Op-ed by Nina Holland of Corporate Europe Observatory.
It’s getting increasingly harder for the pesticide lobby to argue against the science showing harm to people and ecosystems of its toxic products. ‘Luckily’ it has an ace up its sleeve: farmers’ frustrations/anger. Corporate lobby group Croplife Europe appears to be opportunistically planning to use farmers’ protests on the 18th of December in Brussels, in order to create political momentum to further slash EU safety rules for its products.
This week the Commission launched its seventh Omnibus package, which will cut rules governing the safety of food and feed. Unsurprisingly, Croplife Europe and Bayer have held numerous meetings with high-up Commission officials over this so-called ‘simplification’ of pesticide regulations. They and other business lobby groups are pushing an agenda that is clearly destructive for public health: from easing renewal assessments for conventional pesticides, to rolling back the independence of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and even regaining the right for industry’s regulatory studies to remain secret. Back to the future?!
By sheer coincidence, in the same week of the Omnibus launch, farmers are hitting Brussels’ streets to protest. And the lobbyists seem to be trying to weaponise this anger for their own ends.
There’s a reason that industry wants to hitch its demands to the farmers’ wagon. Previous farmer protests in 2023-24 had a major impact, succeeding in getting the European Commission to dilute another set of green rules. Presumably hoping for a similar effect, Croplife Europe commissioned an IPSOS survey among farmers in nine EU countries, on the subject: “Have the farmers struggles in early 2024 been resolved by the EU recent actions or are farmers on the verge to protest again?” This narrative then hit the news agenda through a lobby event and sponsored content, echoing the industry lobby’s talking points.
But the Croplife-sponsored survey ignored a rather inconvenient fact. The farmers’ key demand – saying no to the EU-Mercosur free trade agreement – is in direct contradiction to the position of the pesticide industry. Croplife’s empathy with poor farmers clearly has its limits.
Croplife Europe’s ‘farmers’ survey’ design and its conclusions demand scrutiny. They conveniently ignore the elephant in the room: farmers most of all want a decent income and fair prices. They want EU action against unfair competition from abroad, as well as a fair farm subsidy scheme and market regulation. With the EU-Mercosur free trade deal, they are getting the opposite: unfair competition from countries with much lower standards, and much higher use of more (and often EU-banned) pesticides.
EU-Mercosur is a key target of the big farmer protest on 18 December. In contrast EU-Mercosur is strongly supported by the pesticide industry, as the deal will allow them to export more pesticides from the EU to South America – even those products banned for use in the EU itself – while agricultural products produced with their pesticides can continue to be traded to the EU in large quantities.
Rather than understanding rural concerns, the industry lobby group’s goal appears rather to scaremonger politicians with the prospect of long lines of tractors. Given the proximity to the Omnibus launch, they may be hoping that the protests will help erode the EU’s pesticide standards, something that has been on their wishlist for many years.
There is a long history of pesticide corporations appearing to co-opt ‘the farmers’ voice’, to add an air of grassroots legitimacy to their industry lobby demands. Take Croplife lobbyist Emma Brown, who leads its position on the new Omnibus. She previously worked at a lobby firm that Monsanto hired, which constructed a fake grassroots campaign to create the appearance of farmers’ support for glyphosate. However, despite Croplife’s attempts to position themselves as an ally, evidence of harm to the health of farmers and rural populations as a result of pesticide use – in the EU and in countries like Brazil – is too clear to be ignored.
This, then, is the disturbing reality: pesticide lobbyists in the EU quarter are working overtime to further dilute safety assessments, and to serve profits for their clients. At the same time the sector’s own customers – farmers and their families – are bearing the risks of these chemicals to their bodies. And the European Commission – it cannot be said otherwise – appears complicit.
Not only may the Commission propose a vast weakening of EU pesticide legislation, European Commission president Ursula Von der Leyen also plans to travel to Brazil to sign the free trade agreement.
Meanwhile, however much the pesticides lobbyists try to spin the story, the science is not on their side. Wageningen University, which previously provided a flawed ‘impact study’ that served a Croplife campaign to kill the pesticide reduction law SUR, has acknowledged this was a mistake. Meanwhile the key study underpinning the claim that the pesticide glyphosate would not cause cancer – known for a decade to have actually been ghostwritten by Monsanto – has finally been retracted by the science journal that published it.
From astroturfing and weaponising rural grievances, to dodgy science, the EU needs to wake up – and stand up – to the misleading lobby tactics of the pesticides industry.
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