A group of healthcare organisations are asking the UK government to withdraw a campaign that they say spreads misinformation about the benefits of eating meat and dairy.

As restaurants, retailers and consumers prepared for Veganuary last December, a livestock farming group was working on its own campaign in response.

The Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) – which is funded by farmers and food suppliers – launched a drive to promote beef, lamb and dairy consumption in the UK, which included three TV commercials as well as magazine and online ads.

A meat industry backlash to a campaign promoting alternatives to its products isn’t anything new – but what set this one apart was that it was backed by the UK government. AHDB falls under the wing of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). The Let’s Eat Balanced campaign launched in January was part of its annual efforts targeting people attempting to reduce their meat and dairy intake.

The messaging contained nuggets proclaiming that British meat and dairy are “amongst the most sustainable in the world” and that it was helping consumers “adopt a sustainable, healthy and nutritiously balanced diet”. On its website, one line reads: “Did you know that beef, pork, lamb and dairy are natural sources of vitamin B12, an essential vitamin not naturally present in a vegan diet?”

But now, doctors’ associations from across the UK are hitting back at these claims, warning that these are “disingenuous” and “at odds with established scientific evidence on healthy and sustainable diets”.

In an open letter penned by Dr Matthew Lee, sustainability lead at Doctors Association UK, and Dr Shireen Kassam, co-founder of Plant-Based Health Professionals UK, the group is asking the UK government to retract the campaign. The effort is endorsed by organisations like the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change, the BDA Renal Nutrition Specialist Group, and Green at Barts Health, among others.

“We call on the AHDB to wholeheartedly embrace this difficult, but necessary step, by retracting the campaign to promote increased consumption of meat and dairy using misleading and un-evidenced marketing,” the letter states.

Suggestive ‘health benefits’ ignore meat reduction guidance

To the AHDB’s point, the letter acknowledges that meat is a source of protein, zinc, iron and vitamin B12, but adds that these can also be obtained by a well-planned plant-based diet. Similarly, dairy is a source of calcium, but this is a mineral in the soil and can also be obtained from beans, green vegetables, and fortified dairy analogues and tofu.

Illustrating this point, the medical experts point out how vitamin B12 is made by microorganisms and that cows are supplemented with cobalt to support sufficient production by gut bacteria. “Many farm animals are also supplemented directly with vitamin B12. Given that fortification of either animal or human food is required for B12 intake, direct fortification of human food or supplementation would be a more efficient use of resources,” it reads.

On the contrary, it points to the cancer risk presented by processed and red meats, which have been classified as class one and two carcinogens, respectively, by the World Health Organization. Moreover, it cites studies that have shown strong links between red meat and type 2 diabetes. Plant-based diets, however, are “not only nutritionally adequate”, but also present better health outcomes, the doctors argue.

“Encouraging a higher consumption of fruit, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts and seeds whilst limiting or avoiding animal-sourced foods reduces the risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, obesity and certain cancers. Replacing animal protein with plant sources of protein is associated with significant improvement in health outcomes, including reduced risk of premature death,” the letter reads.

“Yet the Let’s Eat Balanced campaign has links to suggestive ‘health benefits’ whilst ignoring the guidance to limit meat intake, particularly red and processed meat.”

Meat is not sustainable

The AHDB’s campaign had stated that “sustainability isn’t just about carbon”, and there are “many other things to consider”. It mentioned data showing that transport and energy emissions are higher than livestock in the UK, while the animal agriculture industry accounts for 7% of national GHG emissions.

However, the livestock group left out methane in all of its communications, which is a shorter-lived gas, but 80 times more potent than carbon. The same government report it cited for carbon emissions revealed that agriculture accounted for 48% of the UK’s methane emissions – and while that figure has fallen by 16% from a 1990 baseline, it has largely been at the same level since 2009.

The AHDB is also a supporter of GWP* (global warming potential star), a new metric to measure methane emissions proposed by meat and dairy producers and certain governments. The idea is to replace the current GWP100 system to measure the warming potential of total GHG emissions over a 100-year period with a focus on changes in the rate of emissions between two points in time (usually over a decadal timescale). Critics argue that this is nothing more than a greenwashing tool to allow the industry to understate its impact and avoid climate action

The UK has been heavily hit by climate-change-induced extreme weather, with the recent record amounts of rain leaving the agricultural industry “on the brink”, according to the AHDB itself. It has left many farmers considering quitting the profession altogether, with their confidence at a 14-year low.

Currently, 85% of farmland in the UK is used for animal agriculture, but these foods only provide 48% of the country’s protein and 32% of its calories. “The latest UK-specific research makes it clear that a diet containing animal products is significantly more harmful to the environment than one that does not, with plant-based diets having approximately 25% of the environmental impact of a diet with a high meat intake,” the doctors write.

“In the UK, 70% of our total food-related emissions come from red meat and dairy production. Methane emissions from cows alone will prevent us from limiting global warming to safe levels. Excess consumption of red meat and dairy is leading to 42,000 deaths in the UK annually.”

The financial drawbacks of animal agriculture

The letter highlights a modelling study that shows a ‘plant-based by default’ approach could save the UK’s economically strained and labour-stretched National Health Service (NHS) £74M annually, with significant household savings too if patients are supported in making dietary shifts.

Similar research by the Office of Health Economics estimated that if England were to adopt a completely plant-based diet, the NHS would see a net benefit of up to £18.8B a year. “No other intervention can deliver such significant health benefits alongside cost savings and environmental benefits,” the letter reads.

“As health professionals, we recognise the importance of farmers and the key role they play in the production of healthy and nutritious food whilst being stewards of our land. The countryside will always require farmers, and they need support from their governing bodies to adapt their industry in a way that allows for the restoration of nature and acceleration of carbon sequestration, whilst continuing to provide locally produced plant-based foods,” it continues.

“We encourage AHDB and Defra to engage with healthcare professionals in developing policies and campaigns to support the future of the farming industry that encourages the increased consumption of locally grown fruit, vegetables, beans and pulses, alongside a significant reduction in production and consumption of meat and dairy produce.”

In response, an AHDB representative told the Independent: “Let’s Eat Balanced is a fully evidence-based campaign communicating the nutritional and sustainability benefits of British red meat and dairy in a manner that aligns with the government’s dietary guidelines, as outlined in the Eatwell Guide… Anyone advocating a totally global plant-based diet as a panacea to climate change ignores the fact the realities are far more complex. Solutions lie in a balance of sustainable plant and sustainable meat and sustainable fish production along with a balanced plate approach to diets and portion sizes.”

But the AHDB’s campaign doesn’t make room for much plant-based eating at all – it isn’t encouraging a balance, it is pushing people to eat more meat. As for “sustainable meat”, this really isn’t a thing. Analysis by Our World in Data shows that buying imported beef from Central America in the UK versus buying locally barely makes a difference. What farmers really need to do is reduce meat and dairy production by a third if the UK is to meet its climate goals, according to the WWF.

The UK has been criticised for not centring climate change in its election campaigns this year, but if it is to reach its net zero goal by 2050, a food system transformation is necessary. “This would be invaluable to the health of the environment, the UK public, and to safeguard all our futures,” the letter concludes.

The post Doctors Urge UK Government to Retract ‘Misleading’ Campaign Asking Brits to Eat Meat & Dairy appeared first on Green Queen.

The meat industry’s PR prowess is well-known, but a new study digs deep into the sector’s reliance upon academics and universities to validate its pushback against research linking livestock farming to climate change, and influence government policies in their favour.

The last year has seen several investigations spotlight the animal agriculture industry’s misinformation campaigns and influence on policymaking – whether that’s blocking a ban on caged farming in the EU, crowding out COP28 to ensure favourable decisions, funding education schemes to shape children’s opinions on the sector, or even promoting an emissions metric that would downplay its carbon impact.

But perhaps the livestock lobby’s biggest initiative was to derail a landmark report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 2006, which essentially kickstarted the mainstream awareness of the climate impact of meat and dairy. Called Livestock’s Long Shadow, the research highlighted that livestock farming was responsible for 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

The reaction was binary: environmental activists and groups commended the publication, while the meat and dairy sector issued swift backlash. An investigation by the Guardian has shown how livestock lobbyists had successfully pressured the FAO to water down the environmental implications of animal-derived food, which subsequently led to the UN body revising that figure to 14.5%, and eventually 11%.

One of the report’s major criticisms highlighted an error on the part of the researchers, who had claimed that livestock’s impact on climate change was “an even larger contribution than the transportation sector worldwide” – but they had only analysed the full life-cycle of meat and dairy production, not the transportation industry. One of the authors called this a “slight methodological error” only inserted on request from the FAO press office, which wanted to hype up the report.

However, the damage was done, with mainstream media outlets including the BBC, the Telegraph and CNN calling out the inaccuracy, facilitating the move to discredit the report. It all stemmed from an article co-published by Frank Mitloehner, an animal scientist who is the head of the UC Davis Clarity and Leadership for Environmental Awareness and Research (CLEAR) Center. The FAO report’s authors noted that Mitloehner had “a point”, but suggested his article didn’t challenge any of the other information about livestock’s climate footprint.

Frank Mitloehner and his animal agriculture exploits

Mitloehner is the main focus of new research published in the journal Climate, which highlights how the meat and dairy industry took a page out of the tobacco and fossil fuel industries’ playbook to divert conversations from a product that causes harm. However, the key difference is that while the latter two focused on funding academics who published industry-friendly studies, Big Meat promoted university-affiliated figures who intervene in “public discourse, advocacy, and lobbying efforts”, one of the authors told the New Republic.

“The details of Mitloehner’s rise to prominence show that in the 21st century, it was possible for the animal agriculture industry to help build a reputation of scientific credibility on topics related to climate change and attract national attention for individuals for whom little to none previously existed,” the researchers write.

Mitloehner’s ties with the livestock lobby really began in 2009, when the Beef Checkoff programme – an industry-funded scheme that charges levies to cattle producers for marketing efforts to promote beef consumption – provided him with $26,000 to conduct an environmental impact assessment of the sector. The resulting study, which did not acknowledge the beef industry funding, didn’t dispute the FAO’s evidence, but instead claimed that American livestock’s contribution to US emissions was smaller than that of all livestock on a global scale.

An accompanying press release by UC Davis pointed out the discrepancy between the FAO’s comparison of livestock and transportation emissions, where Mitloehner described Livestock’s Long Shadow as a “lopsided analysis” that “truly confused the issue. “We certainly can reduce our greenhouse gas production, but not by consuming less meat and milk,” he stated, adding that “producing less meat and milk will only mean more hunger in poor countries”.

Since then, he has become a major animal agriculture industry figure, with trade publications calling him “the scientist who debunked Livestock’s Long Shadow” and “the scientist setting the record straight on cows and climate change”, despite him never being a climate scientist.

With over 33,000 followers on Twitter, he has previously advised Obama on agricultural research and policy, and published non-peer-reviewed papers with wide-reaching impact. One of them was credited for keeping a reduction in meat consumption out of the national dietary guidelines – despite Americans eating over six times more meat than recommended in a planet-friendly diet by the Eat-Lancet Commission.

Livestock farming, university centres and the impact on policy

Since 2018, Mitloehner has helmed the CLEAR Center at UC Davis, which has been described as “a well-known Big Ag conspirator”. The centre is funded by the Institute for Feed Education and Research (which has poured in $2.9M to date), and has received nearly $200,000 from the California Cattle Council. Mitloehner has received about $5.5M in research funding from industry groups since 2002, which represents 46% of his total $12M funding reported until 2021.

He has promoted the use of GWP*, a greenhouse gas measurement metric that drastically understates meat and dairy’s climate impact and has been branded as a greenwashing tool by environmental groups. Meanwhile, other researchers at UC Davis published a viral non-peer-reviewed study claiming that cultivated meat is 25 times worse for the environment than beef.

All this has had a sizeable policy impact. Irish government officials cited the cultivated meat study to push back on a proposal to cull 200,000 dairy cows over three years to cut agri-emissions by 25%, while EU countries used it in an Agrifish Council meeting last month to impose restrictions on cultivated meat. Meanwhile, GWP* has already been floated by proponents in New Zealand, Ireland, the US and the UK.

It goes to show the impact of academia on forming public perception and policy. The Climate journal research also looked into another academic centre, Colorado State University’s AgNext, which is headed by Kimberly Stackhouse-Lawson, a former student of Mitloehner’s and chief sustainability officer at JBS USA (a subsidiary of the world’s largest meat company).

Stackhouse-Lawson has said she “worked closely with communications professionals to promote beef’s image and defend beef’s freedom to operate to enhance consumer, influencer and stakeholder trust in beef” in her previous role at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, and noted that her “primary career objective is to expand the role of animal protein in global diets”.

She has appeared in JBS-sponsored content in The Wall Street Journal, Politico and Reuters, none of which mention her previous role as a JBS executive. At AgNext, she has formed industry partnerships, testified to Congress (where she said enhancing sustainability in livestock should only happen if it doesn’t sacrifice “value chain profitability”), and secured funding from multiple quarters. This involves $100,000 from the state of Colorado, $750,000 from industry groups, and $1M from the USDA.

‘Tip of the iceberg’

“Today, CLEAR and AgNext are among the most prominent US university centres engaged in shaping public understanding and public policy related to the livestock industry’s climate impacts,” the researchers wrote. “Industry-funded university-based researchers and centres have helped downplay livestock’s contributions to climate change, increase public trust that the industry is proactively reducing emissions on its own accord, and shape climate policymaking in the industry’s favour.”

Mitloehner called the research “ideological”. “I’m proud of the work I do in the CLEAR Center that is helping to further methane mitigation in livestock,” he told the New Republic. “I understand that some people want to see the livestock sector shrink or disappear, and they believe attacking me will further that cause, but my work and that of the CLEAR Center is moving the needle toward more sustainable food production. I would love to think we all want the same thing, food that nourishes a growing population with a smaller environmental footprint, but it’s clear some are threatened by that notion.”

But Jennifer Jacquet, one of the research’s lead authors, added: “This is the tip of the iceberg in terms of animal ag influence at universities because we were only looking at two universities and the topic of climate change. Once you broaden out to issues like other environmental impacts, nutrition/health, it gets incomprehensibly large.”

It’s clear how successful these efforts have been in influencing policymakers and the public alike. The question is: who can stop them?

The post How the Meat Industry Tapped Into Academia to Influence Climate Policy & Avoid Scrutiny appeared first on Green Queen.

Misinformation is rampant in the food system, with attacks on alternative protein becoming louder and more frequent. Robbie Lockie, founder of the newly formed Freedom Food Alliance, talks about the organisation’s research into meat and dairy’s crusade in a global election year.

Over the last few months, a chunk of investigations have highlighted the link between animal agriculture lobby groups and their influence on policymaking around the world. One highlighted the livestock industry’s ties with EU members, which led to the bloc U-turning on its promised caged farming ban. Another found that the UN FAO watered down its reporting on meat and dairy’s climate impact after pressure from industry groups.

Yet another looked at social media, where powerful far-right figures fuel the culture wars around meat-eating, and highlighted their use of a misleading study into cultivated meat. This was then used by lawmakers in the EU who are trying to restrict cultivated meat, before it has even been approved by the bloc’s food safety regulator.

Now, a new report by consumer advocacy organisation the Freedom Food Alliance (FFA) sheds further light on misinformation and disinformation emanating from the meat and dairy industry, which receives 1,200 times more public funding in the EU than the alternative protein sector, and 800 times more in the US.

A wide-ranging study that covers various examples of misinformation, the research explains how these can lead to policy changes affecting the food system – particularly the alternative protein space – at a time when reducing emissions is paramount and in a year where climate change is a key agenda for elections around the world.

“Animal agriculture giants are waging a disinformation war, threatening public health and the planet,” said lead researcher Nicholas Carter. “Our report exposes their tactics of denial and delay and underscores the need for urgent action.”

But first, let’s distinguish between misinformation and disinformation. The former can often start without malice, and could be “a simple misunderstanding or an error”, according to FFA founder Robbie Lockie. “Disinformation is a beast of a different nature, meticulously crafted with the intent to mislead and manipulate,” he adds. “It’s a deliberate act to cloud public perception, and it’s crucial we distinguish between these two to fight back effectively.”

Big Beef’s viral disinformation campaigns to promote meat

The report is expansive and looks at numerous instances of the livestock industry’s successful attempts to disinform policymakers and the public alike about the alternative protein sector. One of these is the #Yes2Meat campaign, which was a coordinated backlash attempt against the 2019 EAT-Lancet Commission report. Backed by scientists from across the globe, the study recommended halving the consumption of red meat and limiting dairy for a healthier and more sustainable food system.

But a week before the full report came out, a campaign coordinated by the UC Davis CLEAR Center – founded and funded by livestock feed organisation IFEEDER – initiated the #Yes2Meat hashtag to dominate online conversations and spark conspiracy theories against the EAT-Lancet research. The effort was successful: response to the report was 10 times more likely to be negative than positive or neutral, thanks to the cultivation of doubt, false narratives and deflection to other issues.

Lockie calls this the most “glaring” case study explored by the FFA report. “It wasn’t just an opposition to the Planetary Health Diet; it was a calculated attack against the very science that guides us towards healthier, more environmentally friendly dietary choices,” he explains. “This campaign sought to engrain the notion that meat is indispensable, blatantly ignoring the overwhelming evidence of its environmental and health ramifications.”

He adds: “The attempts to sever the established connection between livestock farming and climate change are among the most audacious disinformation campaigns we’ve encountered.” You only need to look as far as the national Beef Checkoff programme run by the Cattlemen’s Beef Promotion and Research Board. While it began as an optional tax in 1985, it now mandates cattle producers to pay $1 for each live cow sold, which goes into a marketing fund designed to increase the demand for beef.

The Beef Checkoff has spent $42M on its campaigns for this year alone, which are creeping into schools to influence children. The programme has used the money to promote beef – which is the food with the highest carbon footprint – with viral campaigns like ‘Beef. It’s What’s for Dinner’ promoting “regenerative grazing” and containing messaging like “meat substitutes are just that – substitutes”. It also got healthcare professionals to advocate for beef consumption.

Other campaigns have downplayed the effects of meat production on the climate – notably, the sector pushing to use a new metric to calculate greenhouse gas emissions, called GWP*, which is skewed in its favour and has won a lot of support from politicians in several countries. But experts have warned that this is all but a misleading attempt to greenwash consumers.

“These efforts deliberately twist scientific findings and amplify uncertainties, all to stall the essential policy changes needed for reducing meat consumption and moving towards a sustainable food system,” says Lockie. “It’s a stark reminder of the lengths some will go to protect vested interests over the well-being of our planet.”

Using media, social networks and AI for disinformation

News media and social networks can be highly effective disinformation tools out there, and Big Meat has been using them to its advantage. The report highlights the underreporting of animal agriculture in climate coverage – 93% of these stories never mention livestock farming – and how the media can reinforce industry narratives, oversimplify complex initiatives, and at times promote false information.

Big Meat’s influence shapes up in the form of sponsored posts and promotional content too – sometimes created by its own members, and in other instances produced by media outlets. And this obviously influences consumer opinion, with a review of 285 million social media posts revealing that people find alternative protein unhealthy and bad for the planet, with dietary shifts framed as an ‘elite’ agenda to promote the culture wars surrounding these themes.

The FFA report outlines how industry-funded social media influencers and bots are creating the illusion of a balanced debate despite scientific evidence repeatedly imploring a dietary change towards more plants and fewer animals. Speaking of bots, the influence of artificial intelligence (AI) is growing by the day.

AI bots can exploit social media algorithms to increase their visibility and mimic human behaviour to spread convincing, viral disinformation – a problem that has been exacerbated by Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now X) and the subsequent staff cuts and removal of content moderation roles. There is one striking example here: since December 2022 (two months after Musk finalised the deal), #ClimateScam has outperformed both #ClimateCrisis and #ClimateEmergency every month on the platform, both in terms of retweets and likes.

“The advancement of AI brings about a new frontier in the dissemination of disinformation,” says Lockie. “The capability of AI to produce content that is convincingly real, yet fundamentally false, is alarming.” The tech has also been accused of being speciesist, which highlights an “urgent need for ethical frameworks and transparency” in how it’s used, especially to thwart potential misuse in spreading harmful narratives within the food sector.

As for social media, Lockie believes there’s a “glimmer of hope” with governments and these platforms beginning to address the tide of disinformation. “The report calls for a firmer stance through enhanced regulations, robust fact-checking, and a united front among policymakers, NGOs, and the tech sector. It’s about laying down the groundwork to dismantle the mechanisms that allow disinformation to flourish,” he states.

The ultra-processed food debate

Another of the issues highlighted by the FFA is the misconceptions about plant-based meat and ultra-processed food. For years, the livestock industry has criticised meat alternatives’ long ingredient lists as shorthand for ‘unhealthy’. The Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), a meat industry interest group, has been running coordinated attack ads since 2019, taking aim at their processed nature.

One of its ads pit plant-based meat against dog food, with a side-by-side comparison of the ingredient lists asking consumers to guess which is which. Perhaps its biggest commercial came during the 2020 Super Bowl, where children in a Spelling Bee contest struggled with words like methylcellulose, a common emulsifier in meat alternatives. “If you can’t spell it or pronounce it,” concluded the ad, “maybe you shouldn’t be eating it.”

While the plant-based industry has hit back, the CCF’s misinformation efforts have been successful, clouding consumers’ perception of these meat analogues, who group them with other UPFs and classify them as unhealthy. But experts have noted that not all UPFs are bad. “[Such marketing] campaigns play into concerns some people have around foods that are new – often called ‘food neophobia‘… Some campaigns really hone in on this, by using words like ‘fake’ and ‘unnatural’ to describe plant-based meats (which are safe, nutritious foods),” Churchill Fellow Jenny Chapman told Green Queen earlier this month.

The meat industry also has clever ways to disregard the health benefits of plant-based meat. Take industry leader Beyond Meat, which last week announced a recipe overhaul for its beef and burger products, which – among other aspects – results in lower saturated fat and sodium content. But speaking to analysts in its Q4 earnings call on Tuesday, CEO Ethan Brown highlighted the deceptive misinformation tactics of Big Meat.

“A favourite target is sodium levels, and the sleight of hand employed is to compare the Beyond Burger, which is seasoned, to an unseasoned ground beef burger,” he said. “The current Beyond Burger contains 17% of the daily recommended value of sodium, which when appropriately compared to seasoned beef burgers, often means less, not more sodium.”

He added: “Nevertheless, Beyond IV achieves a 20% reduction in the amount of sodium, with the sodium content now registering at 14% of daily values. Quick math reveals that even if you were to have seven of the Beyond IV burgers in a single day, this consumption alone would not exceed the daily recommended value of sodium.”

How to combat meat and dairy misinformation

“Without decisive and collective action, we stand on precarious ground, especially as we navigate the controversies surrounding alternative proteins,” says Lockie. “Disinformation campaigns could seize on consumer fears, further muddying the waters.”

The FFA offers a range of solutions. Media literacy is key, with consumers’ ability to evaluate information critically a major step towards battling disinformation. The report argues that scientists and experts should actively engage with the public to share accurate and accessible information, while transparent communication about research processes can help prevent misconceptions.

There is a call for cross-sector collaboration to ensure a cohesive and consistent response against meat and dairy misinformation. Meanwhile, technology can be used for good too – think websites and tools that check for misinformation about the climate credentials of meat, algorithmic and automatic detection of fake news, and AI models to analyse aerial images of methane over dairy farms, for example.

The recommendations further include lobbying, community outreach and educational campaigns on behalf of non-governmental organisations, while administrative bodies themselves could set legal accountability measures for downplaying climate impacts, regulate industry climate transition plans, incentivise herd reduction, and update school curricula to remove livestock promotion and include climate- and nutrition-based food education.

“Our report also sees a silver lining,” notes Lockie. “An informed public and stronger regulatory frameworks could significantly dampen the impact of these campaigns, fostering a more transparent dialogue around our food choices and their impact on the world.”

He doubles down on the importance of public education. “Our fight against disinformation is incomplete without empowering consumers with knowledge. The report advocates for making information about food choices transparent, accessible, and engaging,” he says.

“It’s about enlightening individuals with the science behind their diets and enhancing digital literacy to enable a more critical evaluation of information sources. Knowledge is power, and in this case, it’s the power to make informed choices about what we eat.”

The post The Livestock Industry Spreads Disinformation to Shape Policies – Here’s How to Fix It appeared first on Green Queen.

With 2024 a year of major elections around the world, Caitlin Smith, senior campaigner at corporate watchdog Changing Markets Foundation, highlights the non-profit’s research into alternative protein misinformation on social media, and why it’s more important than ever for our leaders to take a stand for human and planetary health.

Despite high levels of red and processed meats being linked to negative health outcomes like cancer, diabetes, and heart disease, alternative proteins continue to struggle to break through the public narrative and have also increasingly become the target of numerous social media attacks. Our recent investigation, Truth, Lies, and Culture Wars, offers some insights into why and our new explainer video provides a snapshot of social media posts that our investigation (together with Ripple Research) discovered. 

Over a 14-month period (June 2022 to July 2023), we found over one million examples of misinformation surrounding meat and dairy mostly on X (formerly Twitter), with spikes in misinformation around key political and media moments. 78% of misinformation focused on ‘disparaging’ meat and dairy alternatives, pushing forward cultural polarisation and attacking alternative proteins and diets as unhealthy or bad for the environment.

Conversely, 22% of misinformation ‘enhanced’ meat and dairy, exaggerating their health benefits, such as praising ‘the carnivore diet’ and claiming vegan diets would make you unhealthy. To a smaller extent, this misinformation also focused on the environmental benefits of meat and dairy.

This is a big claim, considering methane is around 80 times more warming than C02 over a 20-year time period, with animal agriculture being the single largest source of man-made methane emissions globally. This potent gas is already estimated to be responsible for 0.5°C of warming since industrialisation, and addressing methane emissions urgently is essential to ensure we don’t pass climate tipping points. One of the readily available ways to do this and to improve people’s health is to reduce meat and dairy consumption in favour of a more plant-based diet – not something that Big Meat and Dairy want to hear.

Debunking livestock-industry-backed misinformation campaigns

We were able to trace misinformation back to people who have established financial links with the meat and dairy industry. For example, professor of animal science Frank Mitloehner, who leads the industry-funded CLEAR Centre at UC Davis, has pushed misinformation aimed at undermining alternative proteins by sharing quizzes comparing Beyond and Impossible burgers to dog food.

A similar narrative has been successfully pushed by Rick Berman, a lobbyist and the founder of the Centre for Consumer Freedom – an outlet funded by the meat industry and restaurant chains, which placed ‘Fake Meat or Dog Food?’ adverts in prominent newspapers, as well as placing an ad questioning the ingredients in “fake meat” during the 2020 Super Bowl. The CCF not only attacks these products, but also links proposals for shifting diets to an ‘elite conspiracy’, claiming that these are narratives put forward by people like Bill Gates to get you to eat bugs and shift away from meat consumption for their own profit-making.

Other examples include adverts funded by milk processors and fronted by celebrity Aubrey Plaza, disparaging plant-based milk alternatives, calling them ‘Wood Milk’. A campaign advert, which has had a complaint made against it with the US Department of Agriculture, suggesting the advert could be illegal.

Another tactic that was prominently featured in our research was to undermine scientific research on the impact of animal agriculture and promote other types of research to discredit alternative proteins. A pre-peer-reviewed study by UC Davis on cultivated meat claimed that this was 25% worse for the environment than beef. The study’s media journey started when it was published in an article by the New Scientist magazine on 9 May 2023, which lead to many other media stories.

Though it has since been criticised by a number of academics for its methodology and misleading comparisons, the study and related media coverage caused a huge spike in social media conversations and was seized upon by right-wing media and political figures, which linked it with the various conspiracy theories.

Since our report was launched, the findings of the discredited UC Davies study, which still hasn’t been peer-reviewed, even made its way into the official discussion documents submitted by Austria, France and Italy to the Council of the European Union, claiming that investment into cultivated meat should be stopped because it could be more damaging for the environment than producing conventional meat.

Online misinformation has hurt the alternative protein sector

Misinformation surrounding meat and dairy has not only appeared during policymaking discussions, but it has also impacted the profits of plant-based meat companies. Pricing challenges with many meat burgers, still much cheaper than plant-based alternatives, have been compounded by the lack of clarity on the health benefits of some alternative proteins. When households are under increasing pressure with the ongoing cost of living crisis, the move to switch from plant-based alternatives to processed meat, appears to have been swayed by this lack of clarity on the health implications for the consumer.

Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown was quoted in the Guardian last year stating: “This change in perception is not without encouragement from interest groups who have succeeded in seeding doubt and fear around the ingredients and process used to create our and other plant-based meats.” Granted, this is the opinion of the opposing side, but it is still a strong indication of the impact that misinformation is having. Investment to influence the public narrative is high, even going as far as developing an MBA, Masters of Beef Advocacy, to educate individuals to push industry favourable information online.

Our research found that a mere 50 accounts captured 50% of engagement with misinformation online, and nearly a quarter of all the misinformation we found focused on pushing the negative health impacts of alternative proteins, across meat and dairy alternatives. This included focusing on the ingredients and production processes – highlighting large factories and labs, nutrition, claims that cultivated meat causes cancer, negative health outcomes from consuming alternative proteins, and capitalising on trends like ‘frankenfood’. 

As elections across the world loom this year, including in the EU, the fight for the dominant narrative is heating up. Misinformation spikes at key political moments, and a good example of this, highlighted in our research, was the attempt to reduce livestock numbers in the Netherlands in 2022, after a High Court ruling that nitrogen pollution needed to be urgently reduced. In response to the ruling, the Government offered financial buyouts to farmers, budgeting 25 billion EUR to support this process. However, opposition to the policy was significant and, at the same time, misinformation online was high, with much of the narrative linked to conspiracy theories.

In this instance, misinformation focused on conspiracies about land-grabbing from the Government, feeding into the far-right agenda of populist politicians like Geert Wilders, advocating against environmental policies. Ironically, the majority of voices on this topic which were feeding Wilder’s narratives, were coming from outside of the Netherlands – something which might ordinarily be against Wilder’s usual position on ‘foreign influence’.

Far-right commentators like Eva Vlaardingerbroek were also prominent voices during this time. Vlaardingerbroek is an ex-member of far-right political party Forum for Democracy (FVD) and has been invited to the Tucker Carlson Show and Fox News to comment on the struggles of Dutch farmers. She is firmly behind misinformation narratives, such as that livestock does not have any impact on climate change and that this is all part of an elite agenda to control people’s lives and to make people weak.

Alt-protein has a big hill to climb, but politicians need to stand up

Online misinformation on meat and dairy is benefitting big industries and there are many overlaps in the narrative between misinfluencers and the meat and dairy industry interests. In the EU alone, the climate and environmental policy U-turns that have taken place have been stark. By the Commission’s own accounting, many of the flagship ‘Farm to Fork’ initiatives have been dropped, and as the Commission comes to the end of its term, the far right in Europe has hailed this as a win for farmers.

When EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen announced the pesticide reduction policy was scrapped, Bayer saw an immediate increase in the value of its shares. Topics like cultivated meat have been utilised as an easy scapegoat to distract from the bigger issues of the devastating climate and environmental impact of industrial farming and the significant health impact of overconsumption of red and processed meat. In the EU, meat and dairy production is responsible for 53% of the bloc’s total methane emissions – yet they remain a policy blind spot.

With such powerful opponents, the alternative protein industry has a big hill to climb to reach the same level of influence across its marketing, lobbying, and online presence. Although there has been some pushback by companies like Beyond Meat, it is difficult for this nascent industry to fight the influence big farm lobbies and big meat and dairy companies have on media outlets and social media platforms to counter misinformation online.

The public and politicians must have the accurate information they need to make decisions about our health and the environment. Watch our explainer to find out more about the kinds of misinformation to look out for and whose interests it’s putting forward – it’s probably not yours.

The post Op-Ed: What Do the Meat Industry, Far-Right and Major Internet Conspiracy Theories Have in Common? appeared first on Green Queen.

Today’s kids are more vulnerable to climate change than any generation, and thus more inclined to have consumption behaviours that are kinder to the planet – the meat industry is trying to derail that by influencing the education system.

Writing for the Press Herald in 2022, food writer Avery Yale Kamila had a forecast to make: “Knowing quite a few members of Gen Alpha, I predict these young people will look at Gen Z’s love of vegan meals and say: “Hold my soy milk,” before showing us how veg-forward a generation can get.”

It underlined the importance of sustainability and planet-friendly habits among the world’s youngest generation. In 2019, one report found that 67% of six- to nine-year-olds wanted their central career path to be directed towards saving the planet. And that makes sense too: set to be the largest age demographic group ever, Generation Alpha will experience more adverse climate change impacts than the rest of us.

A 2021 analysis showed that people born in 2020 onwards could face up to seven times more extreme weather events – especially heatwaves – than those born in 1960. To Kamila’s point then, this is already beginning to shape how this cohort lives. According to one survey (also from 2021), 72% of millennials with children said their families are eating plant-based meats more often. And kids’ behaviour is extending to adults too – 80% of parents have been influenced by their Gen Alpha children to change their consumption behaviours or actions to be more eco-conscious.

Meat is notoriously bad for the climate – it accounts for 60% of the entire food system’s emissions, while the wider livestock industry takes up 77% of all agricultural land, despite producing only 18% of the world’s calories and 37% of its protein. Beef, meanwhile, is the worst of the lot in terms of supply chain emissions, with a footprint more than double that of the next on the list.

So naturally, Big Beef has a PR problem, especially amongst Gen Alpha. But it is an impressionable group, and it’s why the industry is hoping to change kids’ opinions on the industry.

How the beef industry is influencing teachers

As reported by Wired, the American Farm Bureau Foundation for Agriculture (AFBFA) – a beef industry group – has been producing lesson plans, resources, in-person events, and webinars for the last eight years as part of a campaign to influence teachers across the US to bolster beef’s rep.

This is because the AFBFA is apprehensive about science teachers – and subsequently, millions of students – getting exposed to “misinformation”, “propaganda” and “one-sided or inaccurate” information, when they “turn toward the internet for information when designing lessons”.

The group wants to increase “agricultural awareness and literacy in teachers and students”, which it says will lead to a higher level of “consumer trust and interest in the beef industry”. On similar lines, a funding document reveals that it hopes to leave educators with a “more positive perception” of the cattle sector.

To illustrate the programme’s “ability to build beef demand protect beef’s image”, the AFBFA refers to a 2021 survey of science teachers, which found that 82% have a positive perception of how cattle are raised for beef production, and 85% believe the industry is very important to society. Those who attended one of the group’s programmes are eight percentage points more likely to trust positive statements about beef production.

This extends to children too, with 92% of educators saying AFBFA programmes have “furthered their students’ understanding of the importance of the beef industry to society”. The group’s executive director, Daniel Meloy, hopes that this programme will help students “gain a greater understanding of agriculture through science education”, according to Wired.

This is evidenced in the lesson plans provided by the AFBFA. One of these directs students to beef industry resources like BeefNutrition.org and FactsAboutBeef.com – both of these are funded by the Beef Checkoff scheme, a national marketing programme designed to increase demand for beef both domestically and internationally. The AFBFA is also a contractor to Beef Checkoff, which has spent $42M this year alone across its initiatives – these amounts are approved by beef industry groups the Cattlemen’s Beef Board and the Federation of State Beef Councils.

Another lesson plan directs students to create a presentation for a conservation agency introducing cattle into their ecological preserve. Meanwhile, younger students practice sums by adding the acreage of cow pastures in one worksheet, while another one aimed at kids aged 8-11 asks teachers to “remind students that lean beef is a nutritious source of protein that can be incorporated in daily meals”.

The AFBFA campaign further includes teachers’ visits to ranches or other parts of the supply chain – last year, 29 educators and school administrators attended a three-day event by the Colorado Beef Council in Denver (which included three webinars as well). It followed similar events taking place in Minneapolis, Nashville, Oklahoma City, and Syracuse, New York since 2019. Meloy said the programme is aimed at high- and middle-school teachers, with each of the AFBFA’s On the Farm immersive events hosting up to 30 of them. And participants at the most recent event represented over 70,000 students.

One of the AFBFA’s funding documents reveals that educators’ perceptions of beef changed positively after attending an On the Farm experience. “They shared that their existing perception of beef production was that of unsustainable agricultural practices carried out using an uncaring corporate-style management structure,” it reads, adding that the programme allowed them to observe how passionate farmers are about the health and quality of their animals, and how much science and tech goes into farming.

A blatant attempt at misinformation

The funding document mentions the implementation of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) in 44 US states, which sets guidelines to encourage teachers to emphasise how science is used in a real-world context. The AFBFA hopes to use this shift as a way to provide teachers with learning materials about the beef sector.

“NGSS requires teachers to approach challenging topics such as climate change and sustainability. Teachers and students are receiving information from educationally trusted sources that do not represent agriculture accurately or in a balanced way, and beef production is often the target of the misinformation,” it says. “To achieve balance and to ensure the accuracy of information, a concerted effort must be made to engage teachers in the conversation around these topics.”

The document further revealed that the AFBFA, whose 2024 campaign is set to cost $800,000, plans to strengthen its relationship with State Beef Councils to reach as many people as possible – 2.5 million educators and a further 125,000 key opinion leaders this year. “This programme’s resources do not promote or encourage students to make a predetermined decision,” Meloy told Wired. “Scientific accuracy is our focus and is demanded by the K-12 Framework for Science Education and built into the NGSS.”

But “scientific accuracy” seems like a bit of a stretch, when you consider that AFBFA’s classroom resources feature images of cattle in open fields, sidestepping the reality of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), where 70% of American cows (66 million) are held for at least 45 days. These are confined spaces that house animals in suffocating conditions without the freedom (or really, the space) to roam.

The meat and dairy industry – with its billions of dollars in government subsidies – will continue to run the education sector ragged in its hope of influencing the leaders of tomorrow. And that’s despite the attempts being blatantly subjective, biased and misinformed. But it’s critical that these efforts are curtailed – you don’t want Gen Alpha Americans to grow up and think eating meat isn’t harmful to the climate, like the current adults do.

The AFBFA says its campaign “will lead to a deeper understanding and appreciation of the beef industry as current and future consumers become better equipped to sort fact from fiction” – but maybe the foundation needs to go on its own fact-finding mission.

The post Meat Misinformation: How Big Beef is Funding Education Schemes to Influence Kids appeared first on Green Queen.

To combat misinformation, ease consumer confusion and offer balance to the discussion around plant-based meat and ultra-processed foods, Green Queen has published a free, comprehensive resource guide on the topic in an easy-to-use FAQ format.

Are all plant-based meats ultra-processed foods? How often should you eat vegan meat alternatives? What are the limitations of the NOVA classification? What does research get wrong about these subjects?

If you’ve ever had a similar concern about the food you eat, you’re not alone. For years, everyone has been asking questions about plant-based meat, ultra-processed foods (or UPFs), and whether the former falls into the latter category.

In a consumer landscape flooded with contradictory dietary information in the media, misinformation on social networks, and unverified claims by online influencers, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and confused. Take this UK poll from last year, for example, where 70% of the 2,127 respondents hadn’t heard of UPFs before the survey. And while 21% said a “healthy, balanced diet” shouldn’t include UPFs, there was a lack of understanding over which foods can be classified as such.

It’s important to provide clarity on the topic. After all, UPFs make up 57% of an average Brit’s diet, and up to 80% when it comes to children or people with lower incomes. And it’s not just the UK, of course: 73% of the US food supply is made up of these foods. According to estimates, UPFs comprise 60% of an average American’s daily calories, and 70% of what the country’s children eat.

Jenny Zegler, director at Mintel Food & Drink, highlighted the public confusion in November, telling FoodNavigator: “34% of US adults say highly processed food is the top concern… there’s a need for clear communication to help consumers make informed decisions about how processed and ultra-processed food and drink fit into their diets. Processed food isn’t necessarily something we can avoid. Almost every single thing in the grocery store is processed somehow.”

One of those things that have come under increased scrutiny is plant-based meats, whose critics have knocked their ingredient lists and ‘overprocessed’ nature. But unlike most UPFs – especially the processed red meats they intend to replace – meat alternatives typically contain a high amount of dietary fibre, are free of cholesterol, and are low in saturated fat, sugar and calories.

To dispel the myths and provide a comprehensive outlook of the subject, Green Queen founding editor Sonalie Figueiras, in collaboration with researcher Marlana Malerich and scientist Alice Johnson, have published the ultimate resource for UPFs and alt-meat products. Presented in the form of FAQs, they touch upon a wide variety of questions, and provide science-backed, fact-based information to inform readers about how UPFs work, why they aren’t all the same, and how they’re connected with plant-based meats.

What are ultra-processed foods?

But wait, what are UPFs in the first place? In 2009, researchers from Brazil led by nutrition and public health professor Dr Carlos Monteiro proposed a framework to classify edibles into four subgroups, called the NOVA classification. The first group contains unprocessed or minimally processed foods, which includes fresh, frozen and dried produce, milk and plain yoghurt, natural spices, legumes, grains, nuts and seeds, as well as foodstuffs like pasta, couscous, flour, fungi, meat and fish.

The second category – “processed culinary ingredients” – comprises elements derived from the first group or from natural sources, such as seed, nut and vegetable oils, butter, salt, sugar, vinegar, maple syrup, and honey. Meanwhile, the third group contains processed foods, defined as those produced by adding these culinary ingredients to unprocessed foods or made using baking, boiling, canning or non-alcoholic fermentation, for example. These can contain non-cosmetic additives that enhance shelf life or prevent bacteria: think fresh bread and cheese, canned vegetables, fruits in syrup, cured meats, salted nuts, etc.

The final category – you guessed it – is UPFs, which constitute industrial formulations and techniques like extrusion or pre-frying, combined with cosmetic additives and often using substances of little culinary use, such as high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils or modified starch. Most ice creams, cereals, flavoured yoghurts, and – of course – plant-based meats all fall into this category. These products are omnipresent in our diets and food system but are often confused with ‘processed’ food – a category most food falls into. The flour, white rice and olive oil you cook with are all processed to some degree, but they’re not classed as UPFs.

The discourse around UPFs has amplified since British infectious diseases physician Dr Chris van Tulleken‘s book, Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn’t Food, came out in April 2023. Here, he suggests that large food companies are pushing consumers towards an increasingly processed diet.

Experts have found that UPFs can raise the risk of heart disease, stroke, obesity, type 2 diabetes, breast and colorectal cancer, and hypertension. But some have pushed back against a simplistic black-and-white perspective on these foods, calling them necessary to feed the world and arguing that the lack of an agreed definition spurs confusion about what is or isn’t a UPF.

Others have noted that the NOVA system is based on the degree of processing of a certain food, but does not speak to nutrition. A study published in The Lancet last year adds further nuance: basing its findings on the dietary and disease history of 266,666 people in seven European countries, it suggested that some UPFs can be good for you.

Green Queen’s ultimate list of FAQs about ultra-processed foods

It’s in this vein that Green Queen partnered with food and climate researchers Marlana Malerich and Alice Johnson – with support from Amy Williams, digital communications manager at the Good Food Institute – to create the evidence-backed FAQ resource, allowing consumers to break down the intricacies and make informed dietary decisions, specifically around alt-meat.

“One of the most common questions we get from our Green Queen audience is about whether plant-based meats are healthy,” said Figueiras. “Expressing the nuance around plant-based meats and ultra-processed foods can be tricky, which is why we wanted to create this comprehensive FAQ guide to cover all the possible questions on the topic with answers that are balanced and backed by the scientific literature.”

The guide covers everything you need to know about the subject – from UPF definitions, limitations of and alternatives to the NOVA classification system, and nutritional profiles and ingredient composition of plant-based meats, to the origin of the UPF and alt-meat debate (including who is funding media campaigns on the topic).

“Existing research suggests that plant-based meat products have favourable health benefits, especially when used as a substitute for animal analogues,” says Malerich. “However, the nutrition content varies depending on the brand and ingredients.”

Johnson adds: “Whilst further scientific studies are needed on novel protein sources, preliminary findings suggest that choosing plant-based alternatives over conventional meat could offer benefits for a variety of reasons.”

With consumers becoming increasingly aware of the links between diet, health and the environment, understanding the true nature of UPFs and plant-based meat is paramount. Green Queen’s guide serves as an essential tool for health enthusiasts, food industry professionals, regulators and reporters alike.

Access Green Queen’s Complete Guide to Ultra-Processed Food and Plant-Based Meat.

The post Not All UPFs are Equal: Green Queen Unveils FAQ Guide for Plant-Based Meat & Ultra-Processed Foods appeared first on Green Queen.

A host of studies suggesting positive outcomes for the livestock industry’s claims to climate neutrality are highly misleading, given they use a methane measurement tool that significantly undermines their emissions impact.

The US cattle industry hasn’t caused any additional warming since 1986, while dairy sheep and goats in Europe haven’t done so since 1990. California’s dairy sector, meanwhile, just needs methane emissions to be reduced by 1% every year to become climate-neutral by 2031. In Australia, sheep meat is already climate-neutral, and will continue to contribute to cooling as per the Paris Agreement.

These are the findings of peer-reviewed studies published within the last two years. They’re claims celebrated and recirculated by livestock industry organisations and publications, painted as a gotcha moment for the anti-meaters and alt-proteiners. Where are your superior climate credentials now, huh?

But a new study has called these statements highly misleading, as they make use of a controversial emissions measurement metric that changes how the true environmental impact of animal agriculture is looked at. For ages, governments and scientists have been using a metric called GWP100, which measures the global warming potential of greenhouse gas emissions over a 100-year period. Lately, though, some have presented an alternative, GWP*, which focuses on changes in the rate of emissions between two points in time (usually over a decadal timescale) rather than the absolute emissions.

This is because, as the proponents of GWP* argue, methane is a short-lived gas, with a lifespan of up to 12 years, compared to hundreds of years for carbon. So the suggestion is that it’s unfair to compare the two gases. The scientists who developed GWP* say it’s a more accurate way to measure the effect of methane (or CH4) on the planet, but the problem is that while methane has 80 times the impact of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period, it is still 28 times more potent over a 100-year timescale.

The new study, published in the Environmental Research Letters journal, shows that academic researchers have been using GWP* as a metric for the livestock industry’s climate impact, minimising their historical contribution by centring focus on current trends over total emissions.

Livestock-friendly research leverages GWP* loopholes

This creates two loopholes, according to climate policy researcher and political studies professor Ryan Katz-Rosene. “If your CH4 emissions trajectory over [20 years] is steady or even negative, you come out looking real good,” he told DeSmog. “But that completely erases the historical legacy of CH4 emissions growth before that (which is what occurred in most industrialized economies). GWP* essentially allows those industrialised economies to start with an unfair hand.

“The second loophole is of course the way it could​ disincentivise greater CH4 cuts. ‘We’re already climate compliant, why should we cut CH4 further?’”,” he added. And both these loopholes are being exploited, according to the study, which highlighted six journals that used GWP* to equate stabilised methane emissions to carbon neutrality, even if said emissions remain high.

For example, in 2021, one study showed the climate effects of sheep farming in Australia, finding that the industry’s emissions had stabilised in 2020 and that meant it wasn’t causing additional warming, making the country’s sheep industry “climate-neutral”. And yes, while there was no further heating on the part of the industry from 2019 to 2020, that doesn’t mean sheep production didn’t affect the climate anymore. Improving over your previous emissions doesn’t make you climate-neutral – there’s still a lot of methane in the air thanks to sheep.

Similarly, research in 2022 used GWP* to suggest that dairy cattle in the US can become carbon-neutral in under 20 years by reducing absolute emissions by 23% on farms and increasing milk productivity by 30% for each cow. But this is misleading, since overall warming from the dairy industry would only keep increasing in this time, and warming the planet much more than what it is today, despite being labelled as “climate neutral” as a result of GWP* calculations.

Frank Mitloehner, a co-author of this report who has been closely linked to the livestock sector, sidestepped the issue of these claims being misleading, but acknowledged that absolute emissions are important. He told DeSmog: “We will absolutely need to continue using GWP100 as it tells us things other metrics can’t, but we can do so in tandem with GWP* to get a more accurate picture of the impact methane emissions have on our climate.”

This is echoed by Myles Allen, an Oxford scientist who helped create GWP*. He explained that this kind of research is not how the metric was built to be used: “It was proposed as a way of using the information provided by GWP100 to work out warming impacts, and that remains what it is for. It’s a supplement, it’s additional information.”

He added: “If you’re trying to use [GWP*] to say what the responsibilities of a sector are, without consideration of anything else — like the history of a sector, the wealth of a sector, and the other impacts that sector might have had on the environment — then I think that’s inappropriate.”

Like a house on fire

“The climate neutrality cited in these reports is defined as having no additional warming over time,” added Michelle Cain, another Oxford scientist who developed GWP*. “For industries which have a large component of methane emissions, this is not the same as the industry not existing at all. Obviously, stopping the methane emissions entirely would lead to even lower temperatures than reducing the methane emissions by a fraction.”

Donnison added that climate neutral claims suggest a warming balance that doesn’t exist, with only continued, aggressive methane cuts offsetting the other emissions from livestock. Claiming to be “carbon neutral” when continued reduction is required indefinitely “is an oxymoron”. And since methane is a rapid driver of climate change – responsible for 30% of post-industrial temperature rises and about half a degree of warming – significant reductions arr necessary. Livestock itself accounts for a third of all methane emissions.

A report by the Changing Markets Foundation last month also outlined how the meat and dairy industry as well as governments are pushing to use GWP* as a methane measurement tool, which could let companies like Fonterra and Tyson claim climate neutrality. And trade groups and policymakers in New Zealand, Ireland, the US and the UK are keen on the metric and hoping to make it an international standard. The UN FAO, meanwhile, has already been under fire after an investigation revealed that it censored work on methane emissions reporting after pressure from the livestock lobby.

“If GWP* is accepted for corporate accounting of emissions, this could allow companies to greenwash small emissions reductions as a significant achievement,” she adds. “Consumers are already inundated with claims such as carbon-neutral milk, climate-friendly beef, etc.,” Nusa Urbancic, CEO of the Changing Markets Foundation, told Green Queen.

“If this metric gets traction in the corporate sector, I can imagine that these exaggerated claims will get an additional boost. They would then have to be judged by individual consumer authorities on their merits, so I think if any company is brave enough to make such a claim, it could result in some interesting legal cases.”

Donnison told DeSmog that the livestock industry’s claims of a climate-neutral future create a situation akin to a house on fire, where someone who’s pouring gas on the fire wants credit for pouring a little less. “You can say, ‘Well, I’m not going to add further to the fire anymore.’ But what about all the existing damage you’ve caused up until that point?”

The post Too Good to Be True: How the Livestock Sector is Misusing Climate Neutrality Claims appeared first on Green Queen.

An analysis of 285 million posts on social media has shown how conspiracy theories, junk science, and pro-meat and -dairy posts are driving a misinformation campaign against climate-friendly food and alternative proteins. Here are 12 striking facts and takeaways.

Commissioned by the non-profit Changing Markets Foundation, the largest-ever analysis of online meat and dairy misinformation has revealed how nearly a million misleading posts attacked figures and organisations like Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum (WEF), scientific findings about the effects of animal agriculture on the environment, and the health and climate benefits of plant-based and cultivated proteins.

Swiss data firm Ripple Research analysed 285 million social media posts – mostly on Twitter/X, but also on Reddit and other blogs and forums – and found that 948,000 either bent the truth about meat and dairy, or attacked veganism and alternative proteins, in an effort that has drawn comparisons to big oil misinformation.

It comes just a day before world leaders will convene at COP28 in Dubai, which will be the UN’s first food-centric climate summit and serve mostly meatless food: “We traced online attacks on alternative proteins and posts that exaggerate the benefits of meat and dairy directly to industry and its representatives,” said Changing Markets Foundation senior campaigner Maddy Haughton-Boakes.

“A large volume of conspiracy theories and culture war content about food and farming came from those on the political far-right rather than industry. But the two have a shared agenda, to downplay the science and weaken regulation. This ultimately maintains and even enhances the status quo of high meat and dairy consumption with low regulation.”

Here are 12 striking facts from the investigation:

1. 78% of posts went on the attack against veganism and science

Over three-quarters (78%) of the misinformation posts were classed as ‘disparaging’, which involves narratives to discredit plant-based food and attack scientific research about the negative impacts of meat and dairy.

2. Conspiracy theories against ‘The Great Reset’ reigned supreme

A total of 37% (350,465) of posts were heavily conspiratorial, projecting that the global elite planned and managed the Covid-19 pandemic to bring down the global economy and establish a socialist world government. These theories still exist, and connect climate, food, and agriculture choices to a scheme to weaken humanity and maintain control.

3. WEF and Bill Gates were frequent misinformation targets

Many posts about The Great Reset suggested a coordinated effort to enforce radical dietary change to transform people into weakened, ‘diseased subjects’ by bodies like the WEF. Climate and diet-related legislation were reframed as extreme measures to eliminate certain ways of life, with figures like Klaus Schwab, John Kerry, Jacinda Ardern, and Bill Gates highlighted. The latter was accused of tampering with livestock, injecting cattle with mRNA shots, and engineering artificial food shortages to promote the consumption of cultivated meat and induce illnesses.

4. 24% of posts maligned alt-proteins as unhealthy

Almost a quarter of posts (223,389) attacked plant-based and cultivated meat and dairy as ultra-processed “Frankenfood” that lack nutrition and can cause serious diseases and “turbo cancers”. This included attacks on long ingredient lists, over-processing, nutritional aspects, and diseases and health effects.

5. 7% denied climate change or the environmental impact of alternative proteins

A total of 69,045 posts (7% of the total) attacked climate science. This involved denying climate change as a hoax perpetrated by ‘vegan extremists’, comparing the environmental impact of almonds (use of water and bee population decline) or soybeans (deforestation and monocropping) with locally produced animal products to discredit plant-based food, and undermining climate policies like net zero. Meanwhile, 13,388 posts questioned scientific findings on the climate, environment and health benefits of reduced meat and dairy.

6. A non-peer-reviewed UC Davis study about cultivated meat with dubious claims became fodder

In May 2023, the University of California, Davis released a pre-print, non-peer-reviewed study claiming that cell-cultured meat is 25 times worse for the environment than beef – something much of this anti-alt-protein narrative centred on. But the institution is a “well-known Big Ag conspirator“, and this work has been heavily criticised.

7. ‘Soy boys’, meat and masculinity fuelled the culture wars

83,790 posts (9%) had a culture war aspect, presenting meat as an identity wrapped in an ‘anti-elite’, ‘us versus them’ ideology. This included targeting vegan men with the derogatory term ‘soy boys’ (related to claims that phytoestrogen in soy products can ‘feminise’ men), labelling vegans as part of a cult, and associating meat with masculinity and traits like fertility and strength.

8. More posts slammed alt-protein than promoted meat and dairy

The report’s authors found the level of hostility against alt-protein – numbering 292,434 posts (31%) – surprising, as they had expected that the majority of posts would promote meat and dairy. But only one in five (207,669 or 22%) did so – these were classed as ‘enhancing’, touting the health (termed ‘healthwashing’) and eco credentials (greenwashing) of meat and dairy.

9. Online posts portrayed meat and dairy as nutritionally superior

173,971 posts (18%) centered around the perceived health benefits of meat and dairy, with slogans like “no need to fear red meat” to drive more consumption and claims such as “animal-based diets meet all nutrient needs”. This weaved in the ‘meat is masculine’ narrative too, and countered negative associations with meat consumption. Trends like the carnivore diet, extreme meat intake, and the #meatheals movement (asserting that meat can cure diseases instead of medicines) were also on the up.

10. Greenwashing attempts added to the narrative

The report says it’s notable that there is a lack of emphasis or positive discussion on the environmental impact of meat and dairy, with only 33,698 posts (4% of the total) doing so. These posts alleged that cows are carbon-neutral and don’t contribute to climate change, used regenerative agriculture as a way to minimise livestock’s climate impact, asserted that livestock supports biodiversity, and bemoaned “unfair targeting” of cows and farmers.

11. 50,000 accounts drove 3.6 million online interactions around meat misinformation

All the posts analysed came from an army of 425,226 real and bot accounts, but only 50,000 drove all the 3.6 million likes, shares and comments. And half of all these came from 50 accounts, which included famous right-wing commentators and politicians.

12. Cabot Philips and @iluminatibot are the most influential misinformation spreaders

Cabot Phillips, an editor at US conservative news site The Daily Wire, and @iluminatibot, an anonymous account that promotes Illuminati conspiracy theories, generated 186,843 and 186,101 likes, comments and shares of misleading posts, respectively. Other influential accounts include figures like Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr, as well as self-proclaimed medical experts like @DrLoupis, @amerix and @SBakerMD. Junk science posts were a regular theme.

Misinformation will undermine COP28 food outcomes

The report is deliberately timed to publish just ahead of COP28. The authors say policy restraint is casting a shadow over global climate talks: while COP28 hosts, the UAE, want governments to incorporate food and agriculture into their national climate plans, it’s unclear if all will sign in time for the Leaders Summit on December 1. December 10, meanwhile, will be a first-ever food day, where the FAO is set to highlight the overconsumption of meat in rich countries, and set out a roadmap to 1.5°C.

But the FAO itself has been embroiled in controversy surrounding misinformation about meat and dairy. It was subject to an investigation that revealed it censored and undermined work by its own officials on the methane emissions caused by the animal agriculture industry, following pressure from livestock lobby groups. Further, there are concerns about the continued decline of the FAO’s estimate of livestock methane emissions, which was calculated to be 18% in 2006, then changed to 14.5% in 2013, and is now cited at 11.2%. Other research puts this number at 20% or between 16.5-28.1%.

Similarly, the EU was revealed to be in cahoots with animal lobby groups as well, which pressured the bloc to walk back a proposed ban on the caged farming of animals like hens and pigs, which has since been put on hold.

Such misinformation campaigns are hugely detrimental to a planet that is on course to reach 3°C warming above pre-industrial levels, which will spell catastrophe around the globe. For COP28, it’s imperative that misinformation is a priority in its food-focused avatar.

The post Meat & Misinformation: How Social Media Conspiracy Campaigns Are Fueling The Fight Against Alt-Protein appeared first on Green Queen.

Food and climate journalist Thin Lei Win shares more details and context about the Lighthouse Reports investigation she worked on with multiple journalists and co-published by The Guardian and IRPI exploring how meat lobby groups pushed back on the EU’s proposed ban on caged farming, which is now on hold.

Over two crisp Spring days in early May, nearly 320 carefully vetted attendees gathered at the Renaissance Arlington Capital View Hotel in Arlington, Virginia, for an annual summit organised by the Animal Agriculture Alliance, a non-profit with very close ties to the American meat and dairy industry. 

One of the speakers for a session titled “Responding to Animal Rights Extremism” was Andrea Bertaglio, campaign manager for European Livestock Voice, a coalition of 14 livestock industry associations.

ELV’s founding partners include Copa-Cogeca, Europe’s most powerful farm lobby whom we exposed a few months ago as representing mainly the interests of the industry and not small-scale farmers, as well as the fur, leather, foie gras, feed, and poultry producers. They mainly represent the large-scale, industrial livestock sector. 

ELV was set up in 2019 “to bring back a balanced debate around a sector that is playing such an essential role in Europe’s rich heritage and future”. It has used the slogan “Meat The Facts” to downplay livestock’s role in climate change and portray animal rights activists and environmentalists as out-of-touch urbanites who want to end animal agriculture in Europe.

In his presentation at the AAA, which Lighthouse Reports obtained, Bertaglio said he has been an environmental journalist for 18 years. “And that’s still my official identity. But my real job now is to work to inform the public about livestock production, actually,” he said.

He also said: “This year in particular, we are all focused in Brussels, at least on the revision of the animal welfare legislation.” He ended his speech with a future strategy. “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 Q&A after the presentation, he expanded on what he thought was going wrong in Europe.

“A big problem is that we humanise, anthropomorphise… (animals),” he said.

“We need to tell people that an animal is not a person. So when you think that you leave a cow grazing and it’s necessarily better because you have this bucolic image of livestock. For the cow, it’s not necessarily good because she is exposed to predators, to diseases, weather conditions.”

He also added in an online Q&A – “The public perception of the so-called “intensive farming” is always negative. What we are doing is to inform (on social media, too) about the advantages of raising animals in “confined” places: they are better fed, protected, treated, cured, etc. Or we often communicate the fact that “factory farming” is more efficient when it comes to water, natural resources use or that a stable can be a barrier to the diffusion of viruses and to pandemics.”

Bringing US-style tactics?

Also at the AAA was Jack Hubbard, an owner and partner of notorious U.S. PR firm Berman & Co, who showed clips of attack ads his company had produced and described how they aim to shift the discussion away from issues of animal welfare, the environment, or workers rights and onto critiques of animal advocacy groups themselves. 

The PR firm has a history of attacking animal rights groups, scientists, journalists, and alternative proteins. 

In response to Hubbard’s presentation, Bertaglio said, “We are going to do something similar possibly in Europe, like your videos. So I’d get in touch with you for sure.”

In a wide-ranging interview a few days ago with The Guardian and EU Scream, Lighthouse Reports’ media partners in this investigation, Bertaglio did not deny expressing a desire to bring U.S.-style stock tactics to Europe but suggested it was more of a joke and that he has neither done it nor proposed it to ELV.

He also denied being a lobbyist 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. 

“I’m trying to see and to consider both sides of the story,” and “nobody is denying” livestock is a problem when it comes to emissions, he said.

“But there is also a lot of science saying that livestock can be helping and agriculture can help in the carbon sequestration. But this message you barely see. Let’s face it… when (do) you read an article about a scientific report showing that livestock can contribute in carbon sequestration? Never.” 

Bertaglio also cited Frank Mitloehner, the head of an agricultural research centre at the University of California, as well as the signatories of the Dublin Declaration, as experts whose unbiased views he seeks. 

Mitloehner’s academic group “receives almost all its funding from industry donations and coordinates with a major livestock lobby group on messaging campaigns”, reported The New York Times in 2022. Meanwhile, many signatories of the Declaration have ties to the meat industry, according to newly published articles by The Guardian and Unearthed.

Rhetoric vs Reality

One other thing Bertaglio said at the AAA was that ELV’s target is the Brussels bubble because EU legislation is mostly against livestock. 

This is a curious statement to make because a recent study from Stanford University that looked at support for livestock versus novel technologies in the EU and the U.S. found that a vast majority of research & innovation, government policies, and subsidies go towards animal farming.

In fact, in the EU, the sector already gets a lion’s share – about 50% – of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), a system of subsidies that accounts for a third of the bloc’s budget, according to the study.

While the money given in Europe is not tied explicitly to a commodity, the researchers calculated their findings by using the farm accountancy data network (FADN) to see which farms are receiving the funds and if they are specialised in dairy or meat production. 

“They are typically larger farms and have more hectares. The smaller producers don’t necessarily get enough (funds) because they don’t have enough land,” said Simona Vallone, lead author of the study and Earth System science research associate at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.

In addition, farmers were not required to implement specific environmental conservation practices to reduce the impact of animal farming. If they didn’t comply with environmental requirements, they didn’t immediately lose access to subsidies, Simona told me, adding that legal decisions have also favoured animal farming. 

“In Europe with the ruling of the European Court, it’s not possible anymore for oat milk or soy milk to be called milk,” she said. “So it’s challenging for a company to make decisions on investments when they’re unsure whether or how they’re going to market it. The name really tells a lot about how (the food) will be used. If we call it burger, if we call it milk, we know how we’re going to use (them) in a meal.” 

All of this is a problem, because – as regular readers of Thin Ink know – agriculture is both a key contributor and a victim of climate change.

In Europe, agriculture is responsible for 94% of ammonia, a harmful air pollutant, and 54% of methane, the second most important greenhouse gas contributing to climate change, according to the European Environment Agency (EEA). Livestock is the main source for both gases and their emissions in Europe have barely fallen over the past two decades, the EEA said. 

A 2021 report from the European Court of Auditors also raised concerns about the CAP budget not mitigating climate change.

“Livestock emissions, mainly driven by cattle, represent around half of emissions from agriculture and have been stable since 2010. However, the CAP does not seek to limit livestock numbers; nor does it provide incentives to reduce them. The CAP market measures include promotion of animal products, the consumption of which has not decreased since 2014,” it said.

Doubting science

Unfortunately, our reporting discovered that DG AGRI, the department of the European Commission responsible for agricultural policy, seems to disregard such scientific data. 

A leaked internal DG AGRI document we obtained showed the head of the department pushing back on reasonable and scientifically proven criticism about livestock. 

The authors had written: “Similarly, while the CAP Plans can contribute to climate change mitigation, in particular by enhancing carbon sequestration, efforts on livestock emissions are limited and climate adaptation requires a more holistic, longer-term approach”. 

The head of DG AGRI left a typed comment:- “This point needs to be worked on and be more sophisticated. No general livestock bashing”. 

Two former officers at the department told us about their disappointment and anger at the general disinterest, starting from the highest echelons of the department, in sustainability and environmental issues around agriculture. 

“The default position is defence: resist, resist, resist, instead of acknowledging problems, engaging with science and working with other relevant (directorate-generals) to devise credible solutions. This is what a public administration should be doing, and they are failing,” one told me. 

“AGRI is failing to recognise what its role should actually be – ensuring genuinely sustainable agriculture, not protecting the incumbent actors and the status quo. So they are a danger to the agriculture sector, which they purport to be responsible for.” 

A second officer recalled that staff who ask questions about sustainability, especially on the impact of animal farming, risk losing credibility in the eyes of the department higher-ups. “I think my work in AGRI was very disheartening and a bit of disillusionment. It was different from the way I wanted to contribute.” 

The Commission did not respond to emails with detailed questions.

How the animal welfare laws became undone

Let’s now go back to something Bertaglio mentioned three times at the AAA – ELV’s focus on the revision of animal welfare legislation in the EU – because we discovered that the alliance’s partner associations have been very very active in pushing to either water down or abandon some of the laws.

Back in October 2020, the EU — so often criticised for its lack of democracy — received a truly democratic request. 1.4 million citizens from all over Europe asked the EU to end the practice of keeping farm animals in cages and increase their welfare standards.  In June 2021, it was adopted by the EU parliament with an overwhelming majority and the European Commission decided to revise the current legislation in line with the citizens’ wishes.

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

Three years later, those promises are in tatters. All but one have been dropped, including the ban on caged farming, from the European Commission’s 2024 work programme and it is anyone’s guess when or if they will appear in the future. 

This is despite the overwhelming support for these laws. A survey released this month – and conducted at the height of inflation – found that 84% of Europeans want more protection for animal welfare and 60% are even happy to pay more for it.

Interviews with EU officials familiar with the file recounted aggressive lobbying against the laws by groups such as the European Livestock Voice (ELV) and its partner associations. 

Documents we received through a freedom of information request also showed that in at least six meetings between Sep 2021 and Feb 2023, ELV partner associations pushed DG SANTE, the branch of the commission tasked with drafting the animal welfare laws, to reconsider ending caged farming. One asked “the Commission to resist the pressure from NGOs”, saying, “NGO perspectives do not reflect the views of the broad public/ the society.” 

EFSA, the European Food Safety Authority, came under particular criticism from Copa-Cogeca and ELV, according to sources. Between August 2022 and May 2023, EFSA published a total of 11 scientific opinions relating to animal welfare that included recommending more space, lower temperatures, and shorter journeys to improve animal welfare during transport and against mutilation, feed restriction and the use of cages for broiler chickens and laying hens. 

On the exact same day, EFSA released its opinion on broilers, Copa-Cogeca, EFFAB, and AVEC Poultry – all founding partner associations of ELV – criticised EFSA’s opinion on broilers as “the roadmap to unsustainable poultry production in Europe”. 

We sent two e-mails to ELV asking for comment and they responded with a few short paragraphs. They told us that each partner association provides between €1,000 and €5,000 annually to fund its activities. However, ELV did not address our questions around their lobbying tactics and Bertaglio’s comments at the AAA.

We followed up with more specific questions, including their annual budget. Their response: “We believe we have already provided sufficient responses to your enquiry, but would like to clarify as stated previously that European Livestock Voice is a communications platform and as an entity does not engage on a policy level.”

However, we know ELV requested a meeting with Frans Timmermans, the then-executive vice president of the Commission in April 2021. The minutes of that meeting in May 2021 are here.

Look, lobbying by both sides has been around for as long as politics has been. What is worrying in this particular instance is the extent to which the will of the many could be thwarted by the demands of the few and the strategies used, particularly the attacking and questioning of science, similar to the tactics of the tobacco and fossil fuel companies.

This is an edited and web-adapted version of the 30th October 2023 edition of the Thin Ink newsletter, a weekly publication on food, climate, and where they meet by journalist Thin Lei Win – subscribe here.

The post Deep Dive: How the Livestock Lobby Sunk Its Teeth Into the EU’s Animal Welfare Legislations appeared first on Green Queen.

A new investigation by climate media outlet DeSmog has revealed the deep ties between agriculture lobby groups and a group of influential EU politicians, who are consequently pushing against the bloc’s green agriculture reforms around pesticide use, ecosystem restoration and the Farm to Fork strategy.

Earlier this month, DeSmog and Politico revealed the high volume of meetings between industrial farming lobby groups and six politicians from the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) – the largest group in the EU Parliament – with the aim of forming powerful alliances to resist EU Green Deal legislations and stall reforms since the Farm to Fork strategy was laid out in 2020.

Between January 2020 and July 2023, the six members of the EU Parliament (MEPs) met lobbyists over 400 times. This meant an average of two meetings a week, outnumbering meetings with non-governmental organisations representing public interests by eight to one. Five out of the six representatives allegedly flouted EU transparency guidelines, with 20% of the meetings held with unregistered groups, and one in six documented by the investigation not declared on the parliamentary website.

The EPP is vehemently opposing two key pieces of legislation from the Green Deal, which aims to reduce emissions in line with global targets. These are the Nature Restoration Law, which outlines plans to restore degraded ecosystems, and the Sustainable Use Regulation (SUR), which has a target of halving pesticide use by 2030.

Today, the EU Parliament’s environmental committee is set to hold a major vote on the pesticide reduction law, which climate campaigners say could be considerably weakened. Ahead of the vote, DeSmog revealed just how influential lobbyists have been on EU legislation thanks to their ties with the six EPP politicians.

The six EPP politicians’ controversial past

The six MEPs involved in the investigation are Alexander Bernhuber (Austria), Herbert Dorfmann (Italy), Norbert Lins, Christine Schneider (both Germany), Franc Bogovič (Slovenia) and Anne Sander (France). These leaders met with organisations including Bayer, BASF, Corteva and Syngenta – the four largest pesticide companies in the world – fertiliser firms Yara and OCP Group, meat and dairy lobby groups, as well as industrial farming unions like Copa-Cogeca.

The EPP has been criticised for its attempts to water down initiatives like Farm to Fork or the 200 Biodiversity Strategy. Germany’s Lins, who is the chair of the EU’s agriculture committee, called for a major reassessment of the pesticide reduction law in December, which drew controversy and led to accusations of trying to delay the legislation.

Bernhuber, meanwhile – the EPP’s chief negotiator on the SUR – has previously demanded the legislation be dropped altogether. The party itself has been accused of blackmail and spreading fake news to oppose the Nature Restoration Law, which EPP chief Manfred Weber denies.

In July, the party entered more controversy after substituting more than a third of its members on the environment committee to attempt to defeat a crucial vote on the law. The politicians who were brought in included Dorfmann, Sander and Borgovič.

Copa-Cogeca’s large foothold in the EU

The MEPs analysed by Desmog met Copa-Cogeca – and its French and German members, Fédération Nationale des Syndicats d’Exploitants Agricoles (FNSEA) and Deutscher Bauernverband, respectively – 40 times in the assessed period. Over 75% of the meetings were on Farm to Fork and the two aforementioned laws.

Copa-Cogeca is the EU’s largest farmer and agri-cooperative union with unprecedented special access in the bloc. But it’s a controversial group even among farmers, as it has admitted to inflating its membership and has been accused of promoting industrial agriculture over smaller and young farmers. It has opposed Farm to Fork reforms too, saying they will lead to production declines and food security risks – claims scientists and campaigners disagree with.

According to DeSmog, Copa-Cogeca holds deep personal ties with the six MEPs, including one family relation. Anne Sander, a major negotiator on farming subsidies (which directly contribute to at least half of EU cattle farmers’ income) and ecosystem restoration, is the sister of Franck Sander, a VP at FNSEA, which is opposed to Farm to Fork. Anne has had at least 12 meetings with FNSEA or its branches since 2020, half of which aren’t declared on the parliamentary site – in fact, a quarter of her meetings on the Common Agricultural Policy subsidy reforms were with them, while not a single meeting was held with non-profits on the subject.

Meanwhile, Austria, farming union Österreichischer Bauernbund (ÖBB) pays for office space for Bernhuber, who is an MP with the Österreichische Volkspartei, a local conservative party ÖBB is part of as well. He is a member of one of ÖBB’s branches where he was employed as a paid consultant between 2017-19. The ÖBB is also the chief group within Copa-Cogeca’s Austrian branch.

These organisations and other farming groups are joined by Dorfmann and others on a hike in the Alps every summer, where they chat about EU policy. Last year, Copa-Cogeca’s German branch told participants they needed to reconsider the pesticide reduction plan.

“It is evident that numerous conservative MEPs from the EPP group are historically very close to Copa-Cogeca, the farm lobby that mostly defends the interests of the largest farms and land owners, rather than the farming sector as a whole,” lobby watchdog Corporate Europe Observatory’s Nina Holland told DeSmog.

Multiple routes to access

The pesticide industry is a major lobbying force in the EU and holds privileged access to the EPP. Since plans to slash pesticide use were announced in 2020, the sector has spent €35M on EU lobbying. The aforementioned four major pesticide companies, alongside their trade association CropLife Europe, have held 29 official meetings with the MEPs since 2020.

CropLife Europe is also a strategic partner of the EU40, a group of young politicians in the bloc, which includes Bernhuber as a current member. Lins and Dorfmann, meanwhile, are alums. The EU40 denies representing commercial interests, but its partners are granted special access to politicians at events like its annual summer party. Its ‘soirée’ last month was described as “an opportunity to network with Brussels’ finest” and “a hotspot” for MEPs, their assistants, and officials from the EU Commission, EU Council, and permanent EU representatives.

Meanwhile, the European Food Forum, which is described as an independent and non-partisan food and farming platform, is led and governed by MEPs including Schneider. Its business members include CropLife, Cefic (which represents BASF, Bayer and other agrochemical firms) and Yara, Europe’s biggest fertiliser company.

CropLife Europe said: “We embrace the ambitions of the EU Green Deal and Farm to Fork strategy and believe Europe’s farmers must have access to a full toolbox of innovative crop protection solutions to maintain their production as they transition to a more resilient and sustainable farming system.”

Bayer allegedly supports Farm Europe, an agricultural think tank opposed to the pesticide reduction law that has met with Sander twice since 2020. Calling itself “the leading agriculture technology company”, Bayer told DeSmog: “We have a direct interest in battling climate change and reversing biodiversity loss.”

It added that it welcomed the EU Green Deal’s objectives and “supports the ambition to accelerate the transition towards an even more sustainable and resilient food system, and enhanced biodiversity”. When asked about lobbying, which Bayer called “an essential part of the democratic process”, it said: “Of course, Bayer engages on a number of different topics, in multiple countries, and with a variety of stakeholders and organisations.”

What next?

Ahead of a final decision expected next month, the EU parliament will hold an interim vote on the pesticide regulation today, where at least two of the six MEPs – Bernhuber and Schneider – will be present.

DeSmog says voting in the agricultural committee – which includes five of the six MEPs – earlier this month can give a sense of how things could pan out. The committee voted to significantly weaken the law, which included the removal of the idea of using CAP subsidies to support the transition (which effectively defunds the proposal), as well as the deletion of a ban on pesticide use in sensitive areas.

Bogovič was part of a group that attempted to delay the pesticide reduction deadline from 2030 to 2050, while other EU members (including some from the EPP) pushed to remove mandatory national targets. Speaking to Bogovič, Schneider promised to defend these decisions in the environmental committee, as reported by Politico.

Up to 80% of EU citizens are concerned about the impact of pesticides on the climate. Non-governmental organisations say the EPP’s close ties with the farming lobby are concerning. “This highlights the urgency of increasing transparency about lobbying in the European Parliament,” said Célia Nyssens-James, agrifood policy manager at the European Environmental Bureau.

“These revelations add to the growing evidence that powerful industry interests are simply buying influence in the name of profit margins, at catastrophic expense to people and planet,” she added. “Clearly, too many MEPs on this Committee do not have European citizens’ best interests at heart.”

Bogovič, for his part, rejected the allegations that MEPs are under the influence of lobbyists, telling Politico: “I’m a farmer and… I’m an agricultural engineer and I have my own opinion. I really don’t need their opinion on this. I have my own clear view of what is possible and what is not possible in agriculture.”

Clara Bourgin, food and climate campaigner at Friends of the Earth, told DeSmog: “These ties are both appalling and sadly unsurprising. When certain MEPs strongly push back against EU pesticide law and binding reduction goals, and more broadly against European environmental commitments, it’s clear that intensive industry lobbying is behind it.”

She added: “The upcoming vote will show which MEPs will stand for a healthy and sustainable future and who will bow to the interests of the pesticide industry.”

This article is part of our Meat Misinformation Miniseries, in which we feature investigations that shed light on how the animal ag industry is using its influence to alter food policy regulations; read the first installment: Meat & Dairy Lobby Pressured UN Body to Censor Work on Livestock Farming Methane Emissions.

The post The Big Ag Lobby is Influencing EU Politicians to Oppose Pesticide Reduction and Green Policies: Report appeared first on Green Queen.