A new investigation has sharpened an old suspicion in Brussels: that the most powerful organisations claiming to speak for Europe’s farmers are often acting in ways that suit pesticide manufacturers at least as much as they suit the people working the land.
Documents obtained by GRILLED and reviewed alongside The Guardian reveal how Copa-Cogeca, which claims to represent 22 million farmers across the EU, helped delay, dilute and ultimately derail major agricultural reforms, including the plan to halve pesticide use. An internal Copa-Cogeca discussion in September 2022 explicitly proposed keeping the pesticide proposal unresolved until after the 2024 European elections; the Commission withdrew the legislation in February 2024.
On 15 July, Copa-Cogeca and CropLife EU hosted a joint event in Copa-Cogeca’s Brussels offices to lobby MEPs to dismantle existing pesticide authorisation rules, including the renewal assessments that allow new scientific evidence on harm to be considered.
That is a serious charge, but it is not hard to see why it resonates. Farmers are among the first people exposed to pesticides directly, through skin contact, inhalation and repeated use over time. Germany, France and Italy have all formally acknowledged Parkinson’s disease as a professional illness for farmers who have worked with pesticides. Yet the public rhetoric from major lobby groups consistently treats restrictions on hazardous products as an attack on farming itself. The farmer becomes the moral shield behind which a broader chemical regime is defended.
Farmers and Pesticide Producers Do Not Have Identical Interests
Pesticide companies want market access, weaker limits, longer authorisations and a slower shift away from chemical crop protection. Farmers want workable yields and viable businesses, but many also want lower input costs, safer working conditions and a system that does not lock them into increasingly controversial products. Those interests overlap at times, but they are not the same. The GRILLED archive documents Copa-Cogeca coordinating its lobbying strategy around delay, political alliances and technical changes introduced before proposals reached their final form, a pattern that consistently benefited manufacturers more than the majority of the farmers the lobby claims to speak for.
The trouble is that European policy tends to treat these interests as if they were identical. That allows lobbyists to speak as though any attack on pesticide use is an attack on farming as such, and helps explain why broader reform keeps stalling. Marco Contiero of Greenpeace EU said Copa-Cogeca had “chosen to shield a small group of highly industrialised operators responsible for a disproportionate share of pollution” rather than defend the majority of Europe’s farmers. A Lighthouse Reports investigation that interviewed nearly 120 farmers found that smaller-scale and younger farmers in particular said they did not feel represented by the organisation at all.
Lobby Power Now Works Through Pragmatism
Today’s anti-regulatory politics rarely says openly that health or biodiversity do not matter. Instead, it speaks the language of realism. Europe, the argument goes, cannot burden farmers with idealistic green constraints whilst fertiliser and energy costs remain high, imports stay competitive and rural anger simmers. That framing is politically effective because it makes any serious reduction in pesticide dependency look naïve or elitist.
But that is also where the deception sits. A farm model that relies heavily on chemical inputs, leaves farmers exposed to health risks and helps drive biodiversity loss is not automatically pro-farmer simply because it resists environmental regulation. On 17 June 2026, the European Parliament voted to scrap existing safety rules for new GM foods under pressure from the same lobby coalition, with multinational seed corporations already dominating 60% of the commercial seed market. In this model, farmers carry the physical and political risk whilst manufacturers and lobby structures protect the underlying market.
The Argument Is Really About Who Speaks for the Countryside
The biggest issue is not only whether one law survives or one active substance gets renewed.
It is whether the loudest farm organisations still deserve automatic treatment as the authentic voice of farmers when their positions so consistently converge with the interests of the pesticide industry. Copa-Cogeca internally discussed the demand to “Repeal the Green Deal” on the eve of the June 2024 European elections. That is not the language of a body defending smallholders. It is the language of an industrial interest protecting its market.
Europe’s pesticide politics has become a struggle over representation as much as regulation. If the countryside is always invoked to defend the chemical status quo, the first thing that disappears is the possibility that farmers themselves might want a different future. Many of them already do.
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