In this op-ed, Hans Van Sharen of Corporate Europe Observatory argues that Bayer, a German agrochemical giant, exerts vast political and economic influence globally, often harming public health, biodiversity, and democracy in the process. The company aggressively lobbies to shape laws in its favor, fighting legal battles over the harmful effects of its products, like glyphosate. A new report by Corporate Europe Observatory reveals Bayer’s long history of lobbying to maintain control of the seed and pesticide markets, despite evidence of environmental and health risks. With soaring lobbying expenditures, especially in the EU and US, Bayer even seeks to alter liability laws to protect itself from lawsuits. Critics argue that Bayer’s toxic business model must be curtailed to protect both the environment and democracy.
The political influence, interlinked with its economic size, of a company like Bayer should be ‘de-normalised’. Its lobby-power is historically huge and is counterproductive for public health, biodiversity and democracy itself. All over the world the company is not only in the business of selling seeds and pesticides, but also in changing laws, rules and regulations. A secretive PR campaign, exposed by an international team of investigative journalists, is another demonstration of the structural impacts these companies create.
In a new report – Bayer’s toxic trails, Market power, monopolies, and the global lobbying of an agrochemical giant – Corporate Europe Observatory takes a deep dive into the present – and dark past – of the German agrochemical giant Bayer.
Whether it’s over glyphosate, GMOs, or global warming, the report follows the company’s trail of lobbying to reveal how it attempts to capture public policy to pursue its private interests. Bayer’s toxic trails show how anything goes to maintain monopolistic control of the seed and pesticides markets. The German company fights off regulatory challenges to its toxic products, tries to limit legal liability, and exercises political influence.
Read/download – BAYER’s Toxic Trails – market power, monopolies and the global lobbying of an agrochemical giant
A Friendly Letter
«Sehr geerhte Frau Bundeministerin», starts the letter (dated 24 June 2020) from Bayer to former German Agriculture minister Julia Klockner (CDU, part of the European political group EPP). It’s a very touching and optimistic letter in which Bayer seems to want to re-assure the minister about the ongoing glyphosate litigations in the US from citizens who developed cancers attributed to it’s glyphosate based RoundUp. At the time the company started to get juridical knockouts in courtrooms – and heavy fines. The count now stands around 11 billion euro in fines and settlements. And still 60.000 litigations of a total of 170.000 to go.
In spring 2024 Jess Christiansen, Head of Communications for Bayer’s crop science division told news agency AP that “the costs of defending a safe, approved product are unsustainable”. Indeed, billions of dollars spent for settlements and trials, with thousands of lawsuits still pending, represents a financial burden even for a chemical giant. This is why Bayer has also been lobbying US lawmakers to pass legislation which would provide legal protection for the company from future lawsuits. As AP reported “nearly identical bills introduced in Iowa, Missouri and Idaho this year – with wording supplied by Bayer – would protect pesticide companies from claims they failed to warn that their product causes cancer.”
Experts warn that this could have huge consequences – extending to US product liability laws and providing corporate immunity for lawsuits. Matt Clement, a lawyer representing victims of Bayer’s glyphosate, commented that “it’s just not good government to give a company immunity for things that they’re not telling their consumers.”
Science based – but spending too
But back in 2020 Bayer stated that it “looks optimistic to the future” and the company “rejoices” in the potential “to continue our partnership with you”. On 7 August 2020 the German minister aka ‘Bayer’s partner in crime’, replied, reassuring Bayer saying that the “US juridical system is different from the EU which is too often forgotten in the debate”, and that she hoped “the debate in the EU can be rationalized and based on science.”
For these companies, keeping their political power base at home solid is crucial to keep their business model intact or to expand towards so-called ‘precision farming’ -that’s selling data to farmers and spreading new biotechnology products.
Therefore just like that other German giant BASF , Bayer’s influence and lobby spending at national level is considerable: in the German lobby register it declared a €2.5 million expenditure for 2022 and €2.6 million in 2023.
And although these companies know very well that they can count on their political allies of the European People Party (EPP) and others, they are also in an existential fight when it comes to their pesticide business in Europe, after more and more scientific findings clearly indicate that the systemic pesticide use is destroying biodiversity and also eroding soil fertility and thus the basis of food production itself. Public support for these kinds of agricultural practices have been equally eroding.
« Thousands of scientists and millions of citizens have urged EU politicians to take urgent action,” said Martin Dermine, PAN Europe executive director and representative of the Save Bees and Farmers European Citizens Initiative. “Doing nothing is not an option. Not answering citizens’ demands goes against democracy and only favours agribusiness.”
Bayer&co were spearheading the campaign to prolong the EU authorisation for glyphosate with another 10 years, despite a wealth of scientific indications that show the product is a disaster for health, biodiversity, soil and water. Several independent scientific studies show that glyphosate can be carcinogenic. As Pesticide Action Network (PAN) wrote “to re-approve glyphosate is a violation of the EU Pesticide Law that says that health and environment should go first”. Several NGOs are taking the European Commission to court on the glyphosate decision.
Though the largest political family EPP has been clearly on the side of agrobusiness for years, it has at the same time for years been saying they support ‘science based politics’. The independent science is crystal clear: massive use of pesticides is killing us softly. So companies like Bayer need to gear up their lobby tactics and spending, to keep it’s business model alive.
One of the tactics is to make clear that farmers cannot do without their products but that there is room for more ‘precision’ and ‘smartness’ in agriculture. The pesticide-lobby Croplife of which Bayer is a prominent member using slogans like ‘doing more with less’.
Lobby galore!
In the past two years Bayer has risen to one of the top lobby spenders in the EU and even worldwide. For the year 2022 Bayer declared spending €49 million worldwide on lobbying (including the pharmaceutical side of its operations), as well as an extra €26 million on trade association fees.
Considering that companies like Bayer pay trade associations like Croplife, Euroseeds or EuropaBio to lobby on their behalf, this means it seems Bayer spent a staggering €75 million on lobbying worldwide in 2022, though the company does not clearly indicate the fees as lobby costs (which is an EU Transparency requirement).
In the EU, Bayer became the European production company with the single largest lobby budget, just after US companies Microsoft and Meta. For the year 2022 the German company self-declared spending €6.5 million on lobbying in the EU (and slightly higher in 2023) + €2.5 million in Germany + €4 million on fees for EU based trade and lobby associations like Croplife Europe. This makes an estimated total EU lobby budget of well above €10 million, which is an historical high. Bayer’s self declared global lobby budget combined with its fees for trade associations amounts to a staggering €75 million in 2022.
Bayer’s total ‘global lobby budget’ includes $18 million for ‘international lobbying’: according to the company to lobby on “those topics with a global scope or where global/international organizations are the main drivers of policy-making”. This means the company has large capacity to influence all sorts of international UN-level negotiations, far from critical oversight.
When it comes to lobbying governments all over the world Bayer seems to have learned a lot from the US-based company it bought in 2018: Monsanto. Bayer has lobbied hard (sometimes with success) to change or influence laws, regulations and policies not only in the EU but also in countries like Thailand, Mexico, Kenya and now the US.
Bayer’s Lobbying tactics include the ones famously applied by companies like Monsanto such as manipulating science, funding disinformation campaigns, influencing regulators, using trade policy as a way to bully third countries to change their laws, delaying and distracting policy makers with investment promises.
Another Letter
The remark by German minister Klockner about «a different US juridical system» and that she hoped “the debate in the EU can be rationalized and based on science” was perfectly reflected by for example the campaigns of Mosnanto to attack IARC even before it published its monograph on glyphosate.
It was also reflected in Bayer’s open letter of April this year, in which it calls all the independent findings from scientists on glyphosate, including those from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), ‘junk science’.
And Bayer used the classic but false ‘feed the world-argument’: «If American farmers lose a critical tool like glyphosate based on the litigation industry’s actions, they will face even harder choices. Bayer is the only domestic manufacturer of glyphosate. If this keeps up, farmers will be left with two options – grow less food or rely on foreign supplies of the product. We plan to continue providing U.S. farmers this vital, valued product so America’s consumers and a hungry world can be economically and abundantly and, above all, safely fed.”
As the Guardian recently wrote the words of ‘Bundesministerin Klöckner’ were also reflected in what former Monsanto director of information Jay Byrne called «a protest industry» against pesticides. The Guardian mentions a speech Byrne delivered at an agricultural industry conference in 2016, where he made his stance clear: “We’re almost always cast as the villain in these scenarios. And so we need to flip that around. We need to recast the stories that we tell in alternative ways.”
Byrne characterized conventional agriculture as being “under attack” from what he called “the protest industry”, and alleged that powerful anti-pesticide, pro-organic forces were spending billions of dollars “creating fears about pesticide use”, GM crops and other industrial agriculture issues.»
Jay Byrne is also a key player in the recent Poision PR – revelations by a team of international investigative reporters, coördinated by Lighthouse Projects. Byrne created 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.
As Lightouse reports: ‘These profiles are published on a private social network, called Bonus Eventus, 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’.
The findings are part of a ‘wider investigation which found that between 2013 and 2019, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) channeled over $400,000 to v-Fluence for the purpose of “stakeholder tracking” of industrial agriculture critics’.
Indeed an under-reported aspect of this scandal is the fact that the PR campaign was not only co-financed by the US government, but had the successful aim to bring down Farm2Fork policies (as part of the EU Green Deal) like the 50% pesticide reduction (SUR). In 2022 Corporate Europe Observatory already shed a light on this USDA-backed campaign to attack European efforts to bring agricultural policies more in line with planetary boundaries. Bayer is a member of this ‘Coalition on Sustainable Productivity Growth for Food Security and Resource Conservation (SPG) Coalition’, which the United States launched at the United Nations Food Systems Summit in September 2021.
Battle on Capitol Hill
One of its most important markets, and political and juridical battlegrounds, are the US. In this context, Bayer’s lobby spend in the US has risen considerably over the past few years. Previously the company spent several hundreds of thousands of dollars for lobbying in Washington. During the year before the Monsanto takeover in 2018, it is notable that Bayer’s lobby budget rose to several million a year, with the company spending no less than $17.5 million on US lobbying in 2022 (According to the company’s ‘Political Advocacy Transparency Report’, published Dec 2023).
The intensive lobby-campaign Bayer has staged in the US is of another scale entirely. Because of the avalanche of litigation unfolding as a result of the toxic nature of glyphosate and the fact that the labels of products that contain glyphosate have not warned users of its potential dangers, Bayer wants thus to change US law, both on a federal and state level and has unfortunately booked some successes.
End of April this year the first legal victory of this new frontier lobby campaign to prevent litigation over glyphosate was touted by Bayer: “On behalf of more than 75 agricultural and grower groups in the Modern Ag Alliance, we thank the members of the Missouri House of Representatives who stood with farmers and science over the litigation industry in passing House Bill 2763.”
This state level legislation on all things farming also contains Bayer’s wording on labelling, which would essentially provide the company with a ‘get out of jail card’ if finally approved.
Conclusion
Bayer has grown to a global agrochemical giant with a huge lobby power, spending tens of millions worldwide to influence democratic processes for its private interests.
By being more ‘transparent’ about its lobbying, Bayer tries to legitimize what it calls ‘political advocacy’, where in fact it is capable of changing laws and regulations which should serve the general interest. Bayer makes products which are bad for our health and for the environment and by aggressively defending its commercial interests thus also for democracy. This company has undeniably grown into one of the most important global players that should be excluded from the corridors of power, in order to have politics that puts people and planet before profits. This company’s toxic trail belongs in the history books. It must not be allowed to continue its destructive business, in the EU or elsewhere. It’s time for toxic free politics.’
Hans van Scharen, researcher at Corporate Europe Observatory
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