Lobby supreme

In one of the biggest lobbying efforts ever seen in Brussels, lobbyists for Europe's £800m-a-year food industry have been bombarding MEPs with thousands of emails, letters and phone calls and sponsored reports, lectures and conferences ahead of a vote in the European Parliament today.
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They are trying to prevent the European Union adopting the British Food Standards Agency's front of pack labelling system which displays red, amber and green "traffic lights" to indicate levels of salt, fat and other nutrients.
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Although the scheme devised has the backing of doctors and dietitians, because it could cut Britain's annual toll of 70,000 diet-related deaths, the retailers Tesco and Morrisons and the multinational firms Nestlé, Kellogg's, Danone, Kraft, and PepsiCo have refused to introduce it.
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They back a rival scheme called Guideline Daily Amounts, which expresses the nutrients as percentages of an adult's recommended daily intake.
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Independent research shows that traffic lights, which have the backing of the British Medical Association and the British Dietetic Association, are more effective than GDAs in putting consumers off unhealthy products.
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Despite that, in March the European Parliament's environment committee rejected traffic lights by 32-30 votes, following intense lobbying by manufacturers.
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A Dutch socialist MEP Kartika Liotard, who sat on the environment committee, said representations were 100-to-one in favour of the industry and during key meetings the room was so full of lobbyists that there were no seats for MEPs' assistants.
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The lobbying has now shifted to the 736 MEPs who will vote on the adoption of a unified labelling system tomorrow.
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They will vote on three options: traffic lights with GDAs and the words "high", "medium" or "low"; GDAs based on percentages per 100g; or a calorie count.
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They don't want to see traffic-light labels because they don't want this kind of information in such an easy-to-understand format.
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They prefer complex labels that make it far harder for shoppers to really understand what's going in their basket."
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In a report, Corporate Europe Observatory, a business watchdog based in Brussels, disclosed that Commission documents suggested that the PR and lobbying consultancy Fleishman-Hillard had been paid up to €671,000 to promote GDAs by the European confederation of food and drink industries, the CIAA.
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The CIAA acknowledges its members spent €1bn on implementing the GDA scheme across Europe, but would not say how much they had spent on lobbying.
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In a statement the confederation, whose members include the UK Food and Drink Federation, rejected any suggestion its members had been exerting improper influence.
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It said: EU food and drink manufacturers have a legitimate interest in following this piece of EU legislation and we have made sure that European policy-makers are kept abreast of our views on this important draft law
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Independent

Will we ever see the day when Corporations act responsibly with considerations beyond money?

And these same corporations would proudly boast about their corporate social policies

There has been little media coverage of this important legislation that effects every single person in the EU

Wonder why?

No I don't need to we have been here too often before