Post Tags: agriculture

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.

 

 

 

 

Opposition Rises to Planned Agriculture Mega-mergers: Major Threat to Our Food and Farms, Says Civil Society

Brussels, March 27, 2017 – More than 200 organisations –including Food & Water Europe – have today raised their objections to the planned mergers of six giant agriculture corporations.

The farmer, farmworker, beekeeper, religious, international development, and environmental groups claim that the three resulting companies will concentrate market power and “exacerbate the problems caused by industrial farming – with negative consequences for the public, farmers and farm workers, consumers, the environment, and food security” in an open letter to the European Commission and Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager [1]

The European and national organisations – together representing millions of members – state that the proposed mergers of Dow Chemical with DuPont, Monsanto with Bayer AG, and Syngenta with ChemChina will lead to an unacceptable monopoly, with three companies controlling around 70% of the world’s agro-chemicals and more than 60% of commercial seeds.

Ramona Duminicioiu, peasant seed producer of the farmer organization European Coordination Via Campesina said: “Approving these mergers works completely against the rights of peasants, with far reaching effects in our society. When the Commission says that small family farms are the back bone of European agriculture does it honestly believe that or is it just lip service? The already fragile rights of peasants regarding seeds, land and markets risks of being obliterated by these mega-corporations and our Food Sovereignty abducted. The Commission should say no to these mergers!”

Adrian Bebb of Friends of the Earth Europe said: “Europe’s food and farming system is broken and if giant firms, like Monsanto and Bayer, are allowed to merge they will have an even tighter toxic grip on our food. The mergers are a marriage made in hell and should be blocked by regulators. We need to build a fairer and greener food system out of corporate control.”

Arnd Spahn from the European trade unions of agricultural workers EFFAT said:  “Workers, as well as the environment and all society, are victims of the use of pesticides. We are fighting for health and safety on work places and we need partners for our ideas. Today the producers of pesticides are big, but after such a merger they will be too big for anybody to bring them on a path to worker and environmental protection. How shall we stop Glyphosate if we have such strong opponents?”

Isabelle Brachet of CONCORD Europe said: “Ending hunger implies addressing power imbalances in our food systems. A small number of multinational corporations dominate internationally traded food systems and get most of the knowledge, benefits and access to decision makers. Corporate power in our food must be restrained – not further extended by mega-mergers. The main investors in agriculture in developing countries are farmers themselves and it is they who must be at the centre of agriculture development policies.”[3]

The organisations have called on the European Commission to reject the mergers, prevent the damage caused by these corporations, and urgently take steps to support just and sustainable food systems less dependent on agri-business.

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[1] See the letter.

SPAIN, TOWARDS A PIG FACTORY FARM NATION?

Categories

Food

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Spain is the third largest exporter of pork after China and the United States and has the largest pig population in the EU, 28,3 million animals.

Production and exports are growing as a result of high industry integration and low production costs. But that means that the industry is getting concentrated in just a few hands, with the number of farms diminishing rapidly and farmers facing growing marginalization. And this industry is not being held accountable for its impacts on the environment, workers and communities.

Antibiotics Resistance 101

Categories

Food

Food & Water Europe Stop Giving Antibiotics to Healthy AnimalsTetracycline. Penicillin. Amoxicillin. Antibiotics are life-saving tools in our medicine chest, but we all have good reason to worry that we’re losing them. Bacteria that make us sick are adapting to resist even our best drugs, so when we get sick it’s harder to find a medicine to help us get well. Medical authorities call it one of the most serious risks to global human health.

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It’s happening now. At least 25,000 patients in the EU each year die from multidrug-resistant bacteria at a cost of at least an extra €1.5 billion per year. In the United States, these infections make at least 2 million people sick each year, and at least 23,000 of them lose their lives.

It’s inevitable that bacteria will continue to get stronger in this way. It’s how nature works. It’s only sensible to do everything we can to make sure our medicines work as well as they can for as long as possible.

That’s where factory farms come in. Routine, low-dose misuse of antibiotics to boost profits on crowded, stressful factory farms drives the creation and spread of resistant bacteria. This means that we all may be exposed to, and pay the price for, the dangerous bacteria produced by factory farming even if we don’t eat meat or live near a farm.

You may have heard about MRSA infections in hospitals, but it’s on our farms, too. The “R” stands for RESISTANT, and that’s what makes it dangerous, so it’s bad news that it’s in our food. We even know that one strain of MRSA originated in humans, transferred to pigs where it became resistant to two drugs, and then jumped back to humans.

We can’t afford to wait.

Colistin used to be a veterinary drug, but it’s now a critically important medicine of last resort for people, used when other drugs fail. When bacteria with transferable resistance to colistin were found in meat and people in China in 2015, medical predictions said it would be three years before they reached the UK. We now know that the resistant bacteria were already in Europe since at least 2012, but weak monitoring didn’t pick them up.

Many livestock producers and fish farmers use antibiotics appropriately when their animals are sick, but it’s just crazy to keep giving these precious drugs to animals that don’t need them. Food & Water Europe is fighting to stop it.

TTIP and Genetically Engineered Foods

Categories

Common Resources

Get the endnotes in the .pdf

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.

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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.