Lucelle Bonzo, the Executive Director of Davao Today and an Internews Earth Journalism Network Data Journalism Fellow, had long heard rumors that the Philippine’s flagship National Greening Program was not nearly as green as it made out to be. As a Fellow, she tracked down sources within the environmental department who were able to tell her what patterns of greenwashing to look for. We also found a government website where we were able to scrape the shapefiles of over 150,000 regreening sites. With these insider tips and the exact shape and location of the sites, we were able to evaluate whether NGP has really been the success story it claims to be.

A team from DavaoToday, Thibi and Lighthouse Reports used machine learning tools to analyze millions of satellite images to detect deforestation across over a hundred thousand NGP sites. Our investigation reveals that one in every 25 hectares of NGP land experienced a major deforestation event: that is, instead of barren sites being reforested, the opposite occurs. Forests are cleared right before or during regreening efforts. The sites are more often than not managed by communities with only short-term access to the land who will be kicked off after three years. Communities are usually obligated to grow a single cash crop tied to the volatile global commodity markets and that do not generate steady incomes. Many of the designated protected areas have no trees at all, let alone thriving rainforests of indigenous species.

Forest Fraud

This story is the first in a series of articles across Southeast Asia that use remote sensing technology, global supply chain tracking and ground reporting to map deforestation in the protected areas in the region, identifies commodities that have replaced the trees and explores how these products are laundered into global supply chains. As the EU passed its “Deforestation Regulation” (EUDR), meant to curb the world’s second largest source of climate emissions, our investigation looks into how “green” commodities cultivated on land concessions and reforestation areas carved out of forest are being used as convenient cover for continued deforestation. Our remote sensing analysis allows us to pinpoint where illicit deforestation under the guise of protection is happening the fastest and at the largest scale so that the team can go out and identify those who are profiting and reveal actors gearing up to exploit loopholes in EUDR while its compliance demands could shut small farmers out of EU markets.

METHODS

To compile a comprehensive dataset on the National Greening Program (NGP) in the Philippines and gather details such as funded projects, implementation progress, priority commodities, and beneficiaries, multiple sources and methods were utilized.

An FOI request was accordingly furnished to the DENR, through which official reports, statistics, and many others were requested regarding information related to the NGP. Historic and updated forestry statistics from publicly available resources from DENR were analysed in order to understand basic tendencies in reforestation, as well as related investments. The Commission on Audit report for 2019 on the implementation gave crucial insights into financial and implementing challenges.

Pre-existing and new hotspots of deforestation data were sourced from Global Forest Watch to identify those considered causes for alarm. From the data analyzed, Palawan and Agusan del Sur were identified as among those experiencing the most deforestation pressure. Specifically, the reforestation projects of NGP, the engagement of its beneficiaries in those areas, and commodities prioritized were reviewed to analyze how NGP was responding, especially in those particular cases.

The Palawan Network of NGOs, PNNI, was very instrumental in this investigation. The organization provided essential visual evidence, including photos, and shared copies of their filed complaints with the DENR regarding deforestation and illegal activities in areas such as Brooke’s Point, Palawan. These contributions added depth to the dataset by providing firsthand documentation of the environmental challenges on the ground and the efforts to address them.

Satellite imagery was used to validate select NGP sites and corroborate reported reforestation activities. This imagery provided an independent validation of tree cover gain and the progress of greening initiatives in heavily deforested areas.

We obtained the locations, boundaries and data of over 130,000 NGP sites nationally through the DENR’s Forestry Spatial Datasets Portal maintained by the Forest Management Bureau. In addition to geospatial data, other pertinent site attributes such as the zoning designation, establishment year, tenure status, and commodities grown in each site were also included.

Since the dataset could not be downloaded directly through the portal, we queried the underlying public ArcGIS server for the geospatial data. The original site boundaries were shifted about 100m north west of where they should be. Using road intersections and coastlines as reference points, we utilized QGIS’s Georeferencer tool to slightly correct the location of these boundaries.

We used Google Earth Engine to calculate when and how much forest loss occurred in each NGP site. The Global Land Analysis and Discovery (GLAD) laboratory at the University of Maryland’s Global Forest Change dataset provided us with annual forest loss data for each 30m x 30m pixel globally between 2000 and 2023. Using the Forest Loss Due to Fire dataset, we discounted any forest loss caused by fires from our analysis. Finally, we combined this forest loss data with the NGP site boundaries in Google Earth Engine to calculate when and how much forest loss occurred in each NGP site. Site-specific forest loss statistics were then analyzed against site attributes using Google Colab.

Qualitative information on the program’s impact was also gathered through in-depth interviews with NGP experts, DENR representatives, and program beneficiaries. Other information on the export and import of forestry products were extracted from government trade databases to determine the economic implication of NGP-priority commodities.

Further research was conducted by scraping news reports, academic publications, and online government resources to fill in the data gaps, such as detailed information on income generation and supply chain processes for timber prioritization. These data from different sources were integrated and cross-checked through a combination of manual and automated data-cleaning techniques.

NGP-related information has been summarized and visualized to present clear and readable information for the readers. Where inconsistencies or gaps existed, supplementation by independent interviews and careful fact-checking against multiple reliable sources were conducted.

STORYLINES

Marlo Mendoza is the architect of one of the world’s most ambitious regreening programs. His office at the University of the Philippines is crammed with books about trees and nature conservation. Hunched over his desk, he flicks through the glossy government brochure praising his project’s successes, with 130,000 sites covering over two million hectares across the Philippines. It appears as if his dream has become a reality.

Millions of native trees have been replanted and growing now into forests where plants and animals thrive. Vast amounts of carbon sequestered. Indigenous and farming communities cultivating produce among the forests and former timber cutters now managing tree farms.

This is exactly what Mendoza dreamed of.

This is what the world sees.

This, he admits, is not at all what is really going on across the two million hectares of National Greening Program land.

“We mobilised the entire citizenry to plant, but where are all the trees planted?” Mendoza lamented when we sat down for this Zoom interview. “I made the manual; many provisions were not followed.”

The Philippines National Greening Program was a response to the government’s seeming failure to stop its forests from being ravished. Deforestation had been massive during the 1970s to 80s. But the touted National Greening Program failed to protect itself from the decades-old problem of natural resource plunder across the Philippines that has robbed it of forest cover and replaced community and indigenous forests with plantations of invasive exotic species.

Our analysis suggests that degreening of NGP sites is not a rare exception, that across the country, sites are becoming less, not more, green. The clearing of forests include communities slashing through forest trees to avail themselves of NGP funds, failed efforts to grow seedlings and shadow plantations that employed slash and burn techniques between planting cycles on previously forested sites.

A major selling point of the re-greening program is that locally communities would be given unused land to grow crops so they would no longer need to chop down forests to survive. But the process for applying is so complicated, most communities give up on applying for long-term tenure and only get access to the land for three years.

For those who did manage to secure tenure, which guarantees 25-year access to the land, the government’s usual mandate for community groups to grow a single cash crop often precluded any hopes for successfully living off the land. Single crop sites, often fast-growing, cheap timber trees, are vulnerable to market crashes, disease and all the other problems that monoculture brings with it, including the loss of biodiversity.

Just over half of the million hectares of designated production sites are tenured. Six out of 10 hectares are monoculture: sites that are growing just one commodity crop, which is widely considered unsustainable for local communities. Almost four out of 10 hectares are both untenured and growing a single commodity crop, the least sustainable combination of all. And much of what they produce is exported with the stamp of approval of the National Greening Program.

The regreening program was also intended to regrow and protect native rainforests. Of the 30,000 sites covering over two million hectares across the Philippines, some of the least green sites are those designated as protection areas: where indigenous rainforests and the biodiversity that accompanies them, were meant to thrive. According to the most recently available satellite imagery, over a third of those sites have no tree cover at all.

Reporting for this story was supported by Journalismfund Europe

The post Forest Fraud: National Greenwashing Program appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

A year-long investigation managed to penetrate a PR operation that casts those who raise the alarm, from pesticide critics to environmental scientists or sustainability campaigners, as an anti-science “protest industry,” and used US government money to do so.

The US-based PR firm, v-Fluence, built profiles on hundreds of scientists, campaigners and writers, whilst coordinating with government officials, to counter global resistance to pesticides. These profiles are published on a private social network, which grants privileged entry to 1,000 people. The network’s membership roster is a who’s-who of the agrochemical industry and its friends, featuring executives from some of the world’s largest pesticide companies alongside government officials from multiple countries.

These members can access profiles on more than 3,000 organisations and 500 people who have been critical of pesticides or Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). They come from all over the world and include scientists, UN human right experts, environmentalists, and journalists. Many of the profiles divulge personal details about the subjects, such as their home addresses and telephone numbers, and spotlight criticisms that disparage their work. Lawyers have told us this goes against data privacy laws in several countries.

 

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Bonus Eventus is the brainchild of Jay Byrne, a former communications executive at the agrochemical firm Monsanto (bought by Germany’s Bayer in 2016), and his reputation management firm, v-Fluence. Court records reveal that both are currently being sued in the US, alongside the pesticide manufacturer Syngenta, for allegedly suppressing information for over 20 years on the health risks associated with an herbicide, Paraquat.

Our investigation reveals that the US government funded v-Fluence as part of its program to promote GMOs in Africa and Asia. Between roughly 2013 and 2019, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) channelled over $400,000 to v-Fluence for services including “enhanced monitoring” of critics of “modern agriculture approaches” – and to build Bonus Eventus.

Lighthouse Reports–in a global collaboration with the Guardian US, Africa Uncensored, Le Monde, the New Lede, The New Humanitarian, ABC News Australia, and the Wire–delves into the underground social network bringing together the agrochemical lobby and government to weaken global environmental efforts.

METHODS

We received a tip that the US government had been involved in an attempt to sabotage a scientific conference in Nairobi, Kenya, that showcased sustainable solutions to pesticides. FOIA requests revealed extensive correspondence between US civil servants, a Kenyan NGO, pesticide executive and a company, v-Fluence, about how to subvert the event. How was everyone on this email chain connected? We dug into the rather obscure v-Fluence to learn more.

A mix of money-trails analysis and public spending record searches surfaced contracts by USAID, granted to v-Fluence, to construct a “private social network”. By looking through court records, we found a recent case accusing the firm of working with Syngenta to hide the risks of Paraquat.

Open source research, FOIA documents, and interviews with dozens of people familiar with the v-Fluence’s work, revealed the scale of profiling performed by the firm’s private social network and a membership list, which included US government employees, agrichemical executives, and regulators from around the world. Further emails, received through FOIA requests, revealed how the firm worked with the US government officials to undermine anti-pesticide movements.

STORYLINES

In Kenya, Africa Uncensored captures the impact of dangerous pesticides on farmers. Their documentary interrogates why, four years after a parliamentary inquiry into dangerous pesticides, most of them are still available for purchase, and used by agricultural workers who remain largely unaware of their risks. Outside of the US and Canada, Kenya is the country with the highest number of private social network members.

v-Fluence’s work in Kenya is further explored by the New Humanitarian, looking into how the firm’s senior counsel wrote articles in favour of pesticide use and GMOs in Kenyan media, waving the threat of food insecurity.

In the US, The Guardian, in collaboration with the New Lede, focuses on the interactions of v-Fluence with US government agencies and officials. They reveal that more than thirty current US government officials are members of Bonus Eventus, most of whom are from the US Department of Agriculture.

In France, Le Monde reveals how v-Fluence obtained a contract with another PR firm aimed at undermining the EU’s Farm to Fork policy. The work, worth up to $4.9 million, was set to begin in 2020, but public spending records suggest it was suspended when President Biden was elected.

In Australia, ABC News found a number of influential members of Bonus Eventus, including the civil servant overseeing the registration and approval of agricultural chemicals and several scientists affiliated with Australia’s top universities.

In India, The Wire looks at the over 100 Indian environmentalists and scientists who are profiled on Bonus Eventus, including the prominent activist Vandana Shiva, as well as less-known researchers who appear to have been profiled just because they signed a petition against GMOs.

And in Nigeria, Premium Times reveals Agnes Asagbra, Director General and CEO of the country’s GMO regulator, was listed as a member of Bonus Eventus. Mrs Asagbra distanced herself from the group, described the profiling of Nigerians campaigning against GMOs as “unthinkable” and “unethical”.

In a written statement, Jay Byrne described v-fluence’s role as “an information collection, sharing, analysis, and reporting provider” to “promote understanding of all the various stakeholders, positions, research… impacting food and agriculture”

He denied the allegations of the lawsuit, saying they were based on claims which were “manufactured and false”, and said that, “there is no unethical, illegal, or otherwise inappropriate outreach, lobbying or related activities by our organization of any kind.”

v-Fluence denies having held government contracts now or in the past, but said that the US government was a “funder of other organizations with whom we work.”

Syngenta denied the allegations made in the lawsuit, but did not answer questions about v-Fluence and Bonus Eventus, saying it would address the claims in court.

The post Poison PR appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

While there is a widespread agreement that European farmers are struggling, the solution to their woes is hotly debated. In this context, we sought to discover who is speaking on behalf of the farmers, and whose interests they represent.

In collaboration with Splann!, L’Espresso, Frontstory.pl, The Europeans and Taz, we investigated some of the key figures claiming to represent farmers, and how they are doing that job, in France, Italy, Germany and Poland. We gathered testimony and scoured through company records to build profiles of some of the most influential figures framing the meaning of the protests.

This series of investigations shows that the representation of European farmers is concentrated in the hands of a few people who bear little resemblance to the average farmer they claim to speak for. They are much wealthier, sit on the boards of multiple companies and have close links with “Big Ag” companies whose interests can be opposed to those of farmers.

In addition, many of those we profile directly control or own shares in media outlets that cater to the agricultural community, allowing them to spread and amplify their messages among the farming community.

Some farm unions even use unethical methods against critics and those advocating for reforms and alternative policies. Some livestock farmers with deep pockets have managed to portray themselves as “protest leaders” in international media, when they have not been elected or chosen by farmers.

This investigation is a follow up on our 2023 investigation into Copa-Cogeca, the oldest, biggest, and most powerful farm lobby in the European Union which had assumed a role as the self-proclaimed voice of European farmers and agri-cooperatives in Brussels, although our findings showed otherwise.

METHODS

We built a cross-border team of journalists in four European countries and focused on a handful of strongmen leaders with vast webs of influence and connections. We used two main methods to establish their profiles and connections: interviews and open sources.

We dug into the financial and corporate links of union and farmer representatives using open source research, in particular company registry data. We discovered many are on the board of directors of multiple companies, hold various key positions that wield power over agricultural policies, and own vastly more land and receive multiple times more farm subsidies than an average farmer in their country.

Extensive interviews and on-the-ground reporting also helped us to piece together the tactics of the strongmen of agricultures, and the challenges faced by their critics.

STORYLINES

In France, Splann! conducted an analysis of four key leaders of FNSEA (the Fédération nationale des syndicats d’exploitants agricoles), providing an unprecedented mapping of the multiple, and sometimes conflicting, roles they hold. It shows that these powerful men (Thierry Coué, André Sergent, Arnaud Rousseau and Jérôme Despey) occupy positions in a wide range of public and private bodies and how this stifles democratic farmer representation.

Germany provided a cautionary tale of how a well-intentioned process could end up entrenching a association’s power. Taz investigated how one of Germany’s largest farmer associations, Deutsche Bauernverband, backtracked on agreements it had made in a consensus-based commission on the future of agriculture, the Zukunftskommission Landwirtschaft (ZKL) set up by the German government in July 2020. DBV’s behaviour raises questions on how effective the ongoing “Strategic Dialogue on the future of EU Agriculture”, launched by the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, will be, since it is modelled off the ZKL.

In Italy, L’Espresso looked into Coldiretti, a union that claims 1.6 million members, and that it’s the largest farm union in Europe. Over the past decades, it has also shown an extraordinary ability to engage effectively with governments across the political spectrum. Our investigation reveals its links to policymakers – the Chief of Staff of the current minister for agriculture is a former Coldiretti official – and to some of Italy’s biggest agribusinesses. The government is now planning new measures that smaller unions worry could further consolidate power in the hands of the largest unions. The L’espresso piece is on the front page in print, if you’re in Italy grab a copy! If not, it’ll be online next week and we’ll link it here.

The Europeans podcast provides an overview of the situation in all four countries and in Brussels, unpacks some of the simplistic portrayals of the farmers’ protests, and outlines the challenges faced by small farmers. The podcast includes insights from several of the journalists involved in this investigation.

The post Farmers Protest, Who Gains? appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

The set of four laws were supposed to end practices such as keeping farm animals in cages, slaughtering day-old chicks, and the sale and production of fur.

However, all but one have been dropped, including the ban on caged farming, from the European Commission’s 2024 work programme, even though the EU’s latest survey showed that an overwhelming majority of people desire them.

Three EU officials familiar with the file recounted aggressive lobbying by groups such as the European Livestock Voice (ELV) and its partner associations to water down parts of the laws and attack scientific opinions they felt did not align with their goals. One official said “this was the first time” in nearly a decade of experience that they had felt such pressure from a farming association.

METHODS

Reporting on lobbying is notoriously challenging: it happens behind closed doors, little action is involved and the scenes – offices – are boring. But it is essential to expose where private interests are trying to capture the policy-making process.

The lack of transparency and mandatory reporting in the EU when it comes to lobbying make it particularly difficult to scrutinise who is pushing for what policies, according to the author of a recent study that compared the subsidies given to livestock versus novel technologies in the EU and US.

So we put a team together that was able to gather evidence on how the meat lobby is developing strategies against a backdrop of increasing societal pressure for change. What kind of tactics do they aspire to? What campaigns do they deploy and how have they been able to assert so much pressure on the EU Commission?

The investigation started with a leak – an audio file indicating that an environmental journalist was in the pay of the meat industry and contemplating importing US-style campaigning tactics to the EU. It signalled a willingness to deploy new and more aggressive methods and helped us identify a few key players and entities.

Based on the leak we send a series of freedom of information (FOI) requests to relevant bodies including the European Food Safety Agency EFSA, the EU Commission and DG AGRI and SANTE, the Commission departments responsible for agricultural policy and food safety, respectively.

But since the influencing mostly happens behind closed doors and often in informal settings outside a sphere in which FOI rules can enforce transparency, we had to rely to a great extent on human sources. We gathered a team with a large network in the EU bubble which helped us check findings and corroborate quotes and allegations.

We will continue to follow this topic. If you have similar or other relevant experiences or information, don’t hesitate to reach out via this form (anonymous possible) or via any of the contact details shared here.

STORYLINES

If there is one issue that seems to unite the citizens of the European Union, it is animal welfare. Surveys and consultations have consistently shown that they care about the welfare of farm animals, want to see higher standards, and are willing to pay more for products derived this way.

But that means providing farm animals with more space, better housing and shorter journeys when transporting them. For industrial livestock farming and its major supporter Copa-Cogeca, this was a threat to its chokehold on agricultural policy-making.

So much so that in an October 2021 presentation by Copa-Cogeca’s communications director, one objective shot up the agenda: ethical questions about livestock – to be considered first and foremost as communication concerns.

What followed was a carefully crafted campaign to undermine science, co-opt a journalist and pressure officials at the EU to abandon these improvements.

One EU official said ‘this was the first time’ they have experienced such pressure from the farming industry.

A relatively new lobby group that counts CopaCogeca as their founding member – European Livestock Voice (ELV) – was notably active, two EU officials said. ELV was set up in Sep 2019, a year after the launch of the campaign to ban cages, as an activist-style network, using tactics borrowed from NGOs.

Documents obtained through freedom of information (FOI) showed ELV partner associations urging EU officials to ‘resist the pressure from NGOs [as] NGO perspectives do not reflect the views of the broad public’.

One EU insider said lobbyists ‘targeted senior levels in the Commission’ at strategic moments in the legislative process ‘using privileged channels’.

After these meets, high level attitudes towards the legislation became ‘extremely negative’, the official added.

Leaked documents show that this negativity is status quo at DG AGRI, the department at the European Commission responsible for agricultural policy.

An ex DG AGRI officer described difficulty even stating facts: ‘I couldn’t even say things like, “Agriculture has a large share in producing greenhouse gases”. It was like, “Oh, no, I don’t bring that up.”’

Exclusive audio from a closed door Animal Agriculture Alliance (AAA) summit, which has close links to the American meat industry, hinted at ELV’s strategy. The group’s campaign manager Andrea Bertaglio gave a speech at the summit, which was held in the U.S. in May, and said ELV is setting up an ‘entire communications strategy’ around animal welfare legislation.

Bertaglio presents himself on social media as an environmental journalist, an identity he upholds in many of the conferences he attends as a speaker. Yet his real identity is a different one. He told the AAA audience that his “official identity” is as an environmental journalist, but “my real job now is to work to inform the public about livestock production”.

Questioning science is part of their approach, said Bertaglio: ‘I’d like to go to the scientists. The ones publishing papers against meat… against livestock and say, “Why are you saying that? Data? Fact?” So that’s the next step’

In a Zoom interview with The Guardian and EU Scream, media partners for this investigation, he denied being a lobbyist or questioning science and said he is “in transition” from writing for newspapers to communication work.

“But still, my job is more (like) journalists because what I’m doing with European Livestock Voice is informing, writing articles in a balanced way, interviewing people, experts,” he said. It also includes clearing up misunderstandings arising from Western Europeans’ tendency to “humanise animals a bit too much”, he added.

Having delayed – or potentially abandoned – three out of four laws on animal welfare, the EU Commission is now at odds with its own commitment and public consensus.

A survey released this month found 84% of Europeans want more protection for animal welfare. 60% are even happy to pay more for it.

Left hanging in the balance are the welfare of hundreds of millions of farm animals in the EU and ultimately, the consumers.

The post Animal welfare wrecked appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

A single lobby group has dominated the European Union’s agricultural policy for more than half a century. Established in 1959 at the inception of the Common Agricultural Policy, which was founded on the post-war ideal that Europe should never go hungry again, Copa-Cogeca has assumed a role as the self-proclaimed voice of European farmers and agri-cooperatives in Brussels.

On the strength of its history and claim to represent all farmers, it enjoys privileged access to the EU at all levels of its policy making.

In the past year, Copa-Cogeca has used its position to oppose environmental reforms proposed by the Green Deal and Farm to Fork Strategy, including successfully postponing a law to slash pesticide use, and attempting to derail a law that would restore European ecosystems.

Lighthouse Reports’ investigation into the group, including interviews with nearly 120 farmers, insiders, politicians, academics and activists, as well as a survey of 50 Copa-Cogeca affiliates, casts serious doubt on the lobby’s membership strength and legitimacy in the farming community.

Smaller scale and younger farmers in particular said they do not feel represented by Copa-Cogeca. Arūnas Svitojus, the president of a Copa-Cogeca affiliated union from Lithuania, told us: “The decisions go through the big countries, big farmers, big unions. And that’s difficult for smaller farmers, family farmers. There’s no equality.”

Jean Mathieu Thevenot, a young farmer from the French Basque country, said: “Most of the youth farmers I know and work with are disconnected and in complete disagreement with the vision of Copa-Cogeca, which has a lot of power in the EU but advocates in favour of the status quo and industrial agriculture.”

The results of our survey revealed Copa-Cogeca and its affiliate unions’ membership data to be opaque, sometimes inflated and – where figures are available – in decline.

METHODS

Our first challenge was to build a picture of Copa-Cogeca’s membership strength across the EU, so we began by searching the websites and annual reports of its affiliate members. A breakthrough occurred when we read Eurofound’s 2016 report into representativeness in the agricultural sector, a survey of union member strength in all 27 EU countries.

This report gave us a baseline from which to compare the few membership figures we had been able to find, even though Georg Adam, a Eurofound-commissioned researcher we spoke to, cautioned: “In some cases you cannot really trust information given by trade unions. Sometimes they have inflated data because they want to demonstrate their strength so they may double their membership numbers.”

We contacted 50 Copa-Cogeca affiliates to request up-to-date membership figures, but only 9 responded. Despite this, we could see that their membership had declined significantly since 2016 in several countries including France, Ireland, Poland, the Netherlands and Finland.

Next, we built a cross-border team of journalists in five EU countries – all of them major agricultural economies including Spain, Romania, Poland, the Netherlands and Denmark – to investigate their national Copa-Cogeca affiliates. We decided to focus on reaching out to farmers because we wanted affected communities to tell us how well represented they felt by their unions. Farmers make up nearly half of the approximately 120 sources we spoke to for this investigation. Meanwhile, journalists from Politico Europe contributed vital reporting from inside the corridors of power in Brussels.

STORYLINES

In Brussels, Politico sat down with Copa-Cogeca secretary-general Pekka Pesonen for a frank interview in which he conceded that the group’s claim to represent all 22 million European farmers was more of an aspiration than an actual representation of its membership. “Technically speaking, it’s less than [that],” he said – but exactly how many, he couldn’t say.

Our Spanish, Polish and Romanian partners discovered that their governments pay a combined €1.4-million a year in public money for certain national unions to participate in Copa-Cogeca, which compounds the advantages enjoyed by powerful but unrepresentative organisations over numerous others who are excluded.

In Denmark, Danwatch reported on the strange case of the Danish Agriculture and Food Council (L&F), a union which claims to be growing its membership numbers when official statistics show a steep decrease in the number of farmers in the country.

And in Poland, where around 1.3 million farmers are nominally members of Copa-Cogeca’s affiliate KRIR, which receives considerable sums of taxpayer money for its operations, the Supreme Audit Office concluded in 2021 that, “due to the lack of records, agricultural chambers had no knowledge of all the members whose interests they are supposed to represent.”

The post Europe’s Potemkin Lobby appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

In response to our findings, UN Rapporteur Marcos Orellana called the export of hazardous pesticides an “abhorrent practice”, adding, “It exacerbates environmental injustices and is a form of modern day exploitation”.

Orellana said sugar industries should “ensure that their supply chains are free from human rights abuses, such as those relating to exposure to hazardous pesticides”.

METHODS

With our partner on the ground, Repórter Brasil, we obtained documents from the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture through a Freedom of Information request led by the public defenders’ office of the State of São Paulo.

Hundreds of pages of documents revealed the names of pesticides used in some of Brazil’s largest sugar and orange farms during the 2020 harvesting period. They revealed the dates, co-ordinates and scope of the spraying carried out by small agricultural planes, which occurred over thousands of hectares and sometimes in close proximity to residential areas.

We followed the paper trail to identify the supply chains of these farms. They showed some of the sugar farms were first-tier suppliers to Swiss food and drink conglomerate Nestlé. We found that orange farms sprayed with EU-banned pesticides were suppliers to PepsiCo and Coca-Cola.

We spoke to scientists and representatives of the European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) and the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) who confirmed the hazardous nature of the active substances of these pesticides, which include Bifenthrin, Epoxiconazole, and Thiametoxam.

STORYLINES

In February, Cristina Silva was sitting in her living room in the municipality of Rancharia, São Paulo, with her husband when she heard the sound of a small plane flying overhead. A few minutes later, the couple felt an overpowering smell and began to experience symptoms that ended up lasting a week: a swollen and painful stomach, lack of appetite and headaches. She told us the plane was spraying pesticides.

A local community organiser, Bianca Lopes, says it is common for people to report feeling the products sprayed by agricultural planes on their skin. A few years ago, her mother and daughter, who was six months old at the time, almost lost their sight after a plane sprayed pesticides outside their home.

A study published in 2022 by the University of Santa Catarina revealed that regions where most sugar and orange farms are located had higher rates of death by cancer than the national average in Brazil in 2019.

UN Rapporteur Orellana urges pesticide companies and sugar industries to keep up with their human rights responsibilities, and called on the EU to take leadership at a global level and implement its chemical strategy for sustainability without further delay.

Officials at DG SANTE, the EU body responsible for regulating pesticides, said the export of banned pesticides would be phased out in line with the bloc’s Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability – which is part of its “zero pollution” ambition – although no exact date has been set for implementation.

RESPONSES BY THE COMPANIES

A spokesperson for Nestlé said all its suppliers must meet Nestlé’s responsible sourcing standard, including in relation to good agricultural practices. “We continue to closely follow regulatory developments everywhere we operate to ensure full compliance for all our products. Nestlé is not involved in campaigning against an export ban on pesticides and active ingredients banned in the EU.”

Coca-Cola Company said that all ingredients used in its products, including sugar and orange, are subject to rigorous inspection protocols for quality and safety standard evaluation, which follow the company’s global guidelines. In this context, the company highlights its laboratories for the control of inputs, in order to ensure that they are adequate to the criteria established by regulatory agencies in Brazil and competent authorities in each country where it operates. The company also clarifies that it requires its suppliers to adopt responsible and sustainable practices, in accordance with the Principles of Sustainable Agriculture, where its environmental, social and economic expectations are defined, besides international certifications, audited annually, among them the SAI FSA (Farm Sustainability Assessment, of the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative) and Rainforest Alliance.

We have an uncompromising commitment to the safety and quality of all our products and the ingredients we use. We abide by international and local laws and guidelines in relation to sourcing ingredients and only work with suppliers which meet our rigorous standards.

PepsiCo did not reply to our partners’ attempts for contact.

The post Toxic Rain appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

This has led the EU to steadily reduce, or outrightly ban, the use of hazardous pesticides over the past decade. Despite resistance by the chemical industry and its allied lobby groups and politicians, the EU aims to reduce the overall use of pesticides by 50 per cent over the next seven years.

But as Europe steers away from pesticides, a new investigation led by Lighthouse Reports shows how public development banks — state-owned financial institutions set up with taxpayer money to support private-sector investments in developing nations — continue to finance projects where hazardous and EU-banned chemicals are used.

METHODS

Over the course of five months, Lighthouse Reports worked with five global media partners to tell the story of how public development banks engage in what critics describe as an act of hypocrisy: banning chemicals at home, but financing projects linked to them abroad.

“People in the global south are being exposed to highly hazardous substances,” said Dr. Marcos Orellana, UN special rapporteur on toxics and human rights.

After a comprehensive analysis of projects funded by the major public development banks in the US, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK, the team zoomed in on three projects which showed clear signs of questionable pesticide use. These were Dutch public development bank FMO with its investments in eucalyptus farms in Paraguay, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development’s (EBRD) loans in cotton farming in Uzbekistan and the Agence Francaise de Development’s (AFD) financing of rubber plantation farms in Ghana.

Combining paper trails and on the ground reporting, Lighthouse Reports and partners were able to confirm that EU-banned pesticides were used in all of these projects. We spoke to farmers on the ground, skimmed through project-specific environmental impact assessment reports and interviewed a dozen environmental and legal experts on the topic.

The evidence shows that, while public development banks have – to some degree – tried to encourage environmentally sustainable practices by providing training, guidelines, and conducting environmental and social impact assessments, the problem persists. Lack of monitoring by the banks and relaxed EU pesticide regulations on foreign investments mean that countless farmers have been exposed to toxic chemicals that the EU does not allow on its own continent – putting these farmers’ health at serious risk.

STORYLINES

Thousands of smallholder farmers in the Western region of Ghana were involved in a decades-long scheme to farm rubber, under the supervision and assistance of the nation’s biggest rubber plantation company, Ghana Real Estate Limited. The scheme was funded by the AFD and sought to provide rural farmers with employment and direct income, whilst also being environmentally sustainable.

Several farmers Lighthouse Reports spoke to, however, said they were provided with paraquat, a highly poisonous pesticide that has been banned in the EU since 2007.

In Uzbekistan, the EBRD made two loans to help modernise a cotton company, Indorama Agro. The company has been subject to intense criticism in recent years after evidence of forced child labour was brought to the world’s attention. Ever since, the Indorama Agro has pledged to uphold strong environmental regulatory standards.

Yet, Lighthouse Reports found that pesticide problems persist. Exclusive documents and NGOs monitoring the situation in Uzbekistan found that chemicals like indoxacarb, chlorates, and chlorpyrifos — all banned in the EU — were used.

As for Paraguay: FMO funded a company called Arbaro Fund, which has investments in two large eucalyptus plantations: Forestal San Pedro and Foresto Apepu. Reports by local NGOs had already expressed concern about the impact these plantations have on wildlife, but further auditing reports of these sites, seen by Lighthouse Reports, show the use of haloxyfop, a substance banned by the EU.

The post Europe’s funding of EU-banned pesticides appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

They made those bumper profits with ‘trend-following’ techniques, which involve using algorithms to spot rising or falling prices and automatically buying or selling financial derivatives in response.

Our findings raise questions over the role of hedge funds and other speculators in inflating food prices, as a global cost of living crisis continues to affect millions of people across the world.

METHODS

In collaboration with Greenpeace’s investigative unit, Unearthed, we analysed data from investment bank Société Générale’s Trend Index, which tracks the daily returns of the world’s 10 largest trend-following hedge funds.

We combined these daily returns with Société Générale’s data showing the hedge funds’ assets under management as well as estimates of how much these funds were weighted towards commodities. The analysis stripped out non-food commodities and homed in on grains and soya beans.

Once a year, the top 10 trend-followers also report the total value of their portfolio, which in September 2021 stood at $55bn. Using this figure and the Trend Indicator’s daily breakdown of estimated returns from different asset classes, Lighthouse estimated that in the first three months of 2022, the top 10 trend-followers made $9.6bn in returns, including $1.9bn on wheat, corn and soybeans trades.

The $1.9bn in returns on grains and soya beans from the top 10 hedge funds in the first quarter of 2022 was significantly higher than the returns on those same commodities in the first quarter of any of the previous five years.

The top 10 hedge funds were the Managed Futures Offshore fund, run by AQR Capital Management; the Managed Futures fund, run by AlphaSimplex Group; Diversified, run by Aspect Capital; BlueTrend run by Systematica Investments; Tactical Trend A, run by Graham Capital Management; Systematic Trend, run by ISAM; Lynx Bermuda D, run by Lynx Asset Management; Man AHL Alpha, run by Man Investments; DTP Enhanced Risk, run by Transtrend BV; Winton Trend, run by Winton Capital.

STORYLINES

Olivier De Schutter, co-chair of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems and UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, said: “Hedge funds and financial speculators have made obscene profits by betting on hunger and exacerbating it. That cannot be right. At the start of the Ukraine war, financial investors piled into grains and commodities in large numbers, seeking to capitalise on uncertainty and rising food prices, and they hit the jackpot.”

He said the jolts to the food market since the Ukraine invasion showed how dangerous speculation in food commodities could be, with the effects of these extraordinary profits being felt by vulnerable people.

Trend-following hedge funds started buying wheat and corn contracts heavily in the weeks leading up to the invasion, as news emerged of Putin’s troops massing on the Ukrainian border, according to Dave Whitcomb, an analyst at trading consultancy Peak Research. “Their goal is to get on the train early… so that they are already buying commodities before the big move,” he said. “These momentum traders were really buying on upward momentum in early February, and into March.”

The post Exposed: the hedge funds cashing in on the food price spike appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

The UNCTAD, the UN body for trade, stated in their latest report that insufficient attention had been paid to the role of “ speculation and betting frenzies” in the futures markets in pushing up the cost of food and fuel.

An analysis by Lighthouse Reports of the accounts of more than 70 major pension funds in Spain, Italy, Germany, The Netherlands, Germany, the UK, Finland and Denmark showed they may be contributing to the crisis.

While some funds explicitly forbid speculating in commodities, especially in food, 16 are currently investing in them, with the three biggest buyers the Netherlands, UK and Denmark held more than €37 billion between them at the end of 2021.

The findings also raise questions over whether the European Union’s continued drive to deregulate its financial markets will worsen the situation in the future. The rules governing the bloc’s capital markets are currently under review with political discussions expected to be held later this year or early 2023.

According to Jayati Ghosh, professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the findings of this investigation show that pension funds are among the financial institutions that have aggravated the problem of investor speculation driving food prices.

METHODS

Commodity futures are a type of derivative and mentioned as such in annual reports of most pension funds. For this investigation we selected 75 of the biggest pension funds in Europe and analysed their annual reports.

In some cases the annual reports contained a section on derivatives and sometimes a breakdown of the types of derivatives, and whether they were “over the counter” or “exchange traded”. These two categories correspond to whether the investment was made through a so-called index fund like the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index, or directly through a futures exchange.

With this information we asked the funds to clarify to what extent these derivatives included commodities and how they weigh the risk of this type of exposure.

While many funds have no exposure at all and some have an explicit policy that forbids speculation with (food) commodities, 15 of them are currently investing in commodities.

We discussed these findings with financial market experts such as Ann Pettifor, Jayati Ghosh, Dave Whitcomb and Yaneer Bar-Yam to be able to put the role of those funds into a wider perspective.

STORYLINES

The most in-depth report on the investigation is written by the Dutch outlet Follow the Money. It opens with a quote from the annual report of the Rabobank Pension fund: “2021 was an excellent year for the commodities category.”

Its investments in commodities, such as energy and agricultural products, provided the fund with a return of 43 percent, around six times as much as the average total return of Dutch pension funds.

Rising commodity prices are good news for the fund’s commodities portfolio, but in day-to-day practice fund members will have to pay more for goods and services. High energy and food prices are major causes of the skyrocketing inflation that is leaving countless households and businesses in serious financial trouble.

Servaas Storm, economist and assistant professor at the University of Delft, calls the fund’s actions ‘pretty cynical’.

But it’s not just the Rabobank pension fund. The Dutch pension fund for government and education staff, ABP, is by far the largest investor. ABP, one of the world’s biggest pension funds, had €33.9 billion euros invested in commodity derivatives at the end of 2021 – around a third of which was invested in food commodities. In 2021, rising commodity prices led the value of these investments to increase by 31%.

In the UK, it is a government-backed pension fund that is accused of fuelling the cost of living crisis. Nest, which manages the savings of 10 million British savers, invested more than half a billion pounds in commodities derivatives at the end of 2021 – around a quarter of which were food derivatives.

The Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) also currently invests in commodity futures to the tune of £1.5 billion. Most of the top UK pension funds surveyed, including those of BP, HSBC and Barlcays, do not invest in commodity derivatives.

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The post Pension Funds Fuel Hunger Crisis appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

The findings involve Anglo Beef Processors (ABP), owned by Irish billionaire Larry Goodman, as well as Pilgrim’s Pride and Moy Park which are both owned by Brazilian beef giant JBS, the world’s largest meat company.

Together the two groups control a third of the UK’s beef, and chicken production, and a quarter of its pork. They are leading suppliers to most major supermarkets, as well as fast food chains McDonalds, Nando’s and KFC. ABP controls 30% of the Republic of Ireland’s beef processing and up to half of the lamb processing on the island of Ireland. It operates across Europe, with plants and sales offices in Poland, France, Spain and the Netherlands.

Both groups used finance companies in European tax havens to book hundreds of millions of euros in profits. But these companies employ nobody, and were taxed at less than one percent. Corporate tax rates in the UK and Ireland – where the profits would otherwise have been taxed – are 19% and 12.5% respectively.

Dame Margaret Hodge, a UK Labour Party MP who heads the All Party Parliamentary Group on Tax, said the firms involved were “butchering” their responsibilities to society at a time when the majority of the population were struggling under the cost of living crisis.

She said: “A prosperous and equal society is one in which all companies and individuals pay their taxes in order to fund the public services that we all rely on,” she said.

“Yet this important investigation suggests that some of the UK’s biggest meat processing companies might be butchering that social contract by using complex corporate structures and overseas tax havens to avoid paying their fair share.”

The scheme works like this:

Step 1: the meat processing giant uses a finance company in another country like the Netherlands or Luxembourg, which offers favourable tax incentives, to borrow money at 0% interest from another company in the group.

Step 2: The finance company uses that interest-free cash to make loans – at interest – to companies in countries where the group has its processing plants and earns its revenues, such as the UK or Ireland.

Step 3: These companies can use the interest payments they make to the tax havens to reduce their taxable profits – and therefore the amount of tax they pay – in the UK and Ireland.

Step 4: The finance companies in Luxembourg and the Netherlands book the interest revenue they earn as pure profit, but pay almost no tax on it because of special tax rules.

Professor Reuven Avi-Yonah, an international and corporate tax law expert, said: “There is no question that this is aggressive tax avoidance in that you deduct the interest payments to shell companies that are meaningless in the sense that there is nothing there.”

“It’s not illegal, but it’s inconsistent with good corporate citizenship and the public, who are customers of all these meat companies, don’t like it,” he said.

Alex Cobham, director of the Tax Justice Network, said the schemes “give all the appearance of abusive tax avoidance, designed to prevent the declaration and taxation of profits where they actually arise.”

ABP and Pilgrim’s Pride Corporation said that they were fully tax compliant, and followed the law in all jurisdictions where they operated.

METHODS

Our investigation was based on an analysis of the annual reports of dozens of companies filed with corporate registries in the UK, Ireland, Netherlands, Jersey, and Luxembourg.

We used these public filings to map the corporate structures of Europe’s top ten leading meat companies to identify group companies which had been set up in tax havens such as the Netherlands and Luxembourg.

We then analysed company accounts to establish what tax rates the companies based in tax-havens were paying, and whether their revenues could have been used to reduce the taxable profits of operating companies in countries where the groups’ actual operations took place.

Two of the biggest meat companies stood out.

For JBS-owned Pilgrim’s Pride and Moy Park, we identified a holding company, Sandstone Holdings, based in Luxembourg.

Sandstone Holdings employs no staff but it recorded profits of $160 million (€162 million) between 2017 and 2020. These profits stemmed from interest payments made by the UK holding company for Moy Park and Pilgrim’s Pride, called Onix Investments UK. Sandstone received the cash it loaned to Onix from other group companies at zero interest. Between 2017 and 2020 Sandstone paid just $299,000 (€300,000) in tax on its $160 million profit, an effective rate of 0.19%

The UK-based Onix paid Sandstone $170 million (€167 million) in interest payments between 2017 and 2020. Because of these payments it made recurring trading losses, giving it a tax asset of $16 million (€15.6 million). In 2019 it used $10 million (€10 million) of this tax asset to reduce the tax paid by other group companies in the U.K.

ABP Group has a complex corporate structure with dozens of group companies across the E.U, UK and Jersey.

Its UK and Irish companies are “Unlimited”, which allows them to avoid publicly disclosing annual accounts.

Within ABP Group we identified a company based in the Netherlands, Trojaan Investering. Trojaan had no employees, but its accounts showed that it had made €161 million in profits between 2013 -2017, on which it paid an effective tax rate of 0.93%.

Trojaan earned the vast majority of its revenues from intercompany lending. It received more than €700 million in zero-interest loans from group companies based in Ireland and Jersey. It then loaned this money to other group companies at higher rates. These included a €114 million loan to ABP Foods (Ireland) at the benchmark European lending rate (Euribor) + 4% interest and a £63m loan to ABP UK at 5% interest. These companies could in turn deduct these interest payments from their taxable profits in Ireland and the U.K.

We calculated that Irish, UK and Dutch companies would have paid €42 million in interest payments to Trojaan over five years.

The official corporation tax rate in the Netherlands is 25.5%. However ABP appears to have taken advantage of Dutch tax rules which allowed it to deduct the hypothetical interest it would have paid on its zero interest loans, had they been interest bearing. In this way it reduced its taxable profits to virtually nil.

STORYLINES

Giant meat processors like Pilgrim’s Pride, Moy Park and ABP are amongst the few winners of Europe’s dysfunctional food system. While they do not benefit directly from most agricultural subsidies, the low price they pay farmers for livestock is sustained by public money.

Each year Big Meat benefits from billions of euros in taxpayer-funded subsidies given to livestock farmers. These subsidies help to bridge the gap between what it costs a farmer to raise livestock and the “farm gate price” they are offered by the meat processors.

Farming groups complain that the subsidies only support the processors, who themselves fail to pay a fair share of tax.

William Taylor, coordinator for Farmers for Action Northern Ireland, said: “If the processors continue to underpay producers, the government might just as well hand the subsidy money straight to the corporations’ tax haven companies rather than laundering it through farmers”.

In the Republic of Ireland cows now outnumber people as a result of decades of government policies encouraging farmers to rear cheap intensively-produced livestock for export around the world.

Billionaire businessman Larry Goodman built ABP Group into a meat processing giant on the back of these policies. In 2015 ABP became the first European meat company to secure a long-term beef contract in the United States. The company recorded annual revenues of €4 billion in 2021.

ABP’s factories have been picketed by farmers demanding a fair price for their meat, even in the face of injunctions which meant they risked imprisonment by continuing their protests.

As these companies have grown, they have swallowed up their competitors.

Giant processors have come to dominate the meat sector, giving producers less choice about who to sell their meat to. The meat processors involved in this story are key suppliers for virtually all major U.K retailers.

Moy Park processes around a third of the UK’s chickens. Based in Northern Ireland, it was bought by Brazilian giant Marfrig in 2008, before being sold to JBS, the world’s largest meat company, in 2015. JBS then bought the U.K’s largest pork processor, Tulip, in 2017, via Pilgrim’s Pride.

ABP is the U.K’s largest supplier of beef, and last year extended its reach further when it bought Northern Ireland based Linden Foods.

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