“The organic lobby exists in Brussels, it has a storefront and is called Ifoam”, admits the environmental activist Martin Pigeon, who has been campaigning to denounce European lobbying for fifteen years, within the NGO Corporate Europe Observatory.

Ifoam (International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements) is indeed the main international lobbying structure for the organic sector, whose strategy has already been described in A&E (see “The hidden agenda of Ifoam: a war of undermines ‘industrial agriculture'”)

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[Influencing public opinion is] an area where the organic lobby excels, thanks to the implementation of a “guerrilla” type strategy, relying on NGOs all committed to the cause, and proceeding, in an aggressive and systematic way, to disparage conventional agriculture competitors. 

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Without ever appearing as a lobbying structure, [the organization] Générations Futures largely contributed, through its numerous anxiety-provoking campaigns on pesticides, to cast suspicion on the quality of food products from conventional agriculture, and to push ever more consumers towards the shops of its sponsors. Thus, since 2008, when Maria Pelletier took the presidency of Générations Futures, the association has produced thirty-one anxiety-provoking reports on the presence of pesticide residues in food or in the body of consumers, ie one report every six months! And that’s not to mention the other activities of the association.

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This strategy has borne fruit, as undeniably evidenced by the double-digit growth of the organic sector. Thus, without any need to fund a lobbying firm or hire a lobbyist, Générations Futures, which has a well-stocked address book of militant journalists, has largely fulfilled its specifications.

[Editor’s note: This article has been translated from French and edited for clarity.]

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