Pesticides & GMOs

After a decade of campaigning by scientists and citizens, and following the exceptional Stop Glyphosate European Citizens Initiative, the EU has patched today a major flaw in its food safety system. The revision of the EU’s General Food Law Regulation will at last give the public access to most of the confidential toxicity data provided to the EU authorities by food companies to obtain market authorisations for their products. This victory could enable much improved scientific scrutiny of EU food safety decisions, pending some 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.

The pesticide industry had advance access to the European Food Safety Authority’s safety assessment of glyphosate, new CEO research shows. Shortly before the agency revealed its 2015 safety assessment for the world’s most widely-used herbicide, industry representatives were asked to file redaction requests and were even able to edit the documents at the very last minute.

Jess Rowlands, a US expert exposed in the "Monsanto Papers" in a possible collusion with Monsanto, intervened in EFSA's glyphosate assessment, providing information which comforted EFSA in its decision to discard the conclusions of a key study showing cancer in mice exposed to glyphosate. Following the revelation, EFSA told the press and civil society that it had double-checked Rowlands' information. But when requested by CEO to prove it had actually performed these double-checks, EFSA had nothing to show.