Legislators and government officials have worked to rein in this public health crisis by enacting laws that require food companies to be transparent about their ingredients and limit the advertising of unhealthy foods.

In public, the world’s biggest and richest food companies such as Coca Cola, PepsiCola, and Mondelez say they want to be part of the solution. But behind closed doors, they have taken governments to court to delay, dilute, and derail public health laws, which the companies say violate their rights.

This cross border collaboration with health academics and an international media coalition shed light on how transnational corporations use legal tactics – lawsuits and legal threats – to stymie public health efforts in six countries where such tactics are most apparent: Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, India, Britain, and the United States.

We found:

– 239 lawsuits were filed between 2010 and 2025 across Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, the US, the UK, and India against public health policies targeting food and beverages such as front of pack labelling, regulating advertising junk food to children, soda taxes, and taxes on ultra processed foods.

– The cases add up to 595 years of litigation, representing a significant burden on the governments defending their health policies.

– Of the cases brought by private companies where the plaintiff was identifiable, more than 1 in 3 came from just nine parent groups, led by Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Mondelez

Their actions are not only prolonging the public health crisis but also cost countries billions of dollars in both legal and healthcare costs. In addition, they have a chilling effect on policymakers that wish to better their citizens’ health but do not have the resources to engage in drawn-out legal fights with food companies.

METHODS

We constructed a dataset of challenges to laws aiming to improve population nutrition between 2010 and 2025 in these countries: Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, U.S., UK, and India.

With the exception of India, cases were included when a regulation that sought to improve public health through better nutrition was being challenged (i.e. validity, scope, or implementation). We made an exception for cases in India where influencers were being sued, as they were taking over the role of the government in making the nutritional value of products more transparent.

We only included cases that were verifiable through official legal databases, court records, or reputable secondary sources.

We excluded cases solely concerning non-manufacturers such as fresh produce or when companies were appealing fines and other judgments unrelated to public health policies.

This research was done in collaboration with researchers from the University of Caldas (Colombia); Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center (United States); the University of Sao Paulo (Brazil); and the University of Sydney (Australia). They found more lawsuits through a systematic legal search in Colombia, Brazil and Mexico.

An upcoming academic paper will be published alongside the media articles, looking at the dataset from a scientific perspective.

This dataset built on the work and insight of El Poder del Consumidor (Mexico), the FULL database developed by the Global Center for Legal Innovation on Food Environments at the O’Neill Institute and the Global Health Advocacy Incubator, CAJAR (Colombia), and ACT (Brazil).

STORYLINES

– Mexico

More than a third of Mexican schoolchildren and 41% of adolescents were overweight according to a 2022 national survey.

This is the country where we found the most lawsuits (193 out of 239), many of them were against the country’s labelling regulation. Quinto Elemento Lab reveals the companies’ arguments: that the laws were a violation of their constitutional rights and that the measures “demonized” their products or violated consumer rights. For example, a local Pepsi bottler argued that in certain rural areas of Mexico, it was safer to drink soft drinks than the available water. In court, the judges rejected many of the legal arguments that the companies presented.

– Brazil

According to the UN, in 2022-2024, more than 1 in 4 adults in Brazil were living with obesity while nearly 1 in 9 children were overweight.

Some of the 17 lawsuits in Brazil have been dragging on for close to a couple of decades, with no predicted conclusion in sight, according to Agência Pública and O Joio e O Trigo.

In all but one, the plaintiffs were industry associations, which experts told us is a way for companies to keep their valuable brand names away from litigation that may harm their image. Some of the world’s largest food companies are members of these Brazilian associations, including Coca-Cola, Ferrero, Kellogg’s local brand, Mars, Mondelez, Nestlé, and PepsiCo. 11 of the lawsuits were against the Brazilian Health Regulatory Agency, ANVISA, which has been hamstrung as a result. The plaintiffs disputed a regulation that required the advertising of food and beverages with low nutritional value to display more information.

– Colombia

More than half of Colombia’s population is overweight, and treating the diseases caused by unhealthy foods cost the country an estimated 1.3 billion euros in 2021.

We found 18 lawsuits in Colombia, mostly targeting taxes on unhealthy products and front-of-package labelling. Nearly all of them were constitutional challenges brought about by individual citizens as enabled in the country’s constitution. However, Cuestión Pública finds that many of the plaintiffs were lawyers who had done work for food companies. The submissions also used many of the same arguments wielded by the companies. In 2022, while the creation of the health tax was being debated, sugary beverage and ultra-processed food companies donated 5.85 million Euros to political parties, accounting for 40% of all donations to political parties that year.

– U.S.

Two in three adults in the U.S. are overweight and a quarter of adolescents are living with obesity, according to the CDC. The Make America Healthy Again movement supported Trump’s presidency bid.

The American Beverage Association sued to overturn a soda tax in Santa Cruz, which it has so far failed to do. Santa Cruz Local uncovers details of the group’s earlier success squashing a soda tax effort in Watsonville, a neighbouring city. The Santa Cruz lawsuit has far-reaching consequences: the recent victory for the city could unlock the ability for charter cities across California to tax sugary beverages. We found that the soda industry recruited and leveraged the credibility of prominent Black and Latino leaders to amplify opposition against public health taxes within their own communities. We have also identified five other lawsuits. The ABA was involved in four of them.

– Europe

In Europe, non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, or cancer are responsible for 80% of the disease burden, according to the European Commission.

Follow The Money discovers that European countries have struggled to pass taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages, as they come under industry pressure. Unlike in Latin America, European governments frequently face legal threats before legislation is adopted. Industry groups repeatedly invoke EU state-aid, competition and internal-market rules, creating uncertainty that can delay or derail policies without a single lawsuit being filed. Plans for a joint European sugar tax have also been weakened.

L’Espresso and Il Fatto Alimentare explain the role Italian confectionary giant Ferrero plays around the world in stimying public health laws, and how the family-owned company’s influence both domestically and internationally is connected to the country’s agroindustry rather than its famous cuisine.

– India

Nearly one in three Indian women and more than one in four men are overweight or obese. One in five people have high blood sugar levels.

The Wire traces the long journey of India’s front of pack labeling regulation, which the Indian food regulator, the FSSAI, has been developing since 2014. Over that time, it has done numerous consultations, studies but it has stalled regulating, blaming a lack of consensus between the industry and civil society. Research by ATNi commissioned by Lighthouse Reports showed that India’s proposed labelling system is actually consistently more lenient compared to similar systems in Australia and France.

Meanwhile, influential instagram celebrities have made videos comparing the nutrition of various products such as instant noodles, baby food, and others. They’ve been sued by the companies whose ingredient labels they were analysing.

The post Big Food vs. The People appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

Their pleas for intervention to preserve traditional French farming may have come far too late.

An investigation by Lighthouse Reports and Le Monde reveals that the forces currently forcing many small-scale French cattle producers out of business were set in motion decades ago, when competition authorities allowed a single industrial group to swallow up its rivals.

Our investigation reveals how competition authorities put French farmers at the mercy of family-owned industrial giant Groupe Bigard, which now slaughters more than one in every three cattle in France.

Thanks to those mergers, one in every five French farmers now faces slaughtering options within a reasonable driving distance that are so dominated by Groupe Bigard that they would generally be considered unlawful under French competition law.

Even if forced to drive further to slaughter cattle, which stresses animals and leads to reduced profits, more than half French farmers face a market which would raise competition concerns.

This loose regulation has paved the way for industrialized agriculture to take over the French cattle industry: farmers were forced to accept huge financial losses, subsidised by the tax payer, whilst Groupe Bigard raised its margins – and consumers paid more for their meat.

Antitrust scholar Professor Peter Carstensen describes such conditions as a “serious structural problem which is going to harm producers for sure”.

According to Austin Frerick, our findings show that the mergers were “devastating for French farmers” . He said they provided “a textbook example of what happens when competition authorities fail to do their jobs. They allowed the market structure to consolidate, squeezing farmers and gouging customers.

“It’s not just the farmers who are losing out here. The Competition Authority’s failure has resulted in a massive transfer of wealth from French taxpayers to a single corporation, Bigard, through subsidies required to cover these losses.”

METHODS

This investigation has endeavoured to understand how a handful of big French slaughterhouse firms, led by Bigard, ended up with so much power, which farms across France are most impacted, whether the concentration of market control is legal — and how this growing power may have harmed farmers.

To measure the changes to market concentration we linked several datasets obtained from the ministry of agriculture by FOI:

• The location, capacity and owners of the slaughterhouses
• The distribution of cattle farms across France, by administrative district
• How Bigard’s slaughterhouses had changed hands over the past 30 years

For each administrative district, we calculated key concentration metrics within three driving time ranges: 1h30, 2h30 and 4h, corresponding to roughly the 50th, 75th and 90th percentiles of travel times for beef cattle in France.

We then evaluated those metrics against thresholds used in competition law in different countries, and showed how those metrics changed due to mergers greenlit by the Competition Authority.

As far as measuring harms to farmers, we sought advice from competition experts. They told us that a hallmark of a company or group of companies being able to exert market power is an increase to the “price spread” – the difference between what supermarkets are charged for products and what farmers are paid. Where that metric increases, it suggests that slaughterhouses are squeezing farmers and gauging consumers.

We were able to obtain figures from France’s Price Observatory which confirmed exactly this trend between 2013 and 2019 – a period when cattle farmers’ losses were reaching their nadir. This analysis was not available for the earlier, pre-merger period, so we used a more approximate measure: the difference between consumer prices and the farmgate prices. They confirmed the same trend: whilst farmer prices were falling, consumer prices were rising.

We were then able to measure how this trend had been active at the corporate level: we analysed Groupe Bigard’s financial statements to measure how the company had benefited from its growing power: not only did the company’s profits increase five-fold between 2004 and 2023, but the main operating company’s profit margins more than doubled; and paid out €300 million in dividends over the last decade.

STORYLINES

Thierry Thil has been farming cattle, pigs, goats and free-range poultry, in the Moselle region, close to France’s borders with Germany and Luxembourg, for thirty years.

He works 70 hour weeks for €900 a month.

But as Bigard’s power has grown, Thierry’s mixed farm has become harder to maintain. As the industry giant acquired more slaughterhouses in the region, it closed some sites and moved others towards slaughtering just one single species – which supports company profits but not producers who maintain mixed farms.

As a result of Bigard’s changes, Thierry now has to take his animals across the border to Luxembourg, which is costly and heavy in administration. It also leaves him vulnerable: as happened last autumn when an outbreak of lumpy skin disease

“It’s stressful taking an animal to the abattoir. You’ve no idea how stressful it is,” says Thierry.

Farmers, seeking an alternative to Bigard, planned to open an abattoir at Thionville, supported by Thil along with around 190 other farmers in the region. It would have been a lifeline. But just as they were supposed to sign the contract, the bank pulled out.

Martine Cordel, then “a very young elected representative on the Chamber of Agriculture” Thierry’s neighbour Martine Cordel was witness to the beginnings of Bigard’s takeover of what were previously farmer-owned abattoirs.

The slaughter industry “put pressure on the [farming] trade to sell its 50 per cent stake in the abattoir, threatening to leave Metz otherwise”, she recounts.

Martine maintains a short supply chain: the family farm sells its produce through short supply chains at L’Ayotte, the first farmers’ market to open in Moselle. She also backed the abattoir at Thionville, believing it would provide farmers like her an essential service. She lost €10,000 when the bank pulled out.

Bigard’s influence extends beyond the slaughterhouses. As Mayor of Autun, Remy Rebeyrotte, championed the re-establishment of the town’s abattoir. It now slaughters cattle from the local area and provides meat for public services and the town’s supermarkets. But Rebeyrotte says he experienced “hostility” about the project from some farmers attached to powerful co-operatives. Some belonged to a cooperative with close links to Bigard. Bernard Joly, former president of the abattoir, is convinced that the fear of Bigard prevented such co-operatives from supporting the abattoir.

Unless the French authority reforms its approach to regulating mergers and supporting sustainable agricultural practices, more and more farmers are going to face the decision about whether to go big or get out.

According to Frerick, the situation would only get worse unless authorities intervene. He said the French Competition Authority should re-evaluate the mergers it approved and implement policy changes to ensure such purchases are not allowed in the future.

According to Anne Witt, a professor of law at the EDHEC Business School, the Competition Authority’s failure to consider the impact on farmers is part of a wider culture in which competition authorities have focused primarily on protecting ‘consumer welfare’ whilst ignoring the broader context of the value chain. “Who cares if a company leaves the market as long as consumer welfare is not affected?”

There is evidence that trends may be shifting.

French competition scholars say the findings reveal issues that go beyond competition policy and merger-control. According to antitrust scholar Professor Walid Chaiehloudj, current competition policy has failed to provide sufficient protections to farmers and regulators should lower the thresholds at which they allow mergers to take place.

But he also suggests more radical reforms: that in order to properly serve the public,competition law should start to actively incorporate higher order objectives like food-sovereignty into its decision making.

The post Cut to the Bone: Farmers at the mercy of the meat monopolists appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

The world’s largest food companies say they want to be part of the solution. But behind closed doors, they are lobbying governments to derail public health laws.

Our series of investigations, with partners on five continents, reveals the global lobbying tactics of food corporations. We are starting this project’s publication with one country, Colombia, where companies producing unhealthy food attempt to influence the May 2026 presidential elections.

In Colombia, more than half of the population is overweight, with tremendous human and economic costs. Treating the diseases caused by unhealthy foods cost Colombia an estimated 1.3 billion euros in 2021. To address this crisis, civil society and members of the congress proposed various policies. In 2022, they pushed a bill to establish a tax on ultra-processed food, including sodas.

Food companies vigorously lobbied against the bill. Our investigation with Cuestión Pública reveals that companies paid for 40% of all donations to political parties that year, adding up to over 5.85 million Euros.

One of the recipients of the donations from food companies was Paloma Valencia, one of the top candidates in the ongoing presidential elections, which begins May 31. She has promised to eliminate the tax if she’s elected president.

Despite the opposition, the tax passed, and it worked: the consumption of unhealthy foods and sugary drinks dropped dramatically. Lawyers, however, moved to the courtroom. 17 legal challenges were filed against the public health measures. Most of the challenges were made by individuals, under a process that enables any Colombian citizen to challenge the constitutionality of laws or policies. So far, they have all been rejected.

METHODS

In order to find who was pushing back against the public health laws, we did a comprehensive search on legal databases and interviews for all legal challenges to the laws. We also obtained and analysed thousands of social media posts to look for the positions of presidential candidates on food policies. We also searched external visits to members of the Congress by people working for or on behalf of food companies.

STORYLINES

The pushback by the ultra-processed food lobby happened behind closed doors. The names of food companies didn’t appear in the court documents, but most of the individuals who filed legal challenges were lawyers who had done work for food companies. Their submissions also used many of the same arguments wielded by the companies against the tax. Three of the legal challenges were filed by a lawyer, Juan Manuel Charry Urueña, who skirted around our question when we asked who paid for this work. In his email to file the constitutional challenge, he copied a major regional manufacturer of sodas. When Cuestión Pública asked him why he copied them, he told the outlet that he was in a conversation with the group because their products were being unfairly taxed at a higher rate. Four of the other legal challenges came from a law firm and three from a former senator.

Unhealthy food has a tremendous impact in Colombia, leading to billions of euros in health costs and human suffering. Cuestión Pública interviewed the parents of children and infants who had serious health complications that specialists attributed to their diet composed of ultra-processed food. Those also contribute to diabetes and a host of related diseases.

The post Big Food vs The People – Colombia appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

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.