Articles

The European Commission proposes to have industry co-decide how €9.6 billion of EU public research money should be used. The Member States now have to decide if they accept expanding the highly problematic model of EU Joint Undertakings, very large industry-driven public-private research partnerships, in the EU’s new research funding programme Horizon Europe.

In this new episode of EU Watchdog Radio we dive into the covert lobby tactics used by the biotechnology industry to get a new generation of GMO’s to be used in agriculture, deregulated in the EU. Why are agrochemical companies like Bayer and Corteva to against having European safety rules? And why is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation financing this lobby-campaign?

CEO and The Good Lobby have written to Mr Koen Lenaerts (President of the Court of Justice of the European Union) to express concern about the fact that ECJ Advocate General Giovanni Pitruzzella participated in an event on vaccine patents co-hosted by a pharmaceutical industry lobby group. The event - an online roundtable on March 22 2021 - was hosted by the Aspen Institute Italy in cooperation with Farmindustria, the Italian pharmaceutical sector lobby group.

The biotech industry is waging a battle to get new genetic modification techniques excluded from European GMO regulations. This would mean that these new GMOs would not be subject to safety checks, monitoring or consumer labelling. Corporate Europe Observatory has uncovered precisely how the biotech developers are preparing the ground, and lobbying hard, for such deregulation.

This new episode of EU Watchdog Radio is dedicated to the Global Climate strike on Friday 19th March. Two experts talk about how the current proposed climate policies are too oriented towards market-based solutions and are influenced by the same industry that created climate change: the fossil fuel industry. And hence the importance of Fossil Free Politics.

To keep temperature rises below 1.5oC, the EU needs to decommission existing gas infrastructure as well as stop building new fossil gas infrastructure. But the gas industry has a powerful weapon to stop this happening: the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT).

How did EU governments decide to oppose a global measure that could boost production of COVID vaccines and medicines for the global south? You won’t get the slightest hint from official EU sources. But leaked documents reveal that the Commission and member states see the real problem as a mere PR issue of how to deflect criticism. Given the pandemic, their position seems indefensible.

Big Tobacco has been influencing policy to its advantage for decades—postponing, protesting, promoting untruths, playing the victim and pushing new technologies—in order to disrupt tobacco control policies. The World Health Organization’s (WHO) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) is the best global tool to combat tobacco industry interference, providing clear guidelines to protect public health policies and reduce tobacco-related deaths.

To secure a rapid and sufficient supply of vaccines and medicines, the global south has asked for a waiver of intellectual property rights. But despite the gravity of the situation, that is rejected outright by the EU. That should not come as a surprise. A briefing from CEO outlines the EU's traditional role as a staunch defender of big pharma monopolies, and how the push for provisions on 'data exclusivity' in trade agreements with third countries have seeked to undermine even existing flexibility under international rules.