A US court will today hear a request from Monsanto for access to a huge batch of internal communications by Avaaz, in a move that the campaign group says could have grave repercussions for online activism and data privacy.

Monsanto is seeking the release of all lobby documents, emails, correspondence and notes “without limitation”, where the firm or its herbicide ingredient glyphosate have been mentioned.

Avaaz says this would include personal information about its employees, as well as the email addresses of more than four million signatories to petitions against Monsanto’s GM and glyphosate policies.

Emma Ruby-Sachs, the group’s deputy director told the Guardian that if it was successful, Monsanto’s suit would have a “chilling effect” on the group’s activism.

“Our staff are already unsure about what to write down – and what not to write down,” she said. “Our parters are nervous that anything they say to us could be turned over.

“Our members are writing to us saying that they’re afraid their data will be handed over. We are doing our best not to let it slow us down but at the end of the day, there is now this scary cloud hanging over our organisation.”

A victory for Monsanto in today’s hearing would cost the online advocacy group thousands of person-hours of work time, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to Avaaz’s lawyers.

It could even raise the prospect of a migration out of online activism by campaigners concerned about corporate surveillance, they fear.

But Monsanto argues that it is merely following standard procedure to uncover links between Avaaz and non-Hodgkins lymphoma (NHL) sufferers in a separate lawsuit.

Scott Partridge, Monsanto’s vice president for global strategy said the firm had itself complied with court orders to release 10m documents in the past, and called claims that it was seeking personal information on Avaaz employees “completely false”.

“If they wish to redact email addresses or personal information that gives an individual concern, I’m open to that,” he told the Guardian. “This is not an effort to intimidate individuals or make them think their personal information is going to be used by Monsanto.”

“This [subpoena] is directed entirely at the coordinated campaign between Avaaz and the plaintiff’s lawyers, spreading misinformation about the safety of glyphosate, or characterising it as being a carcinogen.”

The subpoena was issued in a case against Monsanto by Ronald Peterson and Jeff Hall, who claim they contracted NHL through exposure to Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller, in which glyphosate is an active ingredient.

“We have never spoken to the plaintiff’s lawyers,” Ruby-Sachs said. “We didn’t even know this case existed until we got the subpoena. I’m 100% confident of that, as we had to look it up and it took a while to figure out what it was.”

Monsanto’s documents request calls for the release of all communications between Avaaz and the plaintiffs’ counsel, lawyers, and law firms. But it also seeks disclosure of all communications – “in the broadest possible meaning” – with governments, NGOs, public relations and advertising firms.

It likewise demands all documents Avaaz employees have created, maintained, received, sent or copied, where these involve discussion about glyphosate, Monsanto, or the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer, which found glyphosate to probably be carcinogenic.

An exhaustive list of communication forms, from telegrams to power point presentations, is listed in the subpoena.

Monsanto filed its request shortly after a bitter EU regulatory battle ended with its license for glyphosate – the core ingredient in Roundup – being extended by just five years, rather than the 15 years originally sought by the European commission.

As the issue was debated, the firm found itself dogged by allegationsemerging from the Monsanto Papers – unsealed documents from a US lawsuit that led to a hearing in the European parliament. The allegations were ultimately dismissed by the commission, which declared Roundup to be safe.

This was one front in a campaign that Avaaz contributed to with a 2 million-strong petition. The group’s lawyers argue that the Peterson and Hall case is being used as “a pretext” for Monsanto to obtain access to private information about Avaaz’s EU campaign strategy.

Monsanto though maintains that it is waging a battle for fair disclosure. “We are only asking Avaaz to be as open and transparent as we have been,” Partridge said.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/23/monsanto-demands-avaaz-hands-over-all-of-its-campaign-data

Monsanto lobbyists have been banned from entering the European parliament after the multinational refused to attend a parliamentary hearing into allegations of regulatory interference.

It is the first time MEPs have used new rules to withdraw parliamentary access for firms that ignore a summons to attend parliamentary inquiries or hearings.

Monsanto officials will now be unable to meet MEPs, attend committee meetings or use digital resources on parliament premises in Brussels or Strasbourg.

While a formal process still needs to be worked through, a spokesman for the parliament’s president Antonio Tajani said that the leaders of all major parliamentary blocks had backed the ban in a vote this morning.

“One has to assume it is effective immediately,” he said.

MEPs had been incensed at a Monsanto decision to shun a hearing organised by the environment and agriculture committees, with academics, regulators and campaigners, on 11 October.

The meeting is expected to hear allegations that Monsanto unduly influenced regulatory studies into the safety of glyphosate, a key ingredient in its best-selling RoundUp weedkiller.

“Those who ignore the rules of democracy also lose their rights as a lobbyist in the European parliament,” said the Green party president Philippe Lamberts. “US corporations must also accept the democratic control function of the parliament. Monsanto cannot escape this.”

The lobby ban will be a bitter blow to Monsanto’s advocacy campaign ahead of a decision later this year about the relicensing of glyphosate, which has been linked to cancer by one expert WHO panel.

Another deemed it safe for public use, but Monsanto’s outreach to regulatory agencies in the US and Europe sparked controversy and prompted the parliamentary hearing.

A Monsanto letter to MEPs seen by the Guardian said that the European parliament was not “an appropriate forum” for discussion on the issues involved.

“The joint hearing could be viewed as the latest attempt by those opposed to modern agricultural practices to influence and frustrate the EU scientific and regulatory process to suit their own agenda,” it says.

“We have observed with increasing alarm the politicisation of the EU procedure on the renewal of glyphosate,” wrote Monsanto’s vice president Philip Miller, “a procedure which should be scientific but which in many respects has been hijacked by populism.”

Martin Pigeon, a spokesman for the NGO Corporate Europe Observatory, said it was “extremely important that parliament has been prepared to meet Monsanto’s unbelievable arrogance with real retaliation and consequences.”

Monsanto spends between €300,000-€400,000 (£260,000 - £350,000) annually on lobbying in Brussels, according to its self-declaration form in the EU transparency register.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/28/monsanto-banned-from-european-parliament

The European food safety authority (Efsa) based a recommendation that a chemical linked to cancer was safe for public use on an EU report that copied and pasted analyses from a Monsanto study, the Guardian can reveal.

Glyphosate is the core ingredient in Monsanto’s $4.75bn (£3.5bn) a year RoundUp weedkiller brand and a battle over its relicensing has split EU countries, with a final decision on its authorisation expected in early November.

That decision will largely be informed by an Efsa opinion, which is based on a 4,300-page renewal assessment report (RAR) published in 2015.

In June, Efsa said that where the RAR was concerned, “every scientific study is scrutinised for relevance and reliability by EU risk assessors based on the evidence contained within the study”.

These sections analyse peer-reviewed studies into links between glyphosate and genotoxicity (how likely it is to cause cell mutations), carcinogenicity and reproductive damage.

Franziska Achterberg, Greenpeace EU’s food policy director, said: “Whether this is a question of negligence or intent, it is completely unacceptable.

“It calls into question the entire EU pesticide approval process. If regulators rely on the industry’s evaluation of the science without doing their own assessment, the decision whether pesticides are deemed safe or not is effectively in the industry’s hands.”

Efsa insists that it has a “robust, well-balanced independence policy” and that it views the RAR as separate from the authority’s conclusion which follows it. The RAR is prepared by an EU state’s regulator – in this case Germany’s BfR – rather than Efsa itself.

An Efsa spokesperson said: “It is important to stress that these are extracts from and references to publicly available studies submitted by the applicant as part of their obligation under the pesticide legislation to carry out a literature search. In other words, these are not Glyphosate Task Force studies but rather studies available in the public scientific literature.”

Even so, the Efsa paper repeats descriptions – and analyses – verbatim from the 2012 GTF review. One of these, by former and current Monsanto employees John Acquavella and Donna Farmer, challenges the results of a study which found an association between pesticide use and non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

It says: “The major limitations of this study were: the reliance on reported pesticide use (not documented exposure) information, the small number of subjects who reported use of specific pesticides, the possibility of recall bias, the reliance on secondary sources (next-of-kin interviews) for approximately 43% of the pesticide use information, and the difficulty in controlling for potential confounding factors, given the small number of exposed subjects.”

Some other sections are differentiated from the GTF paper by additions of text and reference numbers, different marking of headings and tables, capitalisations, changes from US to British spelling and some text cuts.

Most paragraphs dealing with peer-reviewed papers, though, are copied word for word. A Monsanto spokesperson said that Efsa allowed renewal reports to be written this way because of the large volume of toxicological studies submitted.

“There was an explanation by Efsa that direct passages from the industry application were included,” the spokesperson said. “This should by no means be understood as Efsa’s conclusion on glyphosate.”

The row over glyphosate’s safety has pitted scientists against each other – and regulators – with one branch of the World Health Organisation assessing that the substance was unlikely to be carcinogenic, while another ruled that it probably was.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/15/eu-report-on-weedkiller-safety-copied-text-from-monsanto-study