In March this year, vegetable grower Florent Sebban put down his spade and headed to Paris to join mass protests by farmers.
Consumers want higher-quality, more environmentally friendly food, he says, but farmers are not earning enough to keep up.
“Farmers are at the centre of a potential transition, but you need to finance a stable income for them if you want them to change their practices,” adds Sebban.
But the protests for which French farmers are famous are just one of many ways in which the sector makes its voice heard. Behind the scenes the agricultural lobby is a sprawling, complex machine with vast financial resources, deep political connections and a sophisticated network of legal and public relations experts.
“The farm lobby has been one of the most successful lobbies in Europe in terms of relentlessly getting what they want over a very long time,” says Ariel Brunner, Europe director of non-governmental organisation BirdLife International.
Industry groups spend between €9.35mn and €11.54mn a year lobbying Brussels alone, according to a recent report by the Changing Markets Foundation, another NGO.
In the US, agricultural trade associations are “enormously powerful”, says Ben Lilliston, director of rural strategies and climate change at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. “Our farm policy is very much their policy.”
The sector’s spending on US lobbying rose from $145mn in 2019 to $177mn last year, more than the total big oil and gas spent, according to an analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).
In Brazil, where agribusiness accounts for a quarter of GDP, the Instituto Pensar Agropecuária is “the most influential lobbying group”, according to Caio Pompeia, an anthropologist and researcher at the University of São Paulo. “It combines economic strength with clearly defined aims, a well-executed strategy and political intelligence,” he adds.
As a result of this reach, big agribusinesses and farmers have successfully secured exemptions from stringent environmental regulations, won significant subsidies and maintained favourable tax breaks.
The sector argues these are necessary to safeguard farmers’ livelihoods as they try to feed more people with higher-quality food at lower cost.
Bayer, the German crop science and agrichemicals group that also owns Monsanto in the US, says lobbying “is an essential part of the democratic process” and that it is growing regulatory restrictions that risk hindering farmers’ efforts to produce more food with fewer resources and lower emissions.
But critics fear the industry’s power shields it from the need to modernise and decarbonise, and that large agribusiness groups can run roughshod over the interests of other land owners and users.
Unlike other prolific lobbyists, such as the energy, defence or tobacco industries, agriculture projects a wholesome public image of bucolic pastures and earthy men and women tending to livestock.
“Everyone likes the idea of a small farmer — it’s a romantic notion of farming, sometimes among non-farmers who are fairly well off,” said Mairead McGuinness, an EU commissioner who previously sat on the European parliament’s agricultural committee.
Lilliston says “it is this mix of big money, corporate power and lobbying, but also grassroots mobilisation” that makes the agriculture lobby particularly “formidable”.
Food systems are responsible for between 21 and 37 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions depending on what is included, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Over half of those emissions come from animal faming alone.
Yet agriculture remains one of the last sectors in developed countries still to face binding limits on its carbon emissions. It is one of the few industries not covered in the EU’s emissions trading system, although proposals are under discussion.
In the US, it is exempt from a programme to reduce methane emissions, while in Brazil the Parliamentary Front for Agriculture (FPA), a large congressional caucus whose sway has expanded significantly over the past decade, last year secured a carve-out for primary agriculture and livestock from a bill to create a regulated carbon market.
It also helped pass a law restricting indigenous land claims, though said this was because it wanted greater clarity around property titles and reduced rural conflicts, rather than opposing native people’s rights.
Nusa Urbancic, chief executive of the Changing Markets Foundation, says that as farming’s contribution to emissions has become clearer — livestock production is the largest source of human-caused methane emissions, for instance — the meat and dairy industries have managed to convince policymakers of “agricultural exceptionalism”.
This has resulted in “all-carrots-and-no-sticks” regulatory approaches that rely on voluntary actions and financial incentives, she adds.
Food production also receives considerable state support. Governments around the world spend about $520bn a year on agricultural subsidies, according to analysis from Business for Nature and Earth Track. In the EU, farming subsidies make up a third of the bloc’s total budget.
To protect their interests, the agriculture and food industries have borrowed from the playbook used by the tobacco and fossil fuel sectors, according to the Changing Market Foundations report.
The first move, explains Urbancic, is “essentially greenwashing” — distracting consumers and policymakers by promoting their efforts to reduce emissions. The second is to urge governments to delay environmental regulations pending the industry’s voluntary actions. Finally, they seek to derail regulation through hefty political donations and lobbying.
The Meat Institute, a US lobby that represents large companies such as JBS and Cargill, said it was pursuing ambitious targets aligned with global climate goals, “because evidence shows that meat not only can be sustainable but that it is, in fact, essential to food security and climate solutions”.
Farming bodies and agribusinesses have funded campaigns that cast doubt on the scientific findings that influence policymaking and alternative research that often presents findings more favourable to the sector, according to NGOs and academics.
“All you have to say is that the studies weren’t long enough; they didn’t have the right number of people; they came up with inconclusive results,” says Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University.
Henning Steinfeld, former head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s livestock analysis unit, says officials within the UN itself “diminished” and “defamed” his team for more than a decade after it published the first estimates of greenhouse gas emissions from the livestock sector in 2006.
This year, two academics accused the FAO of misrepresenting their research in a report that advocated ramping up meat production to improve diets in developing countries — but made little mention of cutting consumption in richer ones in order to reduce emissions.
Lower meat usage in high-income nations “is mentioned zero times [in the report] when it is scientific consensus now that we need large reductions”, says Paul Behrens, associate professor at Leiden University, who sent a letter of complaint to the FAO.
Both he and Steinfeld say diplomats assigned to the FAO indirectly lobby on behalf of the agrifood industry. “The countries themselves are influenced by private sector interests,” according to Steinfeld.
Máximo Torero, chief economist at the FAO, denies this. “FAO is one of the few agencies in the world where the technical work is not approved by members,” he says.
“We have pressure [from national governments]. They call us, but that’s perfectly OK . . . At the end of the day, they cannot force me to change anything.”
Farm groups and agribusinesses argue that lobbying activities are necessary to protect farmers and safeguard food security.
But the regular meetings between Copa-Cogeca, the umbrella body for farming unions and co-operative bodies across the EU, and the bloc’s officials show that the reach of the agribusiness lobby has been “institutionalised”, says BirdLife’s Brunner.
Patrick Pagani, acting secretary-general of Copa-Cogeca, counters that lobbying is normal practice and “transparent” because the body publishes videos of its presidents’ main points.
“It is of paramount importance that EU legislators, when building legislation, listen to the actors that have to implement these laws on the ground,” he adds.
Brazil’s FPA said that “agriculture and the environment go hand in hand” and defended its support for a controversial law approved last year that loosens rules around pesticides. Reducing crop losses and raising productivity would “contribute to food security, with safer food on Brazilians’ tables”, it added.
Farmers in Europe say they are being strangled with red tape at a time when many are struggling with rising input costs following the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, which inflated energy and fertiliser prices.
The EU’s Green Deal climate law, drafted in 2019, set out proposals to cut pesticide use and improve food systems, as well as reduce emissions from industrial-scale farms.
In the US, the Biden administration has rolled out plans for emissions reductions and a “30×30” initiative that aims to conserve at least 30 per cent of US lands and waters by 2030.
Both proposals threaten farming, given its intensive use of energy, water and land, US farming lobbies argue. New incentives for climate-smart agricultural practices fall short, they add.
“Ranchers’ profit margins are so very thin and are becoming even thinner when having to produce beef in the face of climate change and severe weather,” says Meredith Ellis, who rears cattle using sustainable grazing methods on her 3,000-acre farm in Texas.
While funding to incentivise sustainable practices is a positive step, she says that for the time being the cost of climate solutions falls on producers and urges the US to steer clear of “punitive-style tactics such as a blanket methane tax”.
The threat of having to invest large sums in decarbonisation efforts has prompted an even greater offensive from the industry to protect subsidy schemes on both sides of the Atlantic. Critics say these encourage overproduction of crops such as corn and soyabeans, most of which are turned into feed for animals or biofuels.
Between 2019 and last year, big agribusinesses, food and agriculture industry associations and other interest groups reported more than $523mn of federal lobbying expenditures in disclosure reports, according to UCS analysis. The US Chamber of Commerce, the American Farm Bureau Federation and Koch Industries were among the biggest spenders. All declined to comment, or did not respond to requests for comment.
Much of their effort was focused on the upcoming food and farm bill, which is expected to disburse $1.5tn over a decade. The largest chunk of that funding goes on nutrition programmes but the rest goes to agriculture.
Raj Patel, from the sustainability think-tank IPES-Food, says the beneficiaries range from pesticide companies to meat producers, but the biggest chunk goes on insurance for landowners, who can seek compensation should their crops fail or market prices fall sharply.
The latest food and farm bill was meant to be passed by September 2023 but has been delayed. UCS analysis found that political donors with links to big agribusiness made $3.4mn of campaign contributions to the bill’s main architects, including Glenn Thompson, the Republican chair of the House committee on agriculture.
In the EU, lobby groups are already staking out positions ahead of the next major revision of the Common Agricultural Policy, which will take effect in 2028.
The present iteration has been criticised by farmers for its attempts to tie payments to better environmental performance and cuts to pesticide usage. Following widespread protests, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has pledged that the next CAP will be “targeted” and find “the right balance between incentives, investments and regulation”.
But one EU official says that while most other big industries have an overarching emissions reduction target, “agriculture is still obsessed with how we tweak the CAP”.
Brunner of Birdlife says the “obsession” with the policy is in part what has handed the farming unions such power. “In Italy, for example, a farmer needs to pretty much go through the dominant farm union if they want to get their subsidies,” he adds.
“So if you want to have your income support, you better not mess with the people who do your paperwork.”
Research suggests that big farms and landowners reap far greater benefits from subsidy packages than small-scale growers, even though the latter are often the public face of lobbying efforts.
“It’ll almost always be a farmer testifying before Congress or talking to the press, rather than the CEO of JBS,” says Lilliston.
But between 1995 and 2023, some 27 per cent of subsidies to farmers in the US went to the richest 1 per cent of recipients, according to NGO the Environmental Working Group. In the EU, 80 per cent of the cash handed out under the CAP goes to just 20 per cent of farms.
That has led to some tensions within the sector. Sebban, the vegetable farmer, says the agricultural lobby “hijacked” the spring protests and put the emphasis on deregulation, which served the interest of the biggest industrial farms and agribusinesses, when the main concern of ordinary farmers was insufficient incomes.
He says that FNSEA, France’s largest farming lobby, “has no interest in securing income for farmers” but “a huge interest” in driving pesticide usage, because FNSEA is headed by Arnaud Rousseau, chair of agro-industrial company Avril. FNSEA declined to comment.
At the EU level, Marion Picot, secretary-general of CEJA, the bloc’s main body for young farmers, says its members often feel drowned out by more dominant voices in Copa-Cogeca. “We are trying to make sure that young farmers are visible in other farming groups.”
But Copa-Cogeca’s former secretary-general Pekka Pesonen argues that it is the most representative industry lobby group in Brussels. It also has international clout. Every two years officials from Copa-Cogeca meet their counterparts from the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, the American Farm Bureau and the Consejo Nacional Agropecuario of Mexico.
According to a press statement published ahead of the last one in September 2023, they discuss “pressing issues affecting agriculture” and “collaborate and share ideas to work towards solutions”.
Such global co-ordination gives farming bodies even more influence, according to their critics. “They work at all levels of government and they work in international courts,” says Lilliston.
“Everything they can do to exert their power.”
Data visualisation by Keith Fray