Glyphosate and GMO's - The EU lobby firm that works both sides of the room - TruePublica
Glyphosate and GMO’s – The EU lobby firm that works both sides of the room
By CorporateEuropeObservatory
– In Brussels,
hundreds of lobby consultants make a (rather generous) living by running
lobby campaigns on behalf of anyone who pays them. The borders between
communication and PR strategies, law expertise and traditional lobbying
are blurred. Demonstrating the problematic symbiosis between corporate
interests and the EU institutions in Brussels, the same lobbying
consultancies often get hired by both, bringing serious risks of
conflicts of interest. A case in point: Germany-based lobby consultancy
Genius and its work for the Glyphosate Task Force.
The European Commission – as shown again recently in The Guardian
– seems hell bent on granting glyphosate, the active ingredient in
Monsanto’s toxic herbicide Roundup, re-approval for another ten years.
This is despite the fact that the World Health Organisation’s cancer
institute IARC declared the substance as “probably causing cancer to
humans”, and that EU pesticides rules say such substances should be
banned.
The re-authorisation is being sought by the Glyphosate Task Force
(GTF), an industry platform uniting producers of glyphosate-based
herbicides, whose members include Monsanto, Dow Agrosciences, Syngenta, and Barclay Chemicals. Richard Garnett, a lobbyist for Monsanto Europe, is chair of the Glyphosate Task Force.
To run their website, glyphosate producers hired Genius,
a lobby consultancy based in Darmstadt, Germany. At the same time,
Genius is employed by various EU and German public authorities on topics
that are of key interest to these corporations, notably GMOs.
Genius’ clientèle: pesticides industry and public authorities
According to Genius’ website,
the company works for the biotech and pesticide industry at large. In
addition to the Glyphosate Task Force (GTF), it has been hired by
biotech lobby group EuropaBio, its German member organisation DIB, and
individual corporations including Bayer, BASF, and Syngenta. It also
works for the Brussels-based corporate food think tank EUFIC (European
Food Information Council), even though it’s incorrectly listed as a
“public authority” on Genius’ website.
Monsanto, Syngenta, and Dow (all members of the GTF), as well as BASF
and Bayer coordinate a lot of their lobbying efforts via lobby
associations like EuropaBio. All of them share a deep commercial
interest in the re-approval of glyphosate and in the continued
production of glyphosate-tolerant GM crops, also via the sales of other
brands of pesticides used for the same crops.
Genius specialises in “science communication”, which in their own
words means: “translating science as it works for better understanding
between industry, politics and the public at large”. They offer their
clients “integrated communications strategies” that combine public
relations, public affairs, internet and traditional media relations,
scientific studies, event management etc.
In the case of glyphosate, Genius conveniently “translates” the
science on its toxicity for its clients from the pesticide industry by
writing on the Glyphosate Task Force website that it does not cause
cancer, and saying that the IARC “should withdraw the decision” to classify glyphosate as a Group 2A carcinogen.
On the other side, Genius also lists public institutions as its
clients that are in charge of regulating the industry’s products,
including the European Commission, the EFSA (European Food Safety
Authority), and no less than ten German federal and regional
authorities, including the German risk assessment agency Bfr. This is
important because Germany is the Rapporteur Member State for the
re-approval of glyphosate, and Bfr is the agency in charge of the
renewal assessment report.
In some cases, we know that Genius’ work for public authorities was
carried out at the same time as the work for the Glyphosate Task Force,
which started at least as far back as autumn 2012, when its website was
launched.
Lobby consultancies like Genius can manoeuvre themselves
into this double role while staying entirely below the radar: Genius
has not even signed up to the voluntary EU lobby transparency register –
showing once more why it should be mandatory.
EU and Germany-funded projects on GMO risk assessment and ‘public communication’
Genius takes part in several EU-funded research projects that
generally aim to help shape EU risk assessment requirements, or to
increase communication activities on the supposed benefits of the
biotech industry’s products.
An important example is GRACE (GMO Risk Assessment and Communication
of Evidence). Kristina Sinemus, Genius’ Managing Director, and its
co-founder Klaus Minol take part in this project. German civil society
organisation Testbiotech has closely followed GRACE and took issue with Genius’ participation
in it. The organisation has pointed out how conflicts of interest have
enabled the biotech industry to seriously impact the project’s results.
About half of the experts participating in GRACE have close ties to
industry lobby groups like ILSI (International Life Sciences Institute),
PRRI (Public Research and Regulation Initiative), and/or to
industry-funded organisation ISBR (International Society for Biosafety
Research). Genius is not the only lobby consultancy participating in
GRACE; Belgium-based Perseus also works with companies aiming to get
deregulation for new techniques of genetic engineering.
