Bayer’s toxic trails

German multinational Bayer is one of the biggest pharmaceutical and agricultural companies in the world, employing over 100,000 people globally. In this report we examine the toxic trails left behind by Bayer throughout its long history, and its plans to stay afloat in a volatile future – from pushing glyphosate and new GMOs, to claiming its agricultural model is 'climate smart'. The company’s general modus operandi is to cosy up to different political regimes or carefully generate political pressure to push through its products and its monopoly model, using market power, size, financial assets and lobbying as key tools.

Bayer has been in the headlines again recently because of the EU's re-approval of the controversial herbicide glyphosate for another 10 years. Despite this success, in recent years the news for Bayer has not been so good. Glyphosate has come under heavy scrutiny over the past decade, since the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC, a World Health Organization agency) classified the company's bestselling pesticide as "probably carcinogenic to humans". In the US Bayer has recentlybeen ordered to pay US$2.25 billion in compensation to a single plaintiff due to cancer linked to use of the pesticide (later cut to US$400 million by a judge). 

In total, so far, Bayer has faced over 170,000 lawsuits associated with its pesticide Roundup, which glyphosate is a main ingredient of. As of 2024 the company also estimates that there are still over 60,000 pending Roundup lawsuits. According to US law firm Wisner Baum, roughly 60 per cent of lawsuits have been resolved through verdicts in individual cases worth billions, or via a collective Roundup settlement agreement worth approximately US$11 billion. As a result the company's stock continues to fall: it has dropped 70 percent since the summer of 2018, when it acquired the giant agrochemical glyphosate producer Monsanto for €63 billion. 

Recent talk of breaking up the company reflects this trouble. But as usual Bayer seems to be playing the long game. At a time when food security is ever more impacted by the unravelling biodiversity and climate crises, Bayer is pursuing a business model of increasing monopoly control over chemicals and seeds. After the Bayer-Monsanto and other mergers, just four companies ended up controlling 60 percent of the world seed market. Analysis shows that Bayer is the leading company in the global seed market, with a 17 percent share. It is also a dominant player in the chemical crop protection market. As a result, it appears determined to undermine key aspects of the EU's beleaguered Green Deal. And even where it finds obstacles, for example when its products are deemed too toxic to sell for use in Europe, it will still produce them here and instead export the banned substances to other countries around the world, including across the global south. 

The company has a long history of promoting a global agricultural model that creates and perpetuates addiction to its ever more expensive products. Meanwhile the efforts of big agribusiness and large landowners to steer and dominate the narrative of recent farmers’ protests across Europe should be understood in the context of the agribusiness and chemical sectors’ lobby firepower and political and economic agendas. Their influence across different players in trade associations, platforms, academia, European institutions, and governments serves to preserve the current status quo. 

Recent examples show the capability of the agrochemical giant to challenge or change policies and even laws in countries like Thailand, Mexico, and the US. This report investigates Bayer’s long history, its lobbying tools and its current projects. As for the horizon, Bayer's plans promise a disturbing future for food, farmers, and communities – a future that undermines sustainable agriculture and real climate solutions in order to secure future corporate profits, whatever the environmental and health consequences.

Bayer's EU lobby: a key Big Toxics player across the continent

Major actors in the agrochemical sector, aka ‘Big Toxics’, are currently among the biggest lobby spenders by sector at EU level, jostling for the top place with Big Tech and Big Energy. According to the EU lobby register, Bayer AG spent up between 7 to €8 million in 2023 on EU lobbying, the biggest sum declared by any individual chemical company and the highest amount ever spent by Bayer on EU lobbying. To this we should add the An important caveat: these are self-declared figures in a de facto voluntary register. In the past, Monsanto hired lobby firm Fleishman-Hillard to work on its lobby campaign to secure the re-authorisation of glyphosate but did not declare the €14.5 million contract in the register. 

It was in the context of this glyphosate lobby campaign that Monsanto-Bayer was exposed by the publication of the Monsanto Papers. In May 2019 Bayer acknowledged that its Monsanto unit was being investigated by French prosecutors for compiling files on journalists, politicians and other influential persons in several European countries. The inquiry was opened after a complaint was filed by newspaper Le Monde, which alleged that Monsanto had developed and maintained a file on 200 European names, including journalists and lawmakers, in hopes of influencing their position on pesticides.

"It's safe to say that other countries in Europe were affected by lists... I assume that all EU member states could potentially be affected," Matthias Berninger, Bayer's head of public affairs and sustainability told journalists. Though Berninger did not admit that there had been any illegal activity, he did say there were signs Monsanto had not played fairly in the use of private data: "There have been a number of cases where – as they would say in football – not the ball was played but the man, or woman, was tackled." 

Bayer admitted that it was Fleishman-Hillard that created these lists of people in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom on behalf of Monsanto. US investigative journalist Carey Gillam (who has published two books on glyphosate and Monsanto) published an overview of how the company has very actively manipulated the debate on glyphosate. According to Gillam they have done this not only by “ghostwriting scientific papers and suppressing science that conflicts with corporate assertions of Roundup’s safety”, but also via cosy relationships with regulators and lawmakers, and through strategic manipulation and intimidation of the media.

Funding disinformation campaigns to downplay toxic health harm in the US

In 2022 the US-based investigative group US Right to Know (USRTK) reported that the very active ‘Genetic Literacy Project’ “is an influential front group that partners with Bayer and other chemical companies to promote GMO foods and pesticides and argue for deregulation. Bayer paid the Genetic Literacy Project US$100,000 from July 2020 to June 2021 for its work “to prevent legislative overreach in genetic engineering”, according to the group’s declaration in the US regarding its lobbying there. Donor’s Trust, the secretive funding vehicle that resources attacks on climate science, is also a donor. The Genetic Literacy Project is also very active when it comes to EU policy making.

USRTK noted that “Jon Entine, founder and director of Genetic Literacy Project, is also the founder and principal of ESG MediaMetrics. This public relations firm had Monsanto as a client in 2011 when the firm registered the GeneticLiteracyProject.org domain. Entine was also employed at the same time by Statistical Assessment Services (STATS), a nonprofit group that journalists have described as a “disinformation campaign” that downplays the health harm caused by toxic products.

There’s more! “A 2015 Monsanto PR plan names Genetic Literacy Project among the “industry partners” Monsanto planned to engage in its efforts to “orchestrate outcry” about the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a scientific group that found glyphosate to be a probable human carcinogen. Monsanto’s goal, according to the PR plan: “protect the reputation” of Roundup.”

Working to derail the European Green Deal: Bayer in top 50 EU lobby spenders 

As reported by CEO in May 2023 self-declared lobby figures show that seven Big Toxic lobbyists rank in the top 50 highest-spenders on EU lobbying: four companies (Bayer, ExxonMobil Petroleum & Chemical, Dow Europe, and BASF) and three trade associations (the EU chemical industry lobby CEFIC, its German equivalent Verband der Chemischen Industrie (VCI), and Plastics Europe). Together they declared spending €33.5 million on lobbying the EU institutions in 2022, though the lobby spending of Cefic and Bayer for instance has gone up in 2023. 

In its first ‘Political Advocacy Transparency Report’, published in December 2023, Bayer declared spending of €49 million worldwide on lobbying (including the pharmaceutical side of its operations), as well as an extra €26 million on trade association fees. The report indicates that Bayer spent a staggering €75 million on lobbying worldwide in 2022, (of which at least €13.5 million was spent in Europe). 

Bayer’s lobby power at national level is also considerable: in the German lobby register it declared a €2.5 million expenditure for 2022 and €2.6 million in 2023. In a letter (dated 24 June 2020) from Bayer to former German Agriculture minister Julia Klockner  about the glyphosate litigation, the company states that they “look optimistic to the future” and that Bayer “rejoices” in the potential “to continue our partnership with you”. On 7 August 2020 the German minister replied, reassuring Bayer saying that the “US juridical system is different from the EU which is too often forgotten in the debate”, and that she hoped “the debate in the EU can be rationalized and based on science.”

Bayer's current top lobbying priorities for the European institutions seem clear: to derail the original ambitions of the European Green Deal, rendering it a greenwashing exercise at continental scale, and to prevent any of the company's firmly established interests – in particular chemicals and pesticides – from being touched.

Bayer is a member of numerous industry trade associations which have in recent years, and the last few months, been active on lobbying: 

• against the Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability (CSS, a pillar of the European Green Deal);
• against the REACH revision (which would have strengthened chemicals regulations);
• against the universal PFAS restriction (to limit dangerous 'forever chemicals’);
• against the export ban on toxic chemicals and pesticides;
• against pesticide reduction targets (SUR –Sustainable Use Regulation);
• for the further expansion of glyphosate use in Europe;
• and for the unrestrained authorisation of new genetically modified organisms (new GMOs or NGTs).

The company’s lobbying is pervasive. In Brussels, it operates from its own in-house lobby office. Since 2020, Bayer has directly met with European Commission cabinets and different Directorate-Generals, including meeting:

• Six times with European Green Deal Commissioner (Frans Timmermans), to discuss the European Green Deal, carbon farming, plant breeding, SUR and new GMOs;
• Four times with DG Trade (Phil Hogan and Janus Dombrovskis) about the European Green Deal, corporate governance and due diligence, food security and the Chemical Strategy for Sustainability;
• Three times with DG Agriculture (Janusz Wojciechowski) about the European Green Deal, plant breeding and sustainable food systems;
• Once with DG International Partnerships (Jutta Urpilainen) about food security;
• Once with Climate Policy Commissioner Wopke Hoeskstra.

Other direct contacts also take place, both outside the strict scope of in-person meetings and with lower levels of the administration –such as meeting with DG Agri or DG Grow, again to lobby about Farm to Fork, carbon removals, digital farming, the SUR, the REACH revision or the Chemical Strategy for Sustainability. 

Concerning new GMOs, in 2021 Bayer proposed “a new regulation (separate from GMOs) assessing whether the changes in the DNA of the new plant are similar to the ones that could have been obtained through conventional breeding methods or spontaneous mutation.” This would class new GMOs as essentially the same as non-GM products. In the same year Bayer clarified its opposition to an export ban on toxic chemicals and pesticides already banned in the EU, claiming that “an exclusive ban in the EU would only result in production being shifted to other regions." 

In September 2022, Bayer told the European Commission in no uncertain terms that they should drop the levels of their proposed pesticide reduction targets, defending the smart formulation of “impact reduction instead of volume reduction”, and arguing that the detrimental impact of chemicals on biodiversity was already minor “because of stringent chemicals regulation”. This ignored the conclusion of scientific researchers in 2022 that we have already exceeded the safe planetary boundaries of chemicals in the environment. Target Seven of the 15th Conference of Parties on the UN Convention for Biodiversity clearly outlines the imperative of “reducing the risks of pesticide use to protect a further decline of biodiversity.”

Chemical industry lobbying – including Bayer’s – is paying off: many promises by Ursula von der Leyen from the European Green Deal have been dropped over the past few years, or so thoroughly weakened that they have become unrecognisable. At the same time the European Commission has proposed to deregulate new GMOs, and has re-authorised the use of the "probably carcinogenic" glyphosate for another decade, despite not having achieved the agreement of a qualified majority of member states.

A deeper scale of lobbying in US: undermining regulation to secure legal immunity 

Bayer’s Chief Executive Bill Anderson stated that “political advocacy, or lobbying, means participating in democratic processes and formation of public policy by communicating a person’s or organization’s interests to politicians and institutions that create policies and regulatory frameworks affecting their areas of activity or business. When done in an ethical and responsible manner, lobbying is an important and legitimate part of the public policy process that reflects appropriately balanced interests.” He went on to claim that “responsible lobbying starts with transparency. Transparency in political advocacy is fundamental to establishing trust with the public and policy-makers. When conducted in a secretive or opaque manner, political advocacy can result in controversy or conflict.”

Nice words, but in reality, when it comes to lobbying governments all over the world Bayer seems to have learned a lot from the US-based company it bought in 2018: Monsanto. One of its most important markets, and political and juridical battlegrounds, is indeed the US. In this context, Bayer’s lobby spend in the US has risen considerably over the past few years. Where the company previously spent several hundreds of thousands of dollars in Washington, for example during the year before the Monsanto takeover in 2018, it is notable that its lobby budget rose to several million a year, with the company spending US$7.5 million in 2023 alone, according to its own declarations.

However in 2022 in the company’s ‘Political Advocacy Transparency Report’ it declares having spent no less than US$17.5 million on US lobbying. When asked Bayer gave no clarity on whether the fees to trade and lobby associations it pays are also included in tota lobby costs. In the case of the US those are considerable: US$12.5 million in 2022. Bayer also indicates a ‘global lobby budget’ (to lobby on “those topics with a global scope or where global/international organizations are the main drivers of policy-making”) of US$18 million.

The company’s lobbying of governments is sometimes done in the most direct of ways, such as when former Bayer's Chief Executive Werner Baumann met and promised then president-elect Donald Trump an US$8 billion investment, and 3,000 new US jobs, if Washington regulators gave the green light to the Monsanto-Bayer merger. The US played its part, and EU authorities also approved the merger under controversial circumstances. After the merger of Bayer and Monsanto a DG Competition team member became the Vice President of Compass Lexecon, a consultancy firm that had been involved in the merger process, working on behalf of German chemical giant BASF, which acquired €7.6 billion of Bayer's assets.

But the intensive lobby-campaign Bayer has staged in the US is of another scale entirely. Because of the avalanche of litigation unfolding as a result of the toxic nature of glyphosate and the fact that the labels of products that contain glyphosate have not warned users of its potential dangers, Bayer wants to change US law. 

In spring 2024 Jess Christiansen, Head of Communications for Bayer’s crop science division told news agency AP that “the costs of defending a safe, approved product are unsustainable”. Indeed, billions of dollars spent for settlements and trials, with thousands of lawsuits still pending, represents a financial burden even for a chemical giant.

This is why Bayer has also been lobbying lawmakers in three US states to pass legislation which would provide legal protection for the company from future lawsuits. As AP reported “nearly identical bills introduced in Iowa, Missouri and Idaho this year – with wording supplied by Bayer – would protect pesticide companies from claims they failed to warn that their product causes cancer.” Experts warn that this could have huge consequences – extending to US product liability laws and providing corporate immunity for lawsuits. Matt Clement, a lawyer representing victims of Bayer’s glyphosate, commented that “it’s just not good government to give a company immunity for things that they’re not telling their consumers.”

It is thus clear that, despite the adverse health and scientific findings, Bayer isn’t giving up one inch on maintaining its glyphosate production and market. It is simply an extremely profitable chemical, with annual market revenue of US$10 billion in 2023. 

In April 2024 Bayer America wrote a rather populistic open letter, on the gluphosate litigations noting that all science that is not regulatory science is ‘junk science’: “We win when juries have access to all the relevant evidence and scientific information. So the litigation industry fights to prevent the EPA’s rigorous analysis and science-based conclusion that Roundup is safe to use from being shown in court. Instead, they rely on junk science to mislead juries. When the whole story is not told, billions of dollars are diverted to the litigation industry. Billions that could have been invested into expanding our leading R&D programs and other important investments – investments that are essential to solving some of the world’s most important problems, benefiting both farmers and society.”

Thus ignoring and dismissing the wealth of scientific evidence and the work of the IARC on glyphosate, which has despite enormous pressure not changed its scientific findings. 

According to reporting by The Washington Post, Bayer alone has spent about US$9.6 million to lobby federal policymakers on this legislation (If Bayer get’s what it wants, the states could only follow the verdicts of the Environmental Protection Agency – EPA) and could no longer impose stricter labelling requirements) and other issues since the start of the current Congress’s term. This does not include lobbying by CropLife, or spending by Bayer in their state-level campaigns to change laws in various US states. 

“This (change of law, red) is bigger than just those states, and it’s bigger than just Bayer,” said Jess Christiansen, head of Bayer’s crop science and sustainability communications to AP. “This is really about the crop protection tools that farmers need to secure production.”

According to The Washington Post, at a federal level “Bayer’s lobbyists have focused on the Agricultural Labeling Uniformity Act, which would limit state and local governments from issuing their own rules about pesticide safety warnings. Instead, they would be required to follow the lead of the federal government on what to label and when – an approach that Johnson described last year as an effort to combat “political agendas” that threaten to “instil fear in consumers.”

“The measure threatens to make it harder for farmers and groundskeepers to argue that they were not fully informed about some health and safety risks posed by the popular herbicide. By erecting new legal barriers to bringing those cases, Bayer seeks to prevent sizable payouts to plaintiffs while sparing itself from a financial crisis” The Washington Post wrote in June 2024. “The company recently has set its sights on the sweeping legislation known as the farm bill, which Congress must adopt every five years to sustain federal agriculture and nutrition programs.” 

The approximately 1,000-page House version of the measure contains a single section – drafted with the aid of Bayer – which according to journalists and NGO’s could halt some lawsuits against Roundup. The House Agriculture Committee has approved the bill.

Civil society is fighting back. In September 2023, 185 US environmental organisations sent letters to the House and Senate, urging both chambers to reject these legislative proposals whose aim is to pre-empt existing state and local laws and ordinances which are in place to safeguard communities from the harmful impacts of toxic agricultural pesticides.

In spite of this, Bayer’s immunity language is currently in the House version of the Farm Bill, which the Senate has not yet taken up. The Farm Bill governs agricultural policy in the United States, and a Farm Bill will be passed at some point – even if not during this Congress’s term. Bayer’s Jess Christiansen acknowledged to US reporters that the company “worked with a lot of different lawmakers on different parts of the language” of the current proposal.

A US expert told Corporate Europe Observatory that “if this House provision were to be included in the final version of the bill, pesticide manufacturers and chem-conglomerates will be handed immunity from all legal responsibility to those Americans they've hurt. This language would eliminate all legal responsibility for dangerous pesticides that hurt Americans, even if the dangers have been covered up by pesticide manufacturers and chem-conglomerates for decades.”

It doesn’t stop here. In early April 2024 a new Bayer-led lobby group emerged in the US. The so called ‘Modern Ag Alliance’ announced, under the populist slogan ‘Control Weeds, Not Farming’, that “more than 60 agricultural groups [now 75] voice support for increased legislative clarity that ensures glyphosate and other essential tools remain available to America’s farmers.” The group declared that “it will work with agricultural partners and policymakers to ensure that pesticides registered and labeled through the Environmental Protection Agency are considered compliant with health and safety warning requirements.” The alliance is threatening lawmakers with the classic corporate lobby argument of the risk of hundreds of job losses in the three states of Iowa, Missouri and Idaho. 

Renee Fordyce, President of the Missouri Soybean Association, gave voice to the typical misleading argument that we “need to protect the critical role safe, approved crop protection tools play in sustainably feeding a growing world”. The same argument was made in the EU by right-wing politicians, over and over again after the Ukraine war started, opportunistically using the development to argue for their goal to get rid of the progressive food and agricultural aspects of the European Green Deal. 

Fordyce insisted that “farmers need legislative certainty that enables them to have confidence in the access of these important crop protection tools. While states have the option to build on the federal government's baseline regulations, we’re looking to ensure that any provisions do not directly conflict with the scientific findings of the EPA.”

What Fordyce and Bayer neglected to mention is that though the American Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) re-stated in 2020 that glyphosate, when used as directed, posed no health risks to humans, a federal appeals court panel in 2022 ruled that this EPA decision was problematic, and ordered it to review its decision.

In June 2022 Judge Michelle Friedland stated that the EPA’s finding of no risk of glyphosate to human health “was not supported by substantial evidence.” The US court directed the EPA to review its conclusion that glyphosate “does not pose ‘any unreasonable risk to man or to the environment’, stating that the EPA’s conclusion “was in tension with parts of the agency’s analysis and its guidelines.” The court also ruled that the EPA fell short of its “obligations under the Endangered Species Act” by inadequately examining glyphosate’s impact on animal species and vegetation.

But at the end of April this year the first legal victory of this new frontier lobby campaign to prevent litigation over glyphosate was touted by Bayer: “On behalf of more than 75 agricultural and grower groups in the Modern Ag Alliance, we thank the members of the Missouri House of Representatives who stood with farmers and science over the litigation industry in passing House Bill 2763.” This state level legislation on all things farming also contains Bayer’s wording on labelling, which would essentially provide the company with a ‘get out of jail card’ if finally approved. 

A next level support and form of absolute corporate capture in favour of Bayer was shown early August 2024 when Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers and Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird joined farmers and state agricultural officials in a plea from no less than 11 states that urged the EPA to stop a patchwork of state labeling efforts on farm chemicals. They echoed the words of Kevin Ross, a farmer from Underwood, Iowa, and former president of the National Corn Growers Association, who said that “farmers need the EPA to set a national rule for all to follow”. Ross also praised “glyphosate as one of the most cost-effective tools to control weeds”. 

The dubious track record of the EPA on glyphosate and other substances has already been widely documented and exposed by the publication of the Monsanto Papers. 

Conclusion: Bayer practices are bad for environment, health and democracy

Despite its enormous power, resources, money and influence, Bayer could increasingly become a giant with feet of clay. Ever since taking on Monsanto and adding glyphosate-based RoundUp to its list of troublesome products, it has taken many hits. Sales have continued to decline in its crop science and pharma segments, and a further slash in its 2023 revenue directly connected to a drop in glyphosate demand is creating pressure for change. 

In a more optimistic mood, early August 2024 Bayer announced that in the first half of the year sales of all its products brought in €24.9 billion - 2.1 percent less than in 2023. However there was also a slight increase of glyphosate-based products - showing why keeping that chemical on the market is of existential importance to Bayer. It’s lobby costs seem to pay off indeed.

New boss Bill Anderson may consider reshuffling the corporation, while shareholders are pushing to separate and spin off Bayer's crop-science segment out into a new publicly-listed company, while their dividends drop. 

Bayer had announced that it would take glyphosate for residential use out of the US market in 2023, although its massive agricultural use will be retained. Indeed, in an open letter (April 2024) Bayer wrote: “If American farmers lose a critical tool like glyphosate based on the litigation industry’s actions, they will face even harder choices. Bayer is the only domestic manufacturer of glyphosate. If this keeps up, farmers will be left with two options – grow less food or rely on foreign supplies of the product. We plan to continue providing U.S. farmers this vital, valued product so America’s consumers and a hungry world can be economically an abundantly and, above all, safely fed.”

Juridical protest against Bayer, meanwhile, is getting internationalised. A class action against Bayer was opened by non-Hodgkin Lymphoma patients in Australia – over 800 people allege their cancer was caused by glyphosate and Roundup in particular, spelling more trouble on the horizon. In Missouri, the company was condemned to pay US$1.56 billion for more cancer cases connected to Roundup ().

The level of losses accrued due to glyphosate keeps on mounting, even after the controversial reapproval of the product for ten more years in the EU, making this a serious problem for Bayer in the short term. But is it just a bump in the road for this giant corporation?

Bayer has been looking into alternatives to glyphosate for some time. In March 2024 the company announced that such a product would be publicly available in 2028. At the beginning of this year, in Brazil, Bayer presented two new herbicides in this vein: Icafolin and Convintro. The Convintro herbicide contains PFAS diflufenican and endocrine-disrupting metribuzim, two substances which are bound to raise serious environmental and health issues. So it’s business as usual for the giant.

An even more business-friendly and Bayer-friendly German government in 2025, such as one led by the former director of BlackRock Germany (one of Bayer's biggest shareholders) – and current CDU leader in the Bundestag – Friedrich Merz, might improve Bayer's prospects. With a rise in conservative and far-right elected representatives in the EU, Bayer and its toxic lobby will likely realign for new political scenarios.

It is astonishing to see how far Monsanto’s (subsequently Bayer’s) lobbying has sunk its teeth into public decision-making across the world. Bayer’s lobby tactics continue to capture public policy-making, and in doing so hollow out democracy. A perverse symbiosis between corporate lobby groups and decision-makers has been actively created through its economic weight and large investments in many corners of the world, and this consistently leads to crucial decisions being made in favor of industry profits, rather than public interest.

As this report has shown, companies like Monsanto/Bayer have for many years managed to influence, design and change national policies on the use of pesticides and biotechnology in food production, leading to significant and long-lasting environmental and health harm.

But if Bayer were to now succeed in changing US law on labeling, and thus to de facto achieve immunity from further litigation related to its toxic products, that would still be a new low for democracy and for policies to improve public health and preserve biodiversity. 

Four horsemen of the agrochemical apocalypse: privatising life itself

Some things are really hard to change. As with the three other ‘horsemen of the agrochemical apocalypse’ – Syngenta, Corteva, and BASF – the dire climate situation of food chokepoints internationally offers the opportunity for corporations like Bayer to hold more power over governments and farmers who are subject to significant socio-economic pressures, deploying patented products, crops, and technologies controlled almost exclusively by them. These companies are privatising life and food itself, with patented seeds and the coupled use of pesticides, to maintain and further lock in an agro-industrial model that produces mainly commodities. Despite Bayer’s rhetoric about zero hunger, this approach does not feed the world, let alone in a sustainable way. Nor does this model sustain vibrant rural communities and support family farms, ensuring farmers can make a decent living from their work. The farmers’ protests that have erupted in recent months are caused by a convergence of the cost of living crisis, crop failures, sharply rising prices for inputs like pesticides and fertilisers, and the lack of real EU support for the economic activity of small-scale family farms. 

Despite the successful narrative shift accomplished by lobbyists, large landowner associations, agribusiness and the conservative right in the media, the protests were not largely fueled by green measures, but rather by inequality, lack of support for a green transition, free trade agreements and the crush caused by market conditions –where global food and financial actors determine prices of food and stimulate inflation. The fact that the protests haven’t stopped despite the dismantling of many European Green Deal and Farm to Fork policies reveals that something deeper than recent policies is at fault. The monopolistic agribusiness model – which Bayer is a key actor in and promoter of – is at the core of the problem, putting both individual farmers and biodiversity under stress.

Toxic-free politics: time to kick big polluters out of the corridors of power

Companies such as Bayer have left a toxic trail all around the world and all through their long history. Bayer’s model of production, and many of its products, have been a past, present, and future threat to people and planet, and need to be regulated. Around the world, Bayer's modus operandi is not to work in the public interest, but rather to capture public policy to serve its private interests and dividends of its shareholders, all while ignoring the public health and environmental impact of its activities.

In the short term, we need a firewall between decision-makers on the one side, and Bayer and its lobby representatives on the other. Much as we need toxic-free food and a toxic-free environment, we desperately also need toxic-free politics. Just as the tobacco industry lobby has been to some extent sidelined in the past two decades, (thanks to years of media revelations, litigations and civil society campaigns leading to the WHO’s FCTC protocol and specifically article 5.3) after years of sitting at the negotiating table for public health policy decisions, we need to urgently kick big toxic polluters out of the places where they exercise their poisonous political influence.

Bayer has undeniably grown into one of the most important global players that should be excluded from the corridors of power, in order to have a politics that puts people and planet before profits. This company's toxic trail belongs in the history books. It must not be allowed to continue its destructive business, in the EU or elsewhere.