The lobby behind your lunch

Here is a question worth sitting with: when a farmer reaches for a pesticide, whose knowledge is informing that decision?

Their own experience, perhaps. Their agronomist’s advice. A report they read, or were pointed towards. A training course from university. And at each of those junctions: the agronomist, the paper, the university, there is a reasonable chance that the answer is: Bayer. Or Syngenta. Or Corteva. Or BASF.

Four companies. The same four, more or less, wherever you look. They control around 60% of the global seeds and pesticides markets. By 2019, the same quartet controlled 75% of plant breeding research globally. Their names are on the gates of the farms that feed Europe. They are also, increasingly, in the lecture halls where farmers are trained, in the journals where agricultural science is published, in the Brussels corridors where food policy is negotiated, and in the markets that leave farmers with little practical alternative to buying what they sell.

Education: buying the curriculum

Public research budgets for agriculture across Europe have been progressively squeezed for decades, and the private sector has moved into the gap. When a company funds a university chair, sponsors a research programme, or endows a scholarship, it shapes which questions get asked, which solutions get modelled, and which alternatives remain unexplored.

Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands is one of the continent’s most respected agricultural institutions and a regular reference point for EU policy. It is also one whose independence has been called into question. In 2021, CropLife Europe, the Brussels-based trade association representing Bayer, BASF, Syngenta (now Chinese state-owned, but that’s a story for another article), Corteva, and others, commissioned Wageningen to produce an impact assessment of the EU’s Farm to Fork pesticide reduction targets. The study’s own preface stated that CropLife representatives had “guided” and “supervised” the project throughout, discussing the approach, reviewing intermediate results, and providing feedback. The Chair of Wageningen’s Board, Louise Fresco, had coincidentally joined the board of Syngenta in 2019. What a surprise.

The study focused entirely on projected production losses and economic costs. When Corporate Europe Observatory asked Wageningen why the expected environmental benefits of reducing pesticide use had not been included, the answer was that doing so was “unfortunately beyond the scope of the project.” The scope, of course, had been set by CropLife. Wageningen subsequently acknowledged the episode was a mistake. But a mistake implies an exception, and unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case.

From funding to ghostwriting 

In 2021, researchers Leland Glenna (Penn State) and Analena Bruce (University of New Hampshire) published a paper in the journal Research Policy based on internal Monsanto documents that had surfaced through litigation. What they found went beyond influence: the company had, in documented cases, written scientific papers itself and paid external scientists to put their names on them (a practice known as ghostwriting) with the explicit aim of generating “independent” peer-reviewed literature to protect its flagship herbicide, Roundup, from regulatory oversight. 

The ghostwritten papers appeared in the journal Critical Reviews in Toxicology in 2016 under the title “An Independent Review of the Carcinogenic Potential of Glyphosate.” The results contradicted the World Health Organisation’s International Agency for Research on Cancer, which had classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen the previous year. The internal documents showed Monsanto had identified which external scientists would serve as useful named authors before a single word was written. One of its own senior scientists reviewed the manuscripts before submission. In an internal email, Monsanto executive William Heydens described the manuscript as being “initiated by [Monsanto] as ghost writers” and noted it “would be more powerful if authored by non-Monsanto scientists.” 

The result is an academic culture in which researchers have shifted from scientists to actors in lobbying and corporate public relations campaigns.

There is a further structural constraint that closes the circle. Because the companies hold the patents on the seeds, researchers who want to study genetically engineered crops must, in many cases, request permission from the patent holder to do so. If the subject of your study controls whether you can study it, the word “independent” requires careful qualification.

Science functions because we trust the process: independent researchers, transparent methods, peer review. What this body of evidence describes is a system in which that process has been entered at the source. The paper looks like science. It gets cited in regulatory dossiers, and it arrives in Brussels carrying all the authority that peer-reviewed research is supposed to confer.

The Regulator: science as ammunition

The pesticide industry has build a counter-lobby of huge proportions. Global pesticide sales have doubled in the last 20 years, and following a series of mega-mergers, Bayer-Monsanto, BASF, Syngenta, and Corteva (Dow-DuPont) now hold roughly two thirds of that market worth nearly €53 billion. 

When the EU’s Farm to Fork Strategy set a target of at least 50 per cent reduction in pesticide use and risk by 2030, the industry deployed the research infrastructure it had spent decades building. A March 2022 report by Corporate Europe Observatory, drawn from hundreds of documents obtained through Freedom of Information requests and leaked internal strategy papers, documents exactly how.

In the run-up to a key European Parliament vote on Farm to Fork in October 2021, six “impact studies” were commissioned by industry bodies and their allies (including CropLife Europe, the conservative farm lobby Copa-Cogeca, and the US Department of Agriculture) and presented at three industry-sponsored events in the single week before the vote. Two were produced by Wageningen, one by Kiel University. All focused on projected production losses and none included the environmental and health benefits of reducing pesticide use.  

Of the 54 agriculture-related events that Euractiv hosted between January 2020 and April 2022, nearly 60 per cent were industry sponsored and only one was sponsored by an NGO). According to Bayer’s own entry in the EU lobbying transparency register, the corporation spent between €6.5 and €7 million lobbying EU institutions in 2021 alone, engaging eight lobby firms simultaneously. Its declared spend on Politico (the dominant political news outlet read by EU officials, commissioners, and MEPs, and widely considered the most influential publication inside the Brussels bubble) was between €300,000 and €399,000 that year (and let’s remember that this is what they declare, who knows the real figures). In the week of 21 February 2022, the newspaper Politico focused on RoundUp and was sponsored by Bayer every single day, carrying messages including: “Crop production in the EU could fall if the targets of the Green Deal were fully implemented. Inevitably, we will need to import more food and export less.”

The Farm: nowhere left to turn

All of the above (the research, the published science, the Brussels whisperers) eventually arrives at the farm gate. By the time it does, the farmer’s practical freedom to choose differently has been narrowed by a fourth mechanism: market concentration so advanced it has, in many cases, eliminated the alternatives entirely.

According to a June 2025 report by ETC Group and GRAIN, Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta, and BASF have major control over four sectors critical to agriculture: seeds, pesticides, agricultural machinery, and animal pharmaceuticals. They now meet the formal definition of an oligopoly: a market in which four firms control more than 40%, the threshold at which economists expect market distortions to become structurally inevitable. 

The integration of the seed and chemical markets is where the dependency becomes most concrete. When Monsanto developed Roundup Ready soybeans (seeds engineered to survive being sprayed with its herbicide Roundup) it did not sell two separate products. It sold a system. The farmer who buys the seed has committed to the herbicide. The farmer who saves those seeds for the following year (a practice as old as agriculture itself) is in breach of patent law. Monsanto pursued hundreds of such cases through the courts and they largely won.

Although across the ocean, it’s interesting to note that in the United States, three firms: Bayer, Corteva, and Syngenta, own 95% of US patents for GM corn, 78% for GM soybeans, and 93% for GM canola, according to USDA data. The farmer facing this market is not choosing between competing options. They are operating within a system designed, through the control of what their educational institutions, what science their regulator read, and what seeds their supplier offers, to make one set of choices appear to be the only ones available.

That system did not emerge naturally from market forces. It was constructed, methodically, over decades. 

What this means

None of this requires every agronomist to be compromised, every paper to be fraudulent, or every regulator to be captured. Most individuals operating within these systems do so in good faith, with the knowledge available to them, through channels that appear legitimate. But that is precisely how structural influence works. It does not need bad actors at every level. It needs only that the architecture of knowledge production, scientific credibility, political access, and market control all point, consistently, in the same direction.

The direction is: sell more inputs.

The evidence for this architecture comes not from inference but from the industry’s own documents: internal strategy papers stating the real objectives, lobbying submissions, ghostwritten scientific publications, sponsored media presented as editorial, University research scoped to produce the conclusions most useful to the funder…

PS: If you’d like to learn more about how the lobbying for Big Ag works in Brussels, the paper “A Loud Lobby for a Silent Spring,”  is a real gold-mine. Much of the information in this article has come from there, and if you’re anything like me, it’s a 100% guarantee that the only thing you’ll be thinking once you’ve read it is: 

What The F***?!