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In the name of innovation: corporate capture of EU research policy

EU Watchdog Radio: Episode 6

In the sixth episode Martin Pigeon, researcher and campaigner at CEO and Marine Ejuryan, EU Advocacy manager at ‘Global Health Advocates’ (GHA) explain the content of two in-depth and damning reports they just published; these reports are about how, in the name of innovation, industrial lobbies have managed to control the use of at least 3.6 billion of euro in European public research funds.

For the past 12 years, industry lobby groups have controlled the use of billions in public EU funds for health and climate research, through two so called public-private partnerships, or PPPs and this at the expense of the public interest.

The first report is called ‘More private than public: the ways Big Pharma dominates the Innovative Medicines Initiative’. The second, report is called Research & Destroy: the factories of the industrial bioeconomy threaten the climate and biodiversity’.

These two reports show that these lobby groups have prevented these partnerships from meaningfully investing into research projects that address societal challenges such as epidemic preparedness, - quite telling in times of widespread Covid-19 – or to invest in viable climate solutions; the EU research funds were mostly used to fund their own commercially profitable research projects instead.

These corporate lobbies are now lobbying for these PPPs to be renewed in a comparable form in the next EU budget, under the EU’s Research programme ‘Horizon Europe’ ( which runs from 2021-2027), all this with the support of the European Commission’s DG Research & Innovation.

Both CEO and Counter Balance raise awareness on the importance of good governance in the European Union, by researching issues like lobbying of large and powerful industries, corporate capture of decision making, corruption, fraud, human rights violations in areas like agro-business, biotech & chemical companies, the financial sector & public investment banks, trade, energy&climate, scientific research and much more…

You can find us on iTunes, Spotify & Buzzsprout. Stay tuned for more independent and in-depth information that concerns every EU-citizen!

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