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To what extent does the agri-food industry impose our menu? What strategies do you use to influence public powers? The book ‘Des Lobbys au menu’ (Raisons d’agir, 2022) analyzes how pressure groups in the French agri-food sector work to influence public powers on a daily basis and impose their interests on our plates. An investigation carried out by sociologists Joan Cortinas and Daniel Benamouzig.
The research is subtitled “Agri-food companies against public health.” A declaration of intentions. We asked Joan Cortinas if we really eat what we want or if it is imposed on us. “A little of both”, the sociologist answers us.
“When one goes to buy, and we all go to buy, we have information and an offer available. In both cases, the pressure groups intervene, but luckily for us, they are not the only ones, there are the public authorities”, explains Cortinas.
In the book, Cortinas and Benamouzig demonstrate the strong weight that pressure groups, lobbies, have in manufacturing demand and also supply. “It is a very important economic sector, the second in France after pharmaceuticals. Therefore, it is a sector with many companies, and with a lot of muscle”, he adds.
That is, they have many economic resources with which they can mobilize institutions to defend their interests. In the investigation they have calculated that there are around 600 individual and collective actors. “What we try to show in the book is that the work of defending the interests of this sector is done every day, people who work every day, systematically and daily and that should be much more visible”, explains the author of the book.
Pressure on deputies to stop or amend laws that are not favorable to them, financing of ‘scientific’ reports to value products or delegitimize others. “They finance studies, this does not mean that they are manipulated and that is important to keep in mind. But what they do is guide the investigation. Let’s take dairy products as an example. They may be good for preventing neurodegenerative diseases, but also less good for prostate cancer. What they are going to promote is the line of research to obtain positive results”, says Joan Cortinas.
The mechanism of doubt, a weapon of pressure groups
Pressure groups in the agri-food sector use a strategy to discredit positions that are not favorable to them through the so-called mechanism of doubt. “When we have lost the battle of science, that is, when there is a scientific consensus in the scientific community that alcohol is not good for health, what they are going to do is discredit it by saying, for example, that the studies have been done with mice and that we cannot compare them with humans”, he explains.
Strategies that curb the will of public powers. For example, with the launch of Nutriscore, an indicator with colored letters about the nutritional value of food sold in the supermarket. The opposition was so great that the government had to back down and not impose it as mandatory.
In the French National Assembly the pressure is quite strong. There are pressure groups that even deliver written amendments to deputies, deputies of different political persuasions who present the same text. There are even clubs within the Assembly to influence laws.
“These clubs are associations financed by the industry and animated by communication agencies. They are legal. They organize meals, the deputies are free to go or not go and if they decide to go it is totally legal, but obviously this has repercussions on the perception that the deputies have certain products”, affirms the sociologist.
At this point, is the French State losing weight in health policies in favor of lobbies? “In any case, historically, the Ministry of Health, which is the one that defends our health, has weighed much less than the Ministry of Agriculture, which is the one that defends the food industry,” he says.
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