halt to the precautionary principle, biotech labelling, and traceability requirements, and they'll be taken out of Codex.' He also suggests, '[The US] must persuade all the chief food exporting countries... to create a united front against the EU, leaving Europe with no sources for non-biotech feed grain imports.' This, Bailey says, is the only way to prevent millions in the developing world from being starved.
Affiliations
- Cato Institute
- Reason Magazine - Science Correspondent
References
- http://web.archive.org/web/20011212134456/http://www.policynetwork.net/about.htm
- http://www.clearproject.org/reports_cato.html
- http://www.prwatch.org/improp/cei.html
