2023-09-19 18:48:36
This is not just another documentary about GMOs, Monsanto or food lobbies. This is a story about how corporate profits and food security collide in legislative politics at the European level. An example of how food is understood very differently: as a basic human right or a product for speculation. Price of Progress allows us to understand how the tug-of-war works in the food sector, bringing us closer than ever to the discourse, actions and practices of lobbyists. The director, Víctor Luengo, gets the men and women who work for the all-powerful food and biotechnology companies to relax in front of the camera. “For me, it is one of the great values that this documentary has, having lobbyists like this. How they undress, access their offices,” his director comments for El Salto, explaining the keys to this personal project that began in 2013.
More than five years of recording and post-production that is now premiering in theaters in several Spanish cities. “I was interested in reflecting how companies vote and the impact they have on European legislation,” says Luengo.
The apparent oasis that Europe has become with its ban on GMOs (genetically modified organisms) and numerous pesticides may be a mirage. On the one hand, European legislation prohibits the use of certain toxic substances in crops within the territory, but does not regulate what is imported or exported. A ‘double standard’ that Ecologistas en Acción denounces. “Specifically, the EU has the most powerful legislation on pesticides. The problem arises that while it prohibits, it does not veto its manufacture and sale to third countries,” says Koldo Hernández, from that organization. “It is very normal,” he continues, “that there are pesticides that are manufactured in Europe, sold in Brazil and there is a return to food imports. And it’s legal. Traveling pesticides that go around the world.”
Legislation that at first glance protects the consumer but that contemplates numerous exceptions to lift the restrictions. Precisely, a report by Ecologistas en Acción lists all the times that prohibited toxins have been used in Spain without justified cause. “European chemical standards are full of exceptions, such as article 53, which allows pesticides to be used annually. This means that products such as 1,3 Dichloropropene are used in Spain, which have ended up being one of the best sellers,” explains Hernández.
Legislation that seeks food security in theory, but that does not harm business profits. Everybody wins? “As long as we continue to treat food as a global commodity, we have a big problem,” Pat Thomas, English journalist and director of the whistleblowing platform Beyond GM, explains in the documentary. “We have moved on to the point that it is not about feeding people,” explains Henk Hobbelink, co-founder of Grain and Alternative Nobel Prize winner in agroecology. “Is food a necessity or an economic transaction? It’s both,” food and pharmaceutical industry lobbyist Natalie Moll states in the documentary.
Paid reports and oligopolies
“If the idea is that only the highest bidder should have the products, we are understanding food in a totally wrong way” continues the activist who explains that all the industry’s arguments to justify GMOs, such as that they produce more food against hunger or that they make them more resistant to climate change, are lies. You just need to look at other countries.
“In the US, the use of pesticides has not been reduced, nor have crops produced more nor have plants been made more sustainable. It is just a patent market,” insists Thomas. And the data proves him right: four companies (Bayer, Corteva, ChemChina and Limagrain) control more than 70% of GMO seeds while 75% of the world’s crop varieties disappeared between 1900 and 2000, according to the FAO. If someone misses Monsanto on the list of the transgenic oligopoly, it is because in 2017 Bayer bought the pioneering company in genetic modification. It happened just after the scandal known as ‘The Monsanto Papers’.
Following a trial in the US over the health risks caused by the herbicide RoundUp – the trade name for glyphosate produced by Monsanto – the judge in the case decided to further declassify the company’s internal correspondence. In the more than 250 pages, evidence was found that Monsanto had evidence of the mutagenic potential of glyphosate since at least 1999. It also revealed the unethical or transparent practices that the company used to achieve approval from regulatory and safety agencies. Among them, fabricating favorable reports that were later signed, although not written, by prestigious scientists in exchange for a significant sum of money.
Something that is familiar to us in Spain, since in 2016 a similar practice was revealed in the meat industry to counteract the NGO report that warned of the carcinogenic danger of processed meat products. “It is a topic that we would have also liked to address in Price of Progress,” explains the director of the documentary, which could have included the financing problem that many universities and research groups suffer from and that is taken advantage of by lobbies.
Financing problems like the one that Luengo himself encountered, which explains that the filming was under very precarious conditions. But they did it. They found a financier who asked them for only one condition: get a lobbyist to speak on camera. And he succeeded, on numerous occasions. “That was what surprised me the most,” he says, “accessing them. I met by chance in 2016 Jean-Philippe Azoulay, who was president of the ECPA, the most important pesticide lobby. I took the opportunity and he put me in touch with Nathalie Moll, current director general of the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) and Secretary of Agriculture of EuropaBio and with Mella Frewen, general director of Fooddrinkeurope.” In fact, Price of Progress captures Frewen complaining that the rules to avoid conflicts of interest are too strict, losing, in her opinion, valuable scientists and experts. Although she herself denied having any contact with the lobbying companies, months after her recording, the EFSA (the European Food Safety Agency) ruled her out of a conflict of interest charge.
Transparency Vs intellectual property
The moment of lack of credibility that the EFSA is experiencing is also captured in the documentary, which includes the statements of its director at this time, Bernad Url, who is being investigated for his involvement in ‘The Monsanto Papers’. Agencies like this find themselves at a crossroads: on the one hand they must authorize documents by carrying out studies and tests, but their work is limited by intellectual property. Thus, companies only offer the data they consider and, based on it, the agencies decide. “The problem is that we do not have information, regarding safety or sustainability, labor rights behind each product,” explains Nazaret Castro, from the Carro de combat blog.
The journalist and consumer researcher calls the analyzes carried out on many products before giving them the green light to end up on supermarket shelves as “flatly scarce.” “We should not place the responsibility of informing themselves on the consumer, that is what the States are for. The problem is that the political class is very fed with agri-food companies, a particularly serious problem in Spain. “Spanish MEPs tend to repeat the arguments of agri-food companies,” she denounces. An opinion that Koldo Hernández endorses: “Spain is the country that analyzes the fewest products, about 5%, while the average is 15%.”
Precisely the precautionary principle that is applied in the EU—analyze before authorizing and not only when there is suspicion of risk—is something that lobbies attack and activists and environmentalists question. “Those of us who defend it say that not only is dangerous what is backed by science that it is dangerous, but also everything that we later found out was also dangerous,” he explains, while indicating that the ‘trap’ of This system consists of separately measuring each potentially dangerous and short-term component. “When analyzed separately,” explains Hernández, “it leaves a huge gap in how they behave when they get together. “We don’t know what the consequences are of being exposed throughout life and jointly.”
Endocrine disruptors, toxicity everywhere
The conversation with the Price of Progress lobbies leaves very evident key words: profits, advancement, technology and modern agriculture. Innovations that go, curiously, through GMOs, pesticides, fertilizers and so on. “Products that have been on the market for more than 40 years,” explains Ecologistas en Acción. Permaculture, crop diversity, rescuing adapted local seeds and stopping dependence on oil for planting are the new-old revolutions to achieve more resilience and more productivity in the markets. As illustrated by the documentary Tomorrow that travels the world in search of sustainable solutions. “We must change our vision: not to go where technology allows, but to where we really want and need,” they explain.
A vision shared by Miguel Porta, epidemiologist at the University of Barcelona. “Technology has not managed to produce tons of food without tons of pesticides, in fact, we have a big problem in terms of food and health,” says Porta, one of the pioneers along with epidemiologist Nicolás Olea, of the study of the endocrine disruptors. “They are in sports fabrics, in the Teflon of frying pans, in the paint inside cans, in herbicides like glyphosate, in everything,” explains Víctor Luengo, who warns that his analysis dismantles classic toxicity, since It acts differently in some people than in others, altering hormones, affecting more the younger the person. “Regulating endocrine disruptors would mean regulating the entire plastics market,” he says. “The European industry would have to be changed completely and buying any food product from abroad would be prohibited.” In fact, so far, we have only managed to limit the trade of baby bottle teats with bisphenol-A.
With these data, limiting yourself to eating ‘organic’ seems like a drop in the ocean of taking care of individual and public health. So, what to do? “Making us responsible at an individual level is one of the biggest traps of these lobbies,” explains Koldo Hernández, who continues: “It reduces the responsibilities of the States, which are the ones that should be guarantors of the right to food and health. In addition, at an ethical level, individual responses are not acceptable. Or do we have to divide the world between smart and ignorant, between privileged people who can afford to choose products and those who cannot? Legislation at the European and global level appears to be a short-term stop. Starting by rethinking why it is prioritized that a large part of the crops are not dedicated to human consumption – whether they are used in animal feed, as fuel or to make textiles – or why decisions about agriculture are made in countries that do not produce food. Many doubts arise when assessing the price of progress.
Text and photo: The jump. A woman uses the barcode to find out the components of a product in the supermarket.
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