Open Letter: Europe needs more farmers

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Food

Brussels, 16 April 2021

Today, a joint letter to the European Commission, launched by European Coordination Via Campesina and signed by Food & Water Action Europe, together with farmers’ organisations, environmental organisations, NGOs, unions, and researchers, underlines the key role of small and medium-sized farmers in the resolution of current social, environmental, and food-related crises. It demands that EU policy in this pivotal moment must support and increase the number of small-scale farmers.

This letter marks the week of 17 April, International Day of Peasant Struggles. On this day, we commemorate the massacre of 21 landless peasants in 1996 in Eldorado dos Carajás, Brazil, while demonstrating in support of comprehensive agrarian reform.

You can see the full letter and list of signatories here. 

NGOs call for less and better meat, dairy and eggs in the Farm to Fork Strategy

NGOs call for less and better meat, dairy and eggs in the Farm to Fork Strategy

Brussels — Ahead of the European Commission’s Farm to Fork Strategy, Food & Water Europe and 19 other NGOs wrote to key Commissioners and Commission Vice-President Timmermans to call on them to recognise and address the need to reduce and improve the production and consumption of meat, dairy and eggs in the strategy.

Read the letter.

More Than 30 MEPs Raise Their Voices Against a 23,000 Dairy-Cow Factory Farm in Spain

En Español

Madrid, Brussels, February 27th 2019 — Thirty-three MEPs from six different political groups and 11 countries endorsed a letter [1] sent today to Spanish national and regional governments urging them to stop a projected factory farm that would house more than 23,000 dairy cows [2]. It would be the biggest dairy farm in the European Union and opens the doors to a factory farm model imported from the US that has no place in Europe.

A coalition of environmental NGOs, local organisations and farmers [3] is opposing this project for its potential impacts on rural economies, the environment, local communities, water and air quality, as well as the global impact of factory farming on climate change.

David Sánchez, campaigner at Food & Water Europe, said: “The Spanish and regional governments shouldn’t allow this factory farm model to be imported from the United States into Europe. Its severe impacts in the US are well documented: it doesn’t help rural communities and it has nothing to do with the model of farming that citizens demand in Europe.”

Florent Marcellesi, Member of the European Parliament and co-signatory of the letter, said: “The EU must stop turning a blind eye on the worrying spread of mega factory farms like the one in Noviercas. This kind of factory farming is making Spain become Europe’s dump while it destroys employment, our health, the environment, the climate and the opportunities in the rural areas. We already brought this fight to Brussels and from here we’ll keep on working to ensure the EU turns as soon as possible to sustainable and healthy farming, which respects animal welfare and contributes to the development of rural areas.”

Notes

[1] The letter and the list of signatories can be found here in Spanish and English.

[2] More information about the project can be found here in:

English https://fweuro.pe/20000EN
French https://fweuro.pe/20000FR
Spanish https://fweuro.pe/20000ES

[3] The coalition includes, among others, Greenpeace Spain, Friends of the Earth Spain, Ecologistas en Acción, Food & Water Europe and farmers’ union COAG.

Contact

David Sánchez, Food & Water Europe, +32 (0) 2893 1045, +34 616206942, dsanchez(at)fweurope.org

Florent Marcellesi. +3222837743 [email protected]

 

Block Bayer-Monsanto Merger, Says Major New Legal Study

Friends of the Earth Europe, WeMove.EU, Food & Water Europe, SumOfUs

For immediate release: Monday October 16

Brussels, October 16 – The proposed merger between Bayer and Monsanto should be blocked under EU competition law, according to a major new study from University College London to be released on World Food Day.

The authors of the report claim that the European Commission should be obliged to block the merger – which is currently under an in-depth investigation from the European Commission – even on a narrow reading of EU competition law.

The analysis concludes that the “Baysanto” merger should be blocked as:

  • It would reduce competition: It concentrates even further an already tightly-packed agriculture sector. Just three mega-companies (ChemChina-Syngenta, DuPont-Dow and Bayer-Monsanto) would own and sell about 64% of the world’s pesticides, and 60% of the world’s patented seeds.
  • It would raise prices and farmer dependency: One-stop inclusive packages of all services needed for agriculture (seeds, pesticides, and also “digital farming” products) would lock farmers into the company’s value chain, making them technologically dependent and facing price hikes in seeds and pesticides.
  • Asset selling won’t solve the crisis: Even if the Commission forces the companies to sell off some products the market is already so concentrated that divesting particular products will not address the merger’s negative effects on future competition in the seeds markets.
  • It would stifle alternative businesses: The three mega-corporations controlling the global food value chain would “entrench the market power of the dominant players for the decades to come”, thereby freezing more sustainable forms of agriculture

The academics also call on the European Commission to broaden its investigation of the merger to take into account the full social and environmental costs, as they are likely to “lead to important risks for food security and safety, biodiversity… [and risks for] affordable food prices, high quality of food, variety and innovation”.

Adrian Bebb, food and farming campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe said: “EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager has more than enough arguments to block the unholy alliance of Bayer and Monsanto, and send a strong signal that the EU is prepared to stand up to these mega-corporations in order to protect farmers, citizens and our environment.

“The consolidation taking place between these agriculture giants would have major impacts on the future of our countryside, rural livelihoods and our environment. It is vital that the European Commission widens its investigation to ensure that we retain the possibility to move agriculture onto a sustainable and resilient footing to help counter climate change and halt biodiversity loss.”

Earlier this year over 200 civil society organisations called on European Competition Commissioner Vestager to stop the current wave of mergers in the agri-business sector. Almost 900,000 citizens have signed petitions calling for the Commission to act.

 

 

 

 

Corporate Control in Animal Science Research

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FoodCommon Resources

CorporateControlFoodWaterEurope

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Corporate agribusinesses depend on favourable science to gain regulatory approval or market acceptance of products such as new animal drugs, and they depend on academic journals to deliver this science. To secure favourable scientific reviews, industry groups play an enormous role in the production of scientific literature, authoring journal articles, funding academic research and also serving as editors, sponsors or directors of scientific journals where much of their research is published.

Deep-pocketed corporations often have no counterpoint in the scientific literature. No group of scientists or science funders is, for example, aggressively investigating the safety or efficacy of new animal drugs, or examining alternatives. The influence that industry now wields over every aspect of the scientific discourse has allowed companies to commercialise potentially unsafe animal drugs with virtually no independent scrutiny.

Find out what needs to be done in the report, Corporate Control in Animal Science Research.

New Report: For-Profit Animal Science Undermines Safe Food, Trade

Brussels and Washington, D.C.— A new report (.pdf) published today by Food & Water Europe exposes the enormous influence that corporate drug companies play in the peer-reviewed science surrounding risky veterinary drugs widely used in the United States but forbidden in the EU. The U.S. approach of allowing the marketplace to determine the safety of risky veterinary drugs rather than independent science—as was the case with the beef cattle growth-promoter Zilmax, which was removed from the U.S. market in 2013—makes any move toward regulatory “harmony” via an EU-U.S. trade agreement a serious threat to safety of the EU food system.

Food & Water Europe EU Food Policy Analyst Eve Mitchell said, “It’s clear that some favourable safety findings on the drugs widely used to produce food are effectively bought and paid for by the companies that stand to profit. The cornerstones of the scientific method, like independent replication of findings, simply aren’t being honoured, and many U.S. farmers are giving their animals questionable drugs every day because of it. This is not the kind of food production we want or need, yet a trans-Atlantic trade deal will reinforce these safety problems for everyone.”

The Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a vast trade deal under negotiation between the U.S. and EU. Highly controversial topics like genetically modified (GM) food and hormone treatments in meat animals have all but stalled progress of TTIP, which was supposed to conclude negotiations later this year. “Governments on both sides insist neither regulatory system will be eroded by TTIP and that food safety will continue to be guaranteed, but today’s report shows safety isn’t even clear now,” says Mitchell.

A major problem is with the scientific journals that publish the studies. Industry groups play an enormous role in the production of scientific literature, authoring journal articles, funding academic research and also serving as editors, sponsors or directors of the same scientific journals where much of their research is published.

Mitchell said, “It’s not just a matter of EU and U.S. regulators agreeing that their counterparts consulted the science and concluded drugs are safe when that science is comprised. Now, consumers on both sides of the Atlantic are being asked to place our faith in “harmonised’ approval systems.”

“This report documents the problems in animal science research, but the same weak disclosure rules, industry influence and lack of independent research appears to pervade much of agricultural research, from GMOs to cloning to herbicides. It’s huge.”

Mitchell added, “There’s a lot of talk about ‘free trade” out there, especially when in comes to TTIP, but it’s full of holes. To function properly, genuinely free markets rely on complete information available to all, and this report shows how deep the disclosure problem goes. The EU is not immune to these problems.”

Food & Water Europe calls on scientific journals to disclose the funding sources for papers they publish and says the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) also needs to do more to ensure the research it uses to determine the safety of products in the food chain has been thoroughly and independently assessed.

Mitchell concluded, “The merits of EFSA’s ongoing project on openness and transparency will be called into question unless it does more to ensure it is not relying on for-profit science. EFSA should publish the authorship affiliations and funding sources of the science it consults. Some large portion of the science EFSA consults is likely to have been biased by industry authorship and funding, but the public can’t see where this happens. This has to change.”

Read For Profit Animal Science Undermines Safe Food Trade: http://www.foodandwatereurope.org/reports/corporate-control-in-animal-science-research/.

Contact: Eve Mitchell, Food & Water Europe (UK time), +44(0)1381 610 740, [email protected]