Pesticides & GMOs

More than 100 civil society organisations demand a stop to trade talks with the US that will further endanger EU rules on health and the environment and aggravate the climate crisis. A change of course is needed.

A new investigation reveals how pesticide corporations and trade partners have put immense pressure on the EU to allow residues of certain hazardous pesticides - banned in Europe - to be present in food and feed imports.

After a decade of campaigning, the EU just patched a major flaw in its food safety system. The revision of the General Food Law Regulation will provide public access to most of the confidential toxicity data provided by food companies to obtain EU market authorisation for their products. This could improve scientific scrutiny of EU food safety decisions, if issues around data re-use rights are solved.

Documents released to Corporate Europe Observatory following a Freedom of Information request reveal how pro-biotech lobby platform Public Research Regulation Initiative (PRRI) unites industry, researchers and regulators in ‘like-minded’ groups to influence crucial international biosafety talks under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

In May 2017, the global biotech and seed industry lobby groups landed in Budapest for their annual congress. They launched a joint campaign with one key goal: to get governments worldwide to adopt a zero-regulation approach to new genetic modification (GM) techniques, often termed gene-editing techniques. The seed industry magazine SeedWorld stated that the timing of this international campaign is critical “as policymakers and governments around the world discuss plant breeding innovations, and if and how they should be regulated”.

Find out how the EU lobby register Secretariat has been dealing with CEO complaints about dodgy data, including by Monsanto.

The Monsanto Papers are a trove of internal documents slowly released since March 2017 in a US lawsuit by cancer victims against Monsanto over its ubiquitous herbicide, Roundup. They tell a lot about how Monsanto actively subverts science, both in its practices and the way it abuses science’s moral authority to push for its interests.

A large set of emails - the Gene Drive Files - reveal how actors with a vested interest in the development of gene drives have organised themselves to influence the work of the relevant UN expert group, with financial backing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Corporate Europe Observatory has summarised the content of several new Monsanto Papers, which were released on 27 and 28 October 2017 - more evidence of Monsanto's manipulative approach to glyphosate science.

Beneath the Glyphosate headlines, a crucial battle for the future of EU pesticide approvals

In the last days before a key vote by EU national governements on glyphosate, the pesticides industry and its allies are waging a dirty battle to destroy the reputation of the International Agency for Research Against Cancer (IARC). One scientist in particular, Dr C. Portier, whose work exposed many flaws and limitations in the risk assessment of glyphosate performed by EU agencies, is the target of their attacks. This analysis tries to dispell the lies from the facts.

Pesticide lobby groups and national farmer unions been doing some last-minute lobbying ahead of the European Parliament hearing on the Monsanto Papers.