Fight like you live here.
In its narrative around the significance of liquified natural gas (LNG) for the European Union, the Commission is repeatedly using a set of controversial arguments. Also many MEPs have adopted the Commission’s wording unquestioned. But what is really behind these concepts?
Learn more in Food & Water Europe’s Factsheet:
Facts About LNG: Dismantling Misleading Rhetoric.
The oil and gas industry likes to promote fracking as a boon to farmers and rural communities, but the dream often turns into a nightmare. In the United States, fracking has polluted water wells, sickened people and livestock, and reduced available farmland — proving that fracking and a healthy food system are not compatible.
As seen in the United States, the rapid expansion of oil and gas fracking has created significant environmental and public health problems.
Many of these problems are inherent to the practice and cannot be avoided through regulation, which is why fracking should be banned.
Find out more about why we need to:
In 2013, the United States and the European Union (EU) began negotiations to create the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), also known as the Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA). The trade relationship across the Atlantic is already the number one economic relationship in the world, making up a third of all trade in goods and services and about half of global economic output. Both the United States and EU claim that a new trade agreement with the EU would enhance job creation and competitiveness by eliminating trade barriers and harmonising regulations — but the real winners would be big biotech and food companies, at the expense of consumers and the environment.
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.
Biotechnology seed companies, aided by advocates from academia and the blogosphere, are using their substantial resources to broadcast the myth of a “scientific consensus” on the safety of genetically engineered crops (hereafter GMOs), asserting their data is in and the debate is over. This public relations campaign, helped along by industry front groups, has caught the attention of some of the most visible news outlets in the country, with biotech advocates portraying GMOs as akin to climate change deniers, out of step with science.
Las empresas de biotecnología agraria, junto a sus partidarios del mundo académico y la blogosfera, están usando todos sus recursos para difundirel mito de que existe “consenso científico” en torno a la seguridad de los cultivos y alimentos trangénicos. Afirman que con los datos disponsibles, el debate está terminado. Esta campaña de relaciones públicas, con la ayuda de grupos financiados por la industria, ha calado en importantes medios de comunicación donde se retratan las voces críticas con los transgénicos como completamente ajenas a la ciencia, como a los negacionistas del cambio climático.