Episode 6: In the name of innovation

EU Watchdog Radio is a new podcast hosted jointly by Corporate Europe
Observatory (CEO) and Counter Balance. In the sixth episode Martin
Pigeon, researcher and campaigner at CEO and Marine Ejuryan, Advocacy
manager at ‘Global Health Advocates’ (GHA) explain the content of two
in-depth and damning reports they just published; These reports are
about how, in the name of innovation, industrial lobbies have managed to
control the use of at least 3.7 billion of euro in European public
research funds.

For the past 15 years, industry lobby groups have controlled the use of
billions in public EU funds for health and climate research, through two
so called public-private partnerships, or PPPs and this at the expense
of the public interest.

The first report is called ‘More private than public: the ways Big
Pharma dominates the Innovative Medicines Initiative’. The second,
report is called Research & Destroy: the factories of the industrial
bioeconomy threaten the climate and biodiversity’.

These two reports show that these lobby groups have prevented these
partnerships from meaningfully investing into research projects that
address societal challenges such as epidemic preparedness, - quite
telling in times of widespread Covid-19 – or to invest in viable climate
solutions; The EU research funds were mostly used to fund their own
commercially profitable research projects instead.

These very corporate lobbies are now lobbying for these  PPPs to be
renewed in a comparable form in the next EU budget, under the EU’s
Research programme ‘Horizon Europe’ ( which runs from 2021-2027), And
all this with the support of the European Commission’s DG Research &
Innovation.

Both CEO and Counter Balance raise awareness on the importance of good
governance in the European Union, by researching issues like lobbying of
large and powerful industries, corporate capture of decision making,
corruption, fraud, human rights violations in areas like agro-business,
biotech & chemical companies, the financial sector & public investment
banks, trade, energy&climate, scientific research and much more…

You can find us on iTunes, Spotify & Buzzsprout. Stay tuned for more
independent and in-depth information that concerns every EU-citizen!