The World Health Organization has recommended the use of novel weight-loss drugs to curb soaring obesity rates, and urged pharma companies to lower their prices and expand production so that lower-income countries can also benefit. The WHO’s new treatment guideline includes a conditional recommendation to use the so-called GLP-1s — such as Wegovy, Ozempic and Mounjaro — as part of a wider approach that includes healthy diet, exercise and support from doctors. The WHO described its recommendation as “conditional” due to limited data on the long-term efficacy and safety of GLP-1s. The recommendation excludes pregnant women. While GLP-1s are a now well-established treatment in high-income countries, the WHO warns they could reach fewer than 10 percent of people who could benefit by 2030. Among the countries with the highest rates of obesity are those in the Middle East, Latin America and Pacific islands. Meanwhile, Wegovy was only available in around 15 countries as of the start of this year. The WHO wants pharma companies to consider tiered pricing (lower prices in lower-income countries) and voluntary licensing of patents and technology to allow other producers around the word to manufacture GLP-1s, to help expand access to these drugs. Jeremy Farrar, an assistant director general at the WHO, told POLITICO the guidelines would also give an “amber and green light” to generic drugmakers to produce cheaper versions of GLP-1s when the patents expire. Francesca Celletti, a senior adviser on obesity at the WHO, told POLITICO “decisive action” was needed to expand access to GLP-1s, citing the example of antiretroviral HIV drugs earlier this century. “We all thought it was impossible … and then the price went down,” she said.  Key patents on semaglutide, the ingredient in Novo Nordisk’s diabetes and weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy, will lift in some countries next year, including India, Brazil and China. Indian generics giant Dr. Reddy’s plans to launch a generic semaglutide-based weight-loss drug in 87 countries in 2026, its CEO Erez Israeli said earlier this year, reported Reuters. “U.S. and Europe will open later … (and) all the other Western markets will be open between 2029 to 2033,” Israeli told reporters after the release of quarterly earnings in July. Prices should fall once generics are on the market, but that isn’t the only barrier. Injectable drugs, for example, need cold chain storage. And health systems need to be equipped to roll out the drug once it’s affordable, Celletti said. 

BRUSSELS — Lawmakers in the European Parliament’s legal affairs committee have voted to go ahead and sue the European Commission for axing a proposal to regulate patent licensing. The JURI committee on Tuesday voted in favor of referring the Commission to the Court of Justice of the European Union for breaching EU law by withdrawing a proposal to regulate standard essential patents. The patents, for 4G and 5G networks used in mobile phones and connected cars, have been at the center of a long-running battle between the companies that own them and those that use them. European lawmakers have supported efforts to resolve the fight — and some accuse the EU executive of attacking democracy by killing off the initiative. President Roberta Metsola now needs to mandate the Parliament’s legal service to draft and file a case by Nov. 14, a Parliament official said, citing rules of procedure. If she intends to depart from JURI’s conclusions, she could also bring it to the Conference of Presidents or, in an unlikely scenario, submit it to a plenary vote, they added. Fourteen MEPs voted in favor of the action, against eight who opposed it, the official said. The vote was held behind closed doors.  The motion was spearheaded by German Social Democrat René Repasi, coordinator for the Committee on Legal Affairs and standing rapporteur for disputes involving the Parliament. “With today’s vote, we send a clear message: we will not stand by when the Commission oversteps its mandate,” Repasi said in an emailed statement following the vote. “The Commission’s right to withdraw a proposal, as was conducted with the Standard-Essential Patents (SEP) proposal, cannot be used as a political instrument to short-circuit Parliament’s work or to enforce a deregulation agenda from above. This is not in line with how the democratic processes in the European Union are meant to function.” Members of the European People’s Party, the center-right party allied to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, were instructed to vote against taking legal action. “Today’s vote reflects Parliament’s concern about the balance of powers between EU institutions, but we must be clear: This legal action will not bring back the withdrawn legislative proposal,” Adrián Vázquez Lázara, the EPP’s lead on the issue, told POLITICO.  While he acknowledged that the withdrawal of the SEP bill raised some question marks, Vázquez Lázara said that legal action was not the right solution. “What can be questioned, however, is the wording and justification used in this specific withdrawal, which raises legitimate concerns about institutional transparency and communication,” Vázquez Lázara said. “Those Members who wish to see the proposal revived should seek political and legislative avenues to achieve that goal, rather than resorting to institutional confrontation.” Patent implementers, which historically supported the regulation and range from carmakers to Big Tech companies and SMEs, cheered the move. “There is still hope for democracy and fairness in the EU legislature,” said Evelina Kurgonaite of the Fair Standards Alliance, which represents the patent users. “We thank MEP [Marion] Walsmann and other JURI members for their leadership in fighting for a fair chance at innovation for  businesses in Europe, especially SMEs.” The Commission declined to comment.

CLIMATEWIRE | A once-outlandish idea for reversing global warming took a major step toward reality Friday when Israeli-U.S. startup Stardust Solutions announced the largest-ever fundraising round for any company that aims to cool the Earth by spraying particles into the atmosphere. Its plan to limit the sun’s heat raised $60 million from a broad coalition of investors that included Silicon Valley luminaries and the Agnelli family, an Italian industrial dynasty. The disclosure, critics said, raises questions about involvement of venture capital firms in driving forward a largely untested, thinly researched and mostly unregulated technology that could disrupt global weather patterns and trigger geopolitical conflict. The investors were “putting their trust in the concept of, we need a safe and responsible and controlled option for sunlight reflection, which for me is [a] very important step forward in the evolution of this field,” Stardust CEO Yanai Yedvab said during an interview this week in POLITICO’s London office. He and co-founder Amyad Spector, who also flew in for the interview, are both nuclear physicists who formerly worked for the Israeli government. The startup’s fundraising haul was led by Lowercarbon Capital, a Wyoming-based climate technology-focused firm co-founded by billionaire investor Chris Sacca. It was also backed by the Agnellis’ firm Exor, a Dutch holding company that is the largest shareholder of Chrysler parent company Stellantis, luxury sports car manufacturer Ferrari and Italy’s Juventus Football Club. Ten other firms — hailing from San Francisco to Berlin — and one individual, former Facebook executive Matt Cohler, also joined Stardust’s fundraising round, its second since being founded two years ago. The firm has now raised a total of $75 million. It is registered in the U.S. state of Delaware and headquartered outside Tel Aviv but is not affiliated with the state of Israel. The surge of investor enthusiasm for Stardust comes amid stalled political efforts in Washington and other capitals to reduce the use of oil, gas and coal — the main drivers of climate change. Meanwhile, global temperatures continue to climb to new heights, worsening wildfires, floods, droughts and other natural disasters that some U.S. policymakers have baselessly blamed on solar geoengineering. The new influx of cash is four times the size of the startup’s initial fundraising round and, Yedvab argued, represents a major vote of confidence in Stardust and its strategy to land government contracts for deploying its technology at a global scale. It also shows that a growing pool of investors are willing to bet on solar geoengineering — a technology that some scientists still consider too dangerous to even study. Even advocates of researching solar geoengineering question the wisdom of pursuing it via a for-profit company like Stardust. “They have convinced Silicon Valley [venture capitalists] to give them a lot of money, and I would say that they shouldn’t have,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School and author of the book “Geoengineering: The Gamble.” “I don’t think it is a reasonable path to suggest that there’s going to be somebody — the U.S. government, another government, whoever — who buys Stardust, buys the [intellectual property] for a billion bucks [and] makes the VC investors gazillions. I don’t think that is, at all, reasonable.” Lowercarbon Capital did not respond to emailed questions. Stardust claims to have created a particle that would reflect sunlight in the same way debris from volcanic eruptions can temporarily cool the planet. The company says its powder is inert, wouldn’t accumulate in humans or ecosystems, and can’t harm the ozone layer or create acid rain like the sulfur-rich particles from volcanoes. It plans to seek government contracts to manufacture, disperse and monitor the particles in the stratosphere. The company is in the process of securing patents and preparing academic papers on its integrated solar geoengineering system. The startup would use the money it has raised to begin “controlled outdoor experiments” as soon as April, Yedvab told POLITICO. Those tests would release the company’s reflective particles inside a modified plane flying about 11 miles (18 kilometers) above sea level. The idea, Yedvab explained, is that “instead of displacing the particles out to the stratosphere and start following them, to do the other way around — to suck air from the stratosphere and to conduct in situ experiments, without dispersing essentially.” He said the company could have raised more money but only sought the funding it believes is necessary for the initial stratospheric testing. Stardust only took cash from investors who are aligned with the company’s cautious approach, he added. The fundraising round wasn’t conducted “from a point of view of, let’s get as much money as we can, but rather to say, this is what we need” to advance the technology, Yedvab said. Stardust’s new investors include the U.S. firms Future Ventures, Never Lift Ventures, Starlight Ventures, Nebular and Lauder Partners, as well as the British groups Attestor, Kindred Capital and Orion Global Advisors. Future Positive Capital of Paris and Berlin’s Earth.now also joined the fundraising round. Corbin Hiar reported from Washington. Karl Mathiesen reported from London.

BRUSSELS ― Ursula von der Leyen is facing the biggest challenge yet to her authority as European Commission president after political groups threatened to withdraw support over her decision to cancel climate-friendly legislation. “We are on the brink of an institutional crisis,” Valérie Hayer, chair of the liberal Renew Europe group, told POLITICO.  Von der Leyen is from the center-right European People’s Party and although it’s the biggest group in the European Parliament it relies on votes from the Socialists and liberals to get its way. The Commission’s ability to introduce EU laws risks being blocked if the groups refuse to play ball. The Commission announced on Friday that it was pulling the Green Claims directive ― a landmark law that would hold companies accountable for unfounded environmental claims ― even though it has already passed through many stages of the legislative process. That move, which the EPP group in Parliament requested the Commission make on Wednesday, was applauded by the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists and the far-right Patriots for Europe, the group of France’s Marine Le Pen and Hungary’s Victor Orbán. “If the Commission withdraws the text, we at Renew consider this act as seriously jeopardizing the platform of the pro-European majority,” Hayer said. Socialists and liberals accused von der Leyen of siding with far-right forces ― which demand the EU ditches all its green policies ― and ignoring the will of their groups that voted her into office.  While there are no formal coalitions in the European Parliament, the center-right EPP, Socialists and liberals ― broadly the traditional pro-EU mainstream ― have relied on each other for support and signed a cooperation agreement in November. Yet the EPP has repeatedly aligned itself with right-wing and far-right political groups in the house to push through some measures, set the agenda, or kill green files. They did so this week when they brought down a report on financing development projects and two AI and patents bills, and created a new body to scrutinize NGO financing. ‘WE WILL STOP PROTECTING HER’ This week’s withdrawal of the greenwashing law may be the last straw for the Socialists and liberals, which have also been dismayed at some of von der Leyen’s other actions, including the so-called Pfizergate saga, where the EU court ruled against the Commission over its refusal to release text messages between the commission president and the head of vaccine-maker Pfizer during the Covid pandemic. “The debate on Pfizergate, we protected her from it, if this continues like this, we will stop protecting her,” a senior Renew official said. The Socialists and liberals could “stop playing the game and making deals in other files with EPP,” effectively blocking the EU’s legislative process, they added. “The problem now is that the Commission is also answering to the alternative right-wing majority, not the centrist platform,” the official said. A spokesperson for the EPP said it welcomed the Commission’s announcement, claiming that the current text under negotiation would have “led to a bureaucratic nightmare for companies.” As well as being angry at the cancelation of the proposed law itself, both centrist parties accuse the EPP and the Commission president of bypassing the EU’s legislative process. The anti-greenwashing bill was already being negotiated between Parliament and EU Council ― representing national governments ― after both institutions already approved their positions after months of work. A Socialist official added the situation has brought them to question “the whole basis of support for von der Leyen, and if she really goes through with this, that would be seen as breaching the platform, there is no platform left.” “The Commission should be aware of the importance of the alliance and the commitments.” S&D group chair Iratxe Garcia said. The greenwashing law in the form the negotiations were taking would “go against the Commission’s simplification agenda,” said Commission spokesperson Stefan De Keersmaecker. “Our objective has been to find an agreement on a legislative proposal that would reduce administrative burden and complexity for companies, and in particular smaller companies.” He added: “Obviously, the Commission remains fully committed to fighting greenwashing and ensuring that consumers are correctly informed and will continue to work on this objective.”

An NGO leading the fight for drug price transparency has been forced into signing secrecy pacts with manufacturers, revealing the full might of Big Pharma in keeping its prices hidden. Documents seen by POLITICO reveal that Doctors Without Borders, also known as MSF, signed a confidentiality clause with German pharma company Bayer in a contract to buy contraceptives for distribution in lower-income countries. The deal prevented MSF from disclosing the price it paid for the medicines. A Bayer spokesperson said the company would not comment on the content of agreements with third parties. But it’s not a one-off: A top MSF official admitted the NGO had “reluctantly” signed NDAs with pharma companies on more than one occasion. The news has shocked former staff at MSF who led the NGO’s world-renowned and successful campaign to expose Big Pharma’s drug prices. Tido von Schoen-Angerer, a pediatrician who from 2006 to 2012 led the MSF Access Campaign, said he was “a bit speechless” that MSF would sign nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) because its approach in the past was to “never sign such agreements when it came to supply and cost.” MSF has made transparency a key demand in its campaigning on access to medicines, often disclosing the price it pays for some drugs, including insulin pens, as well as the costs of its clinical trials. But while MSF’s actions have drawn surprise, others can understand the pressure the NGO is under when negotiating prices with big players in the sector, arguing it’s a sign of the leverage pharma companies hold in such talks. MSF, signed a confidentiality clause with German pharma company Bayer in a contract to buy contraceptives for distribution in lower-income countries. | Najeeb Almahboobi/EPA Ellen ‘t Hoen, another former head of the Access Campaign, argued the blame should be on the drug companies. “This is a symptom of the hostage-like situation single source suppliers — e.g. drug companies that hold patents and control the market — create with their pricing policies. It would be a difficult position to take for MSF to withhold medicines from the patients they care for. In other words, the resistance has its medical ethical limits.” Drug companies often prefer to keep the price of medicines secret to prevent other countries from demanding the lowest available price. The European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations has advocated for confidential tiered pricing that it says would ensure lower-income countries would pay less than higher income ones. Transparency campaigners say NDAs allow pharma companies to inflate prices and assert extra conditions on buyers. “MSF is firmly opposed to pricing secrecy, as we believe transparency is essential to improve access to affordable medicines,” Maria Guevara, international medical secretary at MSF International, told POLITICO. “However, sometimes companies force us into a position where we must sign NDAs or confidentiality clauses to be able to obtain critical medicines and tools to treat our patients.” Guevara said that MSF “systematically resists” demands from suppliers, “though unfortunately we do not always win.” “It is the option of last resort; we try our best efforts not to have to sign one,” Guevara added. In 2023, the Access Campaign announced the NGO had refused to sign a contract to buy HIV medication from ViiV because of the pharma company’s “last-minute” demand for terms that are “not acceptable in MSF purchase agreements,” including an NDA. “We refused to sign the [ViiV] agreement with these terms, as it would undermine drug pricing transparency, limit civil society activism for lower drug prices, and restrict supply to [low- and middle-income countries],” Guevara told POLITICO. ViiV declined to comment on the story when contacted. The company has disclosed its non-profit price for the drug — currently £20.70 per vial excluding distribution costs — to buyers, but this price doesn’t apply to middle-income countries. MSF has called for ViiV to publish all of its prices and extend the access terms to all countries. Access Campaign staff have urged MSF management to adopt a policy on NDAs. An email sent by members of the campaign to management last year noted MSF did “not currently have an agreed approach internally to guide the strategic decision making and practices concerning NDA.” When asked what MSF’s current policy was, Guevara said: “We focus our resistance [to drug price secrecy clauses]on products where we know access is a major issue.” This story has been updated with ViiV’s position.

Microwaves, GPS, drones, duct tape, the PC. That’s just a short list of household goods that trace their origin to military research labs.  Their dual-use functionality is known as “military-civil fusion” in the parlance of the defense sector. Now, with Europe about to unleash a flood of money into its defense sector, reversing decades of underinvestment, hopes are high that the continent’s dismal productivity record could tap into similar military ingenuity to turn things around. Projects underway in Europe are already beginning to rival those of the United States in terms of ambition: from continental antimissile defenses to low Earth orbit satellite constellations that could provide alternatives to an increasingly unreliable Elon Musk’s Starlink. The hope is that eventually all the investment drives technological innovation that spills over into the civilian economy, boosting productivity and paying for itself.  But is that realistic, or just wishful thinking? There’s no doubt that in the short term, economic strain is unavoidable, and will require cuts elsewhere. “This is about spending more, spending better,” NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said in a speech at the start of the year, acknowledging Washington’s long-standing complaints about Europe not doing enough for its own security. While two-thirds of NATO members now meet the alliance’s target of spending 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense, it’s still “nowhere near enough,” Rutte said. Rutte is getting his wish. The European Commission has opened the doors to €800 billion in military spending. In parallel, Germany, Europe’s largest economy, announced a plan to spend a trillion euros to upgrade its rickety national army and repair its infrastructure.   ROBOWARS Where public money goes, private business follows, and there is a burgeoning crop of new defense players emerging to meet Europe’s defense needs. Loïc Mougeolle is a defense contractor whose ties to the military go back a generation. His father worked in nuclear deterrence for the French navy; he, in turn, worked nine years for a defense firm until co-founding his own defense company, Comand AI, in 2022, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “We will never be able to produce more than a strategic adversary like China,” said Mougeolle, who is chief executive of the Paris-based Comand AI. “What we need to do is to be able to conduct operations, 10 times, 100 times more efficiently than them. This is the starting point of Comand AI.” “This is about spending more, spending better,” NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said in a speech at the start of the year, acknowledging Washington’s long-standing complaints about Europe not doing enough for its own security. | Erdem Sahin/EFE via EPA Mougeolle said he’s developed an artificial intelligence-based platform that can parse orders, develop task sequences and analyze terrain, all with the aim of greatly accelerating military response times. With Comand AI, “one staff officer can do the job of four,” he said. For now, Comand AI only focuses on the defense sector, but Mougeolle said the technology his company has developed has civil applications as well. For example, it could help fleets of delivery robots navigate terrain to reach their destinations. Or it could help deal with coordinated cyberattacks on private businesses. OFF TO THE SPACE RACES But entrusting new inventions that benefit everyday Europeans to innovative players like Comand AI, or European satellite and missile defense initiatives, is a gamble. While there is plenty of historical precedent, there is no certainty. “Defense spending has been an important driver of technological advances in the U.S.,” said Chris Miller, professor at Tufts University and author of Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology. “The Defense Department often funded basic research and prototyping that was then picked up by private firms and turned into world-changing civilian technologies, such as [micro]chips, GPS, or display screens.”  Research from the Kiel Institute published ahead of the Munich Security Conference in February estimated that Europe’s long-term productivity could rise by as much as 0.25 percent for each 1 percent of GDP spent on military research. “There’s increasing evidence that some of the biggest breakthroughs, particularly in the high-tech area of computation, are associated with R&D that was developed during the Space Race,” said Ethan Ilzetzki, author of the paper and professor at the London School of Economics.  The competitive nature of war and the existential stakes at play encourage efficiency and innovation. While it’s perhaps not a precedent today’s EU would want to repeat (another Thirty Years’ War, anyone?), the intense rivalries of early modern Europe helped give rise to its technological supremacy in the 18th and 19th centuries. “There is an incentive here to be at the technological frontier, and even to push the technological frontier,” Ilzetzki said.   PLOWSHARES TO SWORDS Plans to boost continental defenses have already drawn criticism, notably from those on the left who stress the importance of preserving the welfare state to avoid populist backlash.  “While military expenditures no longer know fiscal limits, social benefits and support for parental leave are already on the chopping block,” economists Tom Krebs and Isabella Weber argued in a column for Project Syndicate. “This is bound to further fuel dissatisfaction.”  The United Kingdom’s Labour government is a straw in the wind. It recently announced £4.8 billion in welfare cuts even as it boosted defense spending by £2.2 billion.  It’s not all pain. Military spending will give the economy a short-term boost. Defense contractors’ revenues will rise, manufacturing jobs will increase, and workers’ wages will cycle back into the economy. Daniel Kral, lead economist at Oxford Economics, said the scale of the plans is so huge that they could help “break Europe out of stagnation through domestic demand-led growth.”  French President Emmanuel Macron has called on governments to replace U.S. Patriot missiles and F-35s with European alternatives like SAMP/T systems. | Joe Klamar/AFP via Getty Images But while the production of guns and bombs is counted in GDP figures, there is no long-term productivity boost from landmines that just lie in the ground, or howitzers under wraps in barracks. They may guarantee the system that generates GDP by protecting it from invasion, but their contribution to the final numbers is unquantifiable. That’s a problem, given that Europe’s rearmament plans are going to be funded largely through debt. Government debt is already high, and adding to it could very well damage the economy in the long run.  CHOICES, CHOICES One way to square the circle is to invest smarter. To keep as much value in Europe as possible, the bloc will need to develop the products itself that it currently buys from the U.S. — and do so without further antagonizing a protectionist White House. More than half of European spending on procurement flows to U.S. firms. French President Emmanuel Macron has called on governments to replace U.S. Patriot missiles and F-35s with European alternatives like SAMP/T systems and Rafale jets. The Berlaymont is explicitly backing local industry as part of its rearmament efforts.    But front-line countries like Poland or Finland want to prioritize immediate needs — even if that means buying from the U.S., South Korea or Israel.   “The Baltics see fire, Central Europe sees smoke, everyone else doesn’t see anything,” said one European diplomat who asked to remain anonymous to speak candidly. At present, too much of Europe’s defense spending goes to entrenched, slow-moving national champions. By contrast, Ilzetzki’s paper describes how the U.S. Department of Defense promotes competition through dual sourcing — purchasing weapon systems from more than one company at once to encourage competition. Often these tenders are more open-ended: Rather than favoring a certain technology with very fixed specifications that in effect favors established players, it will put out a call for open-ended solutions to a certain military problem.  Such tenders “reached a broader set of firms that are smaller, younger, and more technology-oriented … [and] also led to more patents and dual-use spillovers,” the Kiel report reads.  Partly because of that, about 16 percent of U.S. military spending goes to R&D, compared to only 4.5 percent in Europe. That helps U.S. companies keep their technological edge and makes them more likely to invent something useful in civilian life. As such, to succeed in the long run, any coordinated European rearmament push will require capitals to do more to embrace new entrants — many more nimble and at the technological frontier, said Dan Breznitz, an expert in state-run innovation policy at the University of Toronto.   “You need to be able to disrupt the system,” he said. “You need to have an understanding that there will be new players. And some of those new players will become the new giants. And that’s what may be something that I’m not sure that the EU is very good at doing, to be honest.” 

ROMANIAN WILD CARD GEORGE SIMION SETS BRUSSELS’ NERVES ON EDGE The presidential front-runner’s hostility to Ukraine is creating a rift with fellow European conservatives. By MAX GRIERA, NICHOLAS VINOCUR and CSONGOR KÖRÖMI Illustration by Aistė Stancikaitė for POLITICO Is Europe about to have another clamorous disruptor at the leaders’ top table? That’s certainly the fear in Brussels, as the hard-right ultranationalist George Simion stands a strong chance of winning the Romanian presidency on Sunday. European officials are particularly worried the 38-year-old firebrand will join the current duo of wreckers — Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Slovakia’s Robert Fico — in seeking to scupper aid to Ukraine just as the EU wants to dial up pressure on Russia to end the war. Advertisement If Bucharest does lurch over to the saboteur camp, it would be a bitter blow as Romania carries greater geostrategic heft than Hungary or Slovakia. The Black Sea nation of 19 million has, until now, been a rock-solid stalwart of the EU and the NATO alliance. Simion is rapidly trying to allay those fears that he will rock the boat. He insists he will be a pro-EU and pro-NATO leader, who is more directly aligned with Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni — a pro-Ukraine right-winger — than Orbán or Fico. He styles his alliance with Donald Trump’s MAGA movement as a way to keep U.S. troops committed to Romania. “We are a Eurorealist group, not Euroskeptic,” Simion told POLITICO, adding that he embraced the EU’s single market as a driver of wealth for Romanians. It is, admittedly, hard to imagine Simion as a natural bedfellow for Orbán, the EU’s most tenacious internal rebel. While Simion acknowledges Orbán has served as a “model” for him, there is little love lost between the Romanian and Hungarian nationalist camps, who are fiercely at odds over the Hungarian minority in Transylvania in northern Romania. George Simion campaigns ahead of the European elections in Targoviste last year. | Daniel Mihailescu/AFP via Getty Images But those tensions with Orbán don’t mean everyone is breathing a sigh of relief in Brussels. Officials and experts who have observed Simion’s rise to prominence — and tracked his sometimes contradictory statements — are skeptical he can be as successful as Meloni in hitching his right-wing agenda to the EU mainstream. They point to his calls to break EU law, his territorial claims on Moldova, an EU candidate nation facing Russian destabilization, as well as his blanket opposition to any further support for Ukraine as proof that Simion will be, at best, an unpredictable leader and, at worst, a source of division within the bloc. “I think he would certainly be a disruptive figure around the EU Council table and potentially also around the NATO table,” said Oana Lungescu, a former spokesperson for NATO and currently a distinguished fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. “His position seems very clear that in terms of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, he proposes neutrality for Romania — which is of course incompatible with Romania’s position both as an EU member state and as a NATO ally.” Advertisement Simion adamantly denies he is pro-Russian, but he is a banned “persona non grata“ in Ukraine for promoting a “unionist ideology that denies the legitimacy of the state border of Ukraine.” Simion’s party, the Alliance for the Union of Romanians, is associated with an irredentist vision of a greater Romania that risks triggering territorial disputes and potential conflict with Ukraine, Moldova and Bulgaria. At the helm in Bucharest, he would have ample opportunity to stir up trouble by pulling out of NATO training operations for Ukrainians, obstructing border crossings and the flow of arms into Ukraine, and rowing back on Romania’s pivotal role in helping Black Sea grain exports. For his part, Simion insists he is pressuring Kyiv to defend the rights of Romanian-speakers inside Ukraine — a subject that the government of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has, in reality, been very willing to address. Manfred Weber, head of the center-right umbrella European People’s Party, whose Romanian affiliate opposes Simion, echoed Lungescu’s concerns and said Simion represented a “risk for what I believe in.” Rather than Orbán, Simion routinely cites Meloni as his main source of inspiration. | Grigore Popescu/Agerpres Foto The EPP leader dismissed any comparison between Simion and Meloni, who remains in the European mainstream despite her hard-right policies at home, arguing the Romanian was “definitely” not like the Italian. Weber also accused Simion of having “worked together with the Russian [security services].” Simion denies allegations he met with Russian spies in Ukraine over a decade ago. Such concerns don’t seem to have dissuaded Romanian voters, who gave Simion 41 percent of the vote in the first round of the presidential election. That said, the populist candidate last week floundered in his debate against centrist rival Nicușor Dan, and opinion polls suggest his lead is beginning to ebb. POLITICO’s Poll of Polls put him only 3 percentage points clear of Dan as the race heads into the final straight. TRANSYLVANIAN TENSIONS On the face of it, Simion and Europe’s disruptor-in-chief, Orbán, look to be cut from the same political cloth. Both are ultranationalists who tout a pro-family, Christian vision for their countries. Both hail from Eastern bloc countries, have compared the EU with the USSR and both venerate Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.  But there’s a clear limit to how close they can get. Simion and Orbán have been at odds for years over Orbán’s claims that Hungarian minorities in Romania are being mistreated. Members of Simion’s AUR party suspect Orbán blocked its bid to join the European Conservatives and Reformists grouping. Indeed, they were only accepted within the bloc’s premier right-wing alliance after the Hungarian leader’s Fidesz party bailed to found the far-right Patriots group. Advertisement AUR — and particularly Simion — gained notoriety in 2019 during heated disputes over military graves in the village of Valea Uzului in Romania, where many Hungarian soldiers are buried. “Hungarians were beaten, and graves were desecrated … Since then, they have been attacking our people, our region, and our schools on a weekly basis,” Botond Csoma, spokesperson and parliamentary group leader of Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania, told POLITICO.  Orbán relies on support from the Hungarian minority in Romania, to whom his government granted citizenship. They accounted for more than 250,000 votes in the last general election in Hungary and are seen as a bastion of support for the strongman. He will need their backing to take on his rival, Péter Magyar, whose Tisza party is polling ahead of him in the run-up to next year’s parliamentary elections.  Despite those underlying tensions, Simion is keen to extend an olive branch to Orbán and forge an alliance in Brussels. Simion shakes hands with former presidential candidate Călin Georgescu during an anti-government rally. | Andrei Pungovschi/Getty Images “The relation with Mr. Orbán at the moment doesn’t exist, but as previously stated, to some extent, Viktor Orbán is a model for me and in many issues, I will collaborate with him,” Simion told POLITICO.  Last week, Orbán spoke out about the Romanian elections for the first time, saying that “one of the candidates, Mr. Simion, said … that both Hungary and Romania should be able to rely on each other … We fully agree.” Simion thanked Orbán for his support after the statement — but that caused disarray in the Hungarian minority party. To ease the turmoil, Orbán backtracked slightly a day later and stated that he fully aligned with the Hungarian minority party’s opinion. MELONI MAN Rather than Orbán, Simion routinely cites Meloni as his main source of inspiration. The Italian prime minister occupies a political zone between the far-right camps and the EU’s center-right mainstream, and is accepted as a partner by both Weber’s EPP and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.   For Brussels, however, Simion is no Meloni. The populist’s hostile relationship with Ukraine is a major problem, and was considered another impediment to the group’s adhesion to the ECR family in the past. To gain admission to the party, the ECR obliged AUR to sign a written declaration, seen by POLITICO, condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and vaguely committing to preserving the rule of law. Advertisement Since then, Simion has claimed to be a staunch critic of the Kremlin and recently said Putin should be arrested for war crimes in Ukraine. But he has declined to commit to military aid to Ukraine and has doubled down on his promise to oppose those measures within the European Council.  It remains to be seen whether Meloni and the ECR can ultimately make the populist palatable in Brussels. “I will be open to collaborate,” Simion said. “Of course, I will be the new kid on the block, so I will have to learn a lot from Madame Meloni and other experienced leaders.” Simion told POLITICO he also looked up to other conservative politicians like the Flemish nationalist Prime Minister of Belgium Bart De Wever and Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala. SHAPE-SHIFTER Romanian experts, with a longer memory, have a message: Do not trust what Simion or his party program says. This is, after all, a man who has moved from comparing the EU to the Soviet Union, and has then claimed not to be Euroskeptic. “Don’t take anything from whatever they wrote in that program,” said Expert Forum’s Ana Otilia Nuţu, who argued Simion has learned from Trump’s campaign. She said that, just like Trump, Simion was “creating a cult” around himself. “People are going to vote for you even if you lie to them in the face,” she said. Simion is now moderating his speech to reach a wider audience, Nuţu said, but warned that “he is going to act like Orbán in favor of Putin” if he gets elected.  Simion speaks against the court’s decision to annul the first round of the presidential elections. | Robert Ghement/EFE via EPA Romanian political expert Radu Magdin also said Simion was unreliable and was overpromising to win the election, but reckoned that economic constraints would ultimately force him to fall into step. Romania receives highly significant EU funds in sectors ranging from farming to digitalization, and Simion won’t want Bucharest to suffer Hungary’s fate and have its funding cut. “The political legitimacy here is stronger with Simion, but the economic leverage is stronger with von der Leyen because, you know, you campaign in poetry and you govern in prose,” he said, citing the economic fragility of Romania over deficit levels. “This is an element of weakness that any Romanian leader has in their relationship with Brussels.” “The pressure to normalize on any Romanian president … is huge and is driven simply by economic considerations,” Magdin added. Claudiu Năsui, former Romanian economy minister, and a current member of parliament with the liberal Save Romania Union party, was even less equivocal and predicted Simion’s victory would be an “absolute disaster.” Advertisement “What’s going to happen with the Simion presidency is that people will expect a lot more uncertainty of Romania and a lot of more problems, so they’re going to withdraw funds,” he predicted. “So at best, we should expect a Meloni or PiS-style president,” he said, referring to Poland’s nationalist, socially conservative Law and Justice party. “That will be the absolute best-case scenario. I think it’s not going to be the best-case scenario, I think it’s going to be worse than Viktor Orbán if he gets elected.” Seb Starcevic contributed to this report.

‘PARKINSON’S IS A MAN-MADE DISEASE’ Europe’s flawed oversight of pesticides may be fueling a silent epidemic, warns Dutch neurologist Bas Bloem. His fight for reform pits him against industry, regulators — and time. Text and photos by BARTOSZ BRZEZIŃSKI in Nijmegen, Netherlands Illustration by Laura Scott for POLITICO In the summer of 1982, seven heroin users were admitted to a California hospital paralyzed and mute. They were in their 20s, otherwise healthy — until a synthetic drug they had manufactured in makeshift labs left them frozen inside their own bodies. Doctors quickly discovered the cause: MPTP, a neurotoxic contaminant that had destroyed a small but critical part of the brain, the substantia nigra, which controls movement. The patients had developed symptoms of late-stage Parkinson’s, almost overnight. The cases shocked neurologists. Until then, Parkinson’s was thought to be a disease of aging, its origins slow and mysterious. But here was proof that a single chemical could reproduce the same devastating outcome. And more disturbing still: MPTP turned out to be chemically similar to paraquat, a widely used weedkiller that, for decades, had been sprayed on farms across the United States and Europe. Advertisement While medication helped some regain movement, the damage was permanent — the seven patients never fully recovered. For a young Dutch doctor named Bas Bloem, the story would become formative. In 1989, shortly after finishing medical school, Bloem traveled to the United States to work with William Langston, the neurologist who had uncovered the MPTP-Parkinson’s link. What he saw there reshaped his understanding of the disease — and its causes. “It was like a lightning bolt,” Bloem tells me. “A single chemical had replicated the entire disease. Parkinson’s wasn’t just bad luck. It could be caused.” THE MAKING OF A MAN-MADE DISEASE Today, at 58, Bloem leads a globally recognized clinic and research team from his base at the Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, a medieval Dutch city near the German border. It treats hundreds of patients each year, while the team pioneers studies on early diagnosis and prevention. The hallway outside Bloem’s office was not hectic on my recent visit, but populated — patients moving slowly, deliberately, some with walkers, others with a caregiver’s arm under their own. One is hunched forward in a rigid, deliberate shuffle; another pauses silently by the stairs, his face slack, not absent — just suspended, as if every gesture had become too costly. On its busiest days, the clinic sees over 60 patients. “And more are coming,” Bloem says. Bloem’s presence is both charismatic and kinetic: tall — just over 2 meters, he says with a grin — with a habit of walking while talking, and a white coat lined with color-coded pens. His long, silver-gray hair is swept back, a few strands escaping as he paces the room. Patients paint portraits of him, write poems about him. His team calls him “the physician who never stops moving.” Unlike many researchers of his stature, Bloem doesn’t stay behind the scenes. He speaks at international conferences, consults with policymakers, and states his case to the public as well as to the scientific world. His work spans both care and cause — from promoting movement and personalized treatment to sounding the alarm about what might be triggering the disease in the first place. Alongside his focus on exercise and prevention, he’s become one of the most outspoken voices on the environmental drivers of Parkinson’s — and what he sees as a growing failure to confront their long-term impact on the human brain. Advertisement “Parkinson’s is a man-made disease,” he says. “And the tragedy is that we’re not even trying to prevent it.” When the English surgeon James Parkinson first described the “shaking palsy” in 1817, it was considered a medical curiosity — a rare affliction of aging men. Two centuries later, Parkinson’s disease has more than doubled globally over the past 20 years, and is expected to double again in the next 20. It is now one of the fastest-growing neurological disorders in the world, outpacing stroke and multiple sclerosis. The disease causes the progressive death of dopamine-producing neurons and gradually robs people of movement, speech and, eventually, cognition. There is no cure. Age and genetic predisposition play a role. But Bloem and the wider neurological community contend that those two factors alone cannot explain the steep rise in cases. In a 2024 paper co-authored with U.S. neurologist Ray Dorsey, Bloem wrote that Parkinson’s is “predominantly an environmental disease” — a condition shaped less by genetics and more by prolonged exposure to toxicants like air pollution, industrial solvents and, above all, pesticides. Most of the patients who pass through Bloem’s clinic aren’t farmers themselves, but many live in rural areas where pesticide use is widespread. Over time, he began to notice a pattern: Parkinson’s seemed to crop up more often in regions dominated by intensive agriculture. “Parkinson’s was a very rare disease until the early 20th century,” Bloem says. “Then with the agricultural revolution, chemical revolution, and the explosion of pesticide use, rates started to climb.” Europe, to its credit, has acted on some of the science. Paraquat — the herbicide chemically similar to MPTP — was finally banned in 2007, although only after Sweden took the European Commission to court for ignoring the evidence of its neurotoxicity. Other pesticides with known links to Parkinson’s, such as rotenone and maneb, are no longer approved. Advertisement But that’s not the case elsewhere. Paraquat is still manufactured in the United Kingdom and China, sprayed across farms in the United States, New Zealand and Australia, and exported to parts of Africa and Latin America — regions where Parkinson’s rates are now rising sharply. Once the second-most widely sold herbicide in the world — after glyphosate — paraquat helped drive major profits for its maker, Swiss-based and Chinese-owned company Syngenta. But its commercial peak has long passed, and the chemical now accounts for only a small fraction of the company’s overall business. In the U.S., Syngenta faces thousands of lawsuits from people who say the chemical gave them Parkinson’s. Similar cases are moving ahead in Canada. Syngenta has consistently denied any link between paraquat and Parkinson’s, pointing to regulatory reviews in the U.S., Australia and Japan that found no evidence of causality.  The company told POLITICO that comparisons to MPTP have been repeatedly challenged, citing a 2024 Australian review which concluded that paraquat does not act through the same neurotoxic mechanism. There is strong evidence, the company said in a written response running to more than three pages, that paraquat does not cause neurotoxic effects via the routes most relevant to human exposure — ingestion, skin contact or inhalation. “Paraquat is safe when used as directed,” Syngenta said. Still, for Bloem, even Europe’s bans are no cause for comfort. “The chemicals we banned? Those were the obvious ones,” Bloem says. “What we’re using now might be just as dangerous. We simply haven’t been asking the right questions.” A CHEMICAL EUROPE CAN’T QUIT Among the chemicals still in use, none has drawn more scrutiny — or survived more court battles — than glyphosate. It’s the most widely used herbicide on the planet. You can find traces of it in farmland, forests, rivers, raindrops and even in tree canopies deep inside Europe’s nature reserves. It’s in household dust, animal feed, supermarket produce. In one U.S. study, it showed up in 80 percent of urine samples taken from the general public. For years, glyphosate, sold under the Roundup brand, has been at the center of an international legal and regulatory storm. In the United States, Bayer — which acquired Monsanto, Roundup’s original maker — has paid out more than $10 billion to settle lawsuits linking glyphosate to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.  Advertisement Glyphosate is now off-patent and manufactured by numerous companies worldwide. But Bayer remains its top seller — achieving an estimated €2.6 billion in glyphosate-related sales in 2024, even as market competition and legal pressures cut into profits. In Europe, lobbyists for the agricultural and chemical sectors have fought hard to preserve its use, warning that banning glyphosate would devastate farming productivity. National authorities remain split. France has tried to phase it out. Germany has promised a full ban — but never delivered. In 2023 — despite mounting concerns, gaps in safety data and political pressure — the European Union reauthorized it for another 10 years. While most of the debate around glyphosate has centered on cancer, some studies have found possible links to reproductive harm, developmental disorders, endocrine disruption and even childhood cancers. Glyphosate has never been definitively linked to Parkinson’s. Bayer told POLITICO in a written response that no regulatory review has ever concluded any of its products are associated with the disease, and pointed to the U.S.-based Agricultural Health Study, which followed nearly 40,000 pesticide applicators and found no statistically significant association between glyphosate and the disease. Bayer said glyphosate is one of the most extensively studied herbicides in the world, with no regulator identifying it as neurotoxic or carcinogenic. But Bloem argues that the absence of a proven link says more about how we regulate risk than how safe the chemical actually is. Unlike paraquat, which causes immediate oxidative stress and has been associated with Parkinson’s in both lab and epidemiological studies, glyphosate’s potential harms are more indirect — operating through inflammation, microbiome disruption or mitochondrial dysfunction, all mechanisms known to contribute to the death of dopamine-producing neurons. But this makes them harder to detect in traditional toxicology tests, and easier to dismiss. “The problem isn’t that we know nothing,” Bloem says. “It’s that we’re not measuring the kind of damage Parkinson’s causes.” Responding, Bayer pointed to paraquat as one of only two agricultural chemicals that studies have linked directly to the development of Parkinson’s disease — even as Syngenta, its manufacturer, maintains there is no proven connection. Advertisement The EU’s current pesticide evaluation framework, like that of many other regulatory systems, focuses primarily on acute toxicity — short-term signs of poisoning like seizures, sudden organ damage or death. Manufacturers submit safety data, much of it based on animal studies looking for visible behavioral changes. But unlike for the heroin users in California, who were exposed to an unusually potent toxin, Parkinson’s doesn’t announce itself with dramatic symptoms in the short term. It creeps in as neurons die off, often over decades. “We wait for a mouse to walk funny,” Bloem says. “But in Parkinson’s, the damage is already done by the time symptoms appear.” The regulatory tests also isolate individual chemicals, rarely examining how they interact in the real world. But a 2020 study in Japan showed how dangerous that assumption may be. When rodents were exposed to glyphosate and MPTP — the very compound that mimicked Parkinson’s in the California heroin cases — the combination caused dramatically more brain cell loss than either substance alone. “That’s the nightmare scenario,” Bloem says. “And we’re not testing for it.” Even when data does exist, it doesn’t always reach regulators. Internal company documents released in court suggest Syngenta knew for decades that paraquat could harm the brain — a charge the company denies, insisting there is no proven link. More recently, Bayer and Syngenta have faced criticism for failing to share brain toxicity studies with EU authorities in the past — data they had disclosed to U.S. regulators. In one case, Syngenta failed to disclose studies on the pesticide abamectin. The Commission and the EU’s food and chemical agencies have called this a clear breach. Bloem sees a deeper issue. “Why should we assume these companies are the best stewards of public health?” he asked. “They’re making billions off these chemicals.”  Syngenta said that none of the withheld studies related to Parkinson’s disease and that it has since submitted all required studies under EU transparency rules. The company added that it is “fully aligned with the new requirements for disclosure of safety data.” Some governments are already responding to the links between Parkinson’s and farming. France, Italy and Germany now officially recognize Parkinson’s as a possible occupational disease linked to pesticide exposure — a step that entitles some affected farmworkers to compensation. But even that recognition, Bloem argues, hasn’t forced the broader system to catch up. WHERE SCIENCE STOPS, POLITICS BEGINS Bloem’s mistrust leads straight to the institutions meant to protect public health — and to people like Bernhard Url, the man who has spent the past decade running one of the most important among them.  Url is the outgoing executive director of the European Food Safety Authority, or EFSA — the EU’s scientific watchdog on food and chemical risks, based in Parma, Italy. The agency has come under scrutiny in the past over its reliance on company-submitted studies. Url doesn’t deny that structure, but says the process is now more transparent and scientifically rigorous. I met Url while he was on a visit to Brussels, during his final months as EFSA’s executive director. Austrian by nationality and a veterinarian by training, he speaks precisely, choosing his words with care. If Bloem is kinetic and outwardly urgent, Url is more reserved — a scientist still operating within the machinery Bloem wants to reform. Advertisement Still, Url didn’t dispute the core of the critique. “There are areas we don’t yet take into consideration,” he told me, pointing to emerging science around microbiome disruption, chemical synergy and chronic low-dose exposure. He didn’t name Parkinson’s, but the implications were clear. “We’re playing catch-up,” he admitted. Part of the problem, he suggested, is structural. The agency relies on a system built around predefined methods and industry-supplied data. “We assess risk based on what we’re given, and what the framework allows us to assess,” Url said. “But science evolves faster than legislation. That’s always the tension.” EFSA also works under constraints that its pharmaceutical counterpart, the European Medicines Agency, does not. “EMA distributes money to national agencies,” Url said. “We don’t. There’s less integration, less shared work. We rely on member states volunteering experts. We’re not in the same league.” A pesticide-free farm in in Gavorrano, Italy. | Alberto Pizzoli/AFP via Getty Images Url didn’t sound defensive. If anything, he sounded like someone who’s been pushing against institutional gravity for a long time. He described EFSA as an agency charged with assessing a food system worth trillions — but working with limited scientific resources, and within a regulatory model that was never designed to capture the risks of chronic diseases like Parkinson’s. “We don’t get the support we need to coordinate across Europe,” he said. “Compared to the economic importance of the whole agri-food industry … it’s breadcrumbs.” But he drew a sharp line when it came to responsibility. “The question of what’s safe enough — that’s not ours to answer,” he said. “That’s a political decision.” EFSA can flag a risk. It’s up to governments to decide whether that risk is acceptable. Advertisement It was a careful way of saying what Bloem had said more bluntly: Science may illuminate the path, but policy chooses where — and whether — to walk it. And in a food system shaped by powerful interests, that choice is rarely made in a vacuum. “There are gaps,” Url said, “and we’ve said that.” But gaps in science don’t always lead to action. Especially when the cost of precaution is seen as an economic threat. THE DOCTOR WHO WON’T SLOW DOWN Evidence from the field is becoming harder to ignore. In France, a nationwide study found that Parkinson’s rates were significantly higher in vineyard regions that rely heavily on fungicides. Another study found that areas with higher agricultural pesticide use — often measured by regional spending — tend to have higher rates of Parkinson’s, suggesting a dose-response relationship. In Canada and the U.S., maps of Parkinson’s clusters track closely with areas of intensive agriculture. The Netherlands has yet to produce comparable data. But Bloem believes it’s only a matter of time. “If we mapped Parkinson’s here, we’d find the same patterns,” he says. “We just haven’t looked yet.” In fact, early signs are already emerging. The Netherlands, known for having one of the highest pesticide use rates in Europe, has seen a 30 percent rise in Parkinson’s cases over the past decade — a slower increase than in some other regions of the world, but still notable, Bloem says. In farming regions like the Betuwe, on the lower reaches of the Rhine River, physiotherapists have reported striking local clusters. One village near Arnhem counted over a dozen cases. “I don’t know of a single farmer who’s doing things purposely wrong,” Bloem says. “They’re just following the rules. The problem is, the rules are wrong.” To Bloem, reversing the epidemic means shifting the regulatory mindset from reaction to prevention. That means requiring long-term neurotoxicity studies, testing chemical combinations, accounting for real-world exposure, genetic predisposition and the kind of brain damage Parkinson’s causes — and critically, making manufacturers prove safety, rather than scientists having to prove harm. “We don’t ban parachutes after they fail,” Bloem says. “But that’s what we do with chemicals. We wait until people are sick.” Advertisement His team is also studying prevention-focused interventions — including exercise, diet and stress reduction — in people already diagnosed with Parkinson’s, in one of the most comprehensive trials of its kind. Still, Bloem is realistic about the limits of individual action. “You can’t exercise your way out of pesticide exposure,” he says. “We need upstream change.” Bloem has seen it before — the same pattern playing out in slow motion. “Asbestos,” he says “Lead in gasoline. Tobacco. Every time, we acted decades after the damage was done.” The science existed. The evidence had accumulated. But the decision to intervene always lagged. “It’s not that we don’t know enough,” he adds. “It’s that the system is not built to listen when the answers are inconvenient.” The clinic has grown quiet. Most of the staff have left for the day, the corridors are still. Bloem gathers his things, but he’s not finished yet. One more phone call to make — something he’ll take, as always, while walking. As we stand up to go into the hallway, he pauses. “If we don’t fix this now,” he says, “we’re going to look back in 50 years and ask: ‘What the hell were we thinking?’” He slips on a pair of black headphones, nods goodbye and turns toward the exit. Outside, he’s already striding across the Radboud campus, talking into the cold evening air — still moving, still making calls, still trying to bend a stubborn system toward change. Graphics by Lucia Mackenzie.

The newly created [aclp.eu] Agricultural Crop Licensing Platform (ACLP) simplifies access to patented traits for European plant breeders, enabling them to leverage the latest technologies and help farmers to meet the challenges of sustainable food production. Europeans rightly expect safe food at affordable prices. But this is getting harder and harder for European farmers to do. Consumer expectations regarding quality and price keep rising, while farmers face increasing pressure to adopt sustainable practices, for example, by reducing their carbon emissions and the impact agriculture has on soil and water. Across the EU, arable farmers are increasingly confronted with drought conditions while the amount of cultivatable land is shrinking. At the same time, the EU is making trade agreements with exporters of agricultural produce that are exposing European farming to ever greater competition. European agriculture cannot afford to be left behind as producers in other parts of the world have access to the latest agricultural technologies. If farmers have access to the best available seed varieties, as well as other innovations, they can tackle these competing challenges. EU policymakers are currently negotiating new rules for developing innovative plant varieties through new genomic techniques (NGTs). These techniques allow plant breeders to introduce highly desirable characteristics such as improved drought tolerance or pest resistance, helping plants cope with challenges like water shortages or maintaining yields, without increasing the use of crop protection products or fertilisers. These sought-after traits can be enhanced by speeding up traditional plant breeding techniques, which, until now, have required long-term work crossing varieties to develop desired traits. Plant breeding can focus, for example, on developing varieties with shorter stems, that are more resistant to heavy rain. It can also improve plants’ resistance to common diseases, such as rhizomania, a common disease affecting sugar beet crops. NGTs use very precise genome-editing tools to target the traits breeders want to enhance in a plant’s own DNA. The precise targeting means that the desired characteristics can be boosted in a single generation rather than the dozens or hundreds that traditional plant breeding requires. Unlike genetic modification, NGTs do not introduce genetic material from other organisms. They work with the material that is already a natural part of the plant’s DNA. If we want European farmers to continue to produce safe, affordable food and farm in an environmentally sustainable way, we need to ensure that plant breeders have access to the latest plant technologies in their already shrinking toolbox. > If we want European farmers to continue to produce safe, affordable food and > farm in an environmentally sustainable way, we need to ensure that plant > breeders have access to the latest plant technologies(…) Currently, for many breeders across the EU, making the most of the latest varieties can involve navigating the complex world of patents. Intellectual property (IP) protection, which includes patents, is often portrayed as blocking access to an innovative technology. In actual fact, it’s not. IP protection plays a crucial role in ensuring access to and safeguarding scientific progress by securing a fair return on investment for researchers. In Europe, plant varieties can be protected under the Plant Breeders’ Rights system, which grants breeders the ability to market their innovations while allowing others to use them for further breeding. However, technological inventions, such as new traits or breeding techniques, may be protected by patents, provided they meet certain legal requirements, which include being genuinely inventive and having an industrial application. In this case, users have access to the patented technology through different mechanisms such as licensing. Effective IP protection ensures that innovators benefit from their inventions. This encourages healthy competition, which leads, in turn, to more innovation. > Effective IP protection ensures that innovators benefit from their inventions. > This encourages healthy competition, which leads, in turn, to more innovation. This can be a complex environment to navigate, especially for breeders who are not trained as IP specialists. Small businesses that want to use patented innovations can face obstacles such as lack of transparency regarding the existence of a patented trait, complexity in negotiating with a patent holder, and insecurity about fair terms and conditions. These time-consuming and expensive processes can lead some companies to refrain from breeding new varieties with the latest innovations or to fear they might be infringing patents when using a new variety released on the market. In order to reduce this complexity, plant breeders have launched several initiatives such as platforms to improve transparency around patented traits and to facilitate access to patents. These platforms strike a balance between rewarding innovation and ensuring fair availability so no single organization can monopolize critical patented inventions. For over a decade, the International Licensing Platform (ILP), has been providing access to patented traits in vegetable crops. Recognising the need for a similar system in other crops, European plant breeding companies sought to expand this model to a wider range of crops, including corn, sunflower, cereals, sugar beet, potatoes, fruit and flowers. In 2023, a group of European plant breeding companies came together to launch the Agricultural Crop Licensing Platform (ACLP), with the aim of facilitating fair access to patented traits and promoting innovation across multiple crop types. This new platform makes it easy for breeders to access current and future technologies. Instead of having to worry about complex patent rules, all they need to do is enter a standard licensing agreement and agree on a royalty fee with the patent holder. If they cannot reach an agreement within six months, they have the right to go to arbitration at the end of which they are guaranteed to get a license to use the patented variety. This system covers over 95% of all patented traits currently available on the market in Europe. The ACLP has been developed by plant breeders as a way to ensure that seed companies can offer their customers the best available varieties to deal with the competing challenges faced by European agriculture. > The ACLP has been developed by plant breeders as a way to ensure that seed > companies can offer their customers the best available varieties to deal with > the competing challenges faced by European agriculture.   If we want European farmers and Europe’s agriculture to remain competitive and produce food in a sustainable way, we must continue to enable access to the best plant varieties that the latest technologies can provide. #EnablingInnovation | www.aclp.eu | LinkedIn: ACLP – The Agricultural Crop Licensing Platform

The EU is in no mood to beg for favorable treatment in the face of U.S. President Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda. Instead, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Tuesday mapped out an upbeat vision of the EU as an economic heavyweight that was beating the U.S. in many key respects and was open for business with countries such as Mexico and China — while Trump sets himself on a collision course with those nations. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in her first major policy address since Trump’s Nov. 20 inauguration for a second term, von der Leyen avoided direct criticism of the president but drew clear and stark contrasts with America, especially by underlining the EU’s commitment to the Paris climate pact that Washington is ditching. Europe, she said, still has the “biggest trading sector in the world” as well as “longer life expectancy, higher social and environmental standards, and lower inequalities than all our global competitors.” In contrast to the maverick strongarm tactics of Trump, Europe’s “large and attractive market” was a predictable partner, von der Leyen said. “With Europe, what you see is what you get. We play by the rules. Our deals have no hidden strings attached.” All in all, von der Leyen sought alliances rather than showdowns, particularly with those in Trump’s crosshairs. “Europe will keep seeking co-operation — not only with our long-time like-minded friends, but with any country we share interests with,” she stressed. As for Europe’s many problems — which range from war on its doorstep to industrial decline and a far-right surge — von der Leyen chose not to dwell on them. Instead, the German politician tried to inspire confidence in the bloc’s ability to change, laying out plans for reforms to be presented in February that aim to unify the bloc’s fragmented capital markets, slash red tape and foster world-beating companies. How she intends to enact those reforms at a time of increasing divisions among the bloc’s leaders is anyone’s guess. Overall, her Davos stump speech was as remarkable for what it didn’t say as for what it did. There was no mention of the far-right’s recent electoral successes in Europe, for example, nor even of Trump. The traditional encomium to the once-sacrosanct transatlantic relationship was another notable omission, while the war in Ukraine received only a passing reference. Instead, von der Leyen’s address was all about Europe as a global economic player, with prominent mentions of South America, Africa, China and India, where she intends to make her first major trip since being re-elected, and placed far less emphasis on the United States. Here’s how it went down in real-time: 1. THINGS ARE A LITTLE CRAZY, RIGHT NOW, OK? With a war raging in Ukraine and Trump in the White House, von der Leyen faced a challenge describing “the situation” without sending her audience into a clinical depression. She did this by staying aloof, describing a “new era of harsh geostrategic competition” in which Europe would have to get tougher. In classic EU form, von der Leyen pleaded with her audience to “avoid a race to the bottom” and not flout global rules to gain an economic edge over rivals. In almost the same breath, however, she recognized that the “cooperative world order” that Europe anticipated had never materialized, and that now was the time to get real. 2. BUT EUROPE HAS A LOT GOING FOR IT. PROMISE! Then came the pep talk. With Elon Musk’s X platform flooded with content attacking the EU as a declining museum resort, von der Leyen did her best to tout the bloc’s qualities. “We have a huge single market … unique social infrastructure … credible and independent institutions … [and] an unshakeable commitment to the rule of law.” Even the bloc’s ability to innovate was “under-appreciated,” she said, noting that Europe registers nearly as many patent applications as China and the U.S. Even so, she allowed, “the world is changing. So must we.” 3. DON’T WORRY. WE HAVE A PLAN. While everything is great in Europe, the place still needs a total overhaul — which von der Leyen pledged to kick off in February when she presents a big reform plan. This big leap will aim to unleash Europe’s economic might by unifying its fractured capital markets and channeling billions of euros in savings accounts toward investment. It will also aim to ease the bureaucratic burden on companies by giving them “one single set of rules” applicable across the union. Not mentioned: The fact that Europe’s leaders remain hopelessly divided on how to move forward, with multiple countries opposed to a capital markets union (an attempt to get the conversation started last year died miserably). 4. BTW, WE ARE STILL INTO THIS GLOBALIZATION THING. At a time when Trump is touting trade tariffs and “America First,” von der Leyen’s speech seemed designed to send the opposite signal: We’re open to doing business with anyone. Von der Leyen addressed potential trading partners directly, saying: “If there are mutual benefits in sight, we are ready to engage with you.” Indeed, a key message from the speech was that Europe wants to diversify its trading relationships away from America.  While Trump is declaring an emergency on America’s southern border and gearing up for tariffs against Mexico, von der Leyen gave special mention to EU trade relations with Latin America. At a time when Trump is touting trade tariffs and “America First,” von der Leyen’s speech seemed designed to send the opposite signal. | Morry Gash/AFP via Getty Images While acknowledging the economic threat from unfair Chinese trading practices, she also said Europe had to “engage constructively” with Beijing. 5. AMERICA? WHO? Tellingly, von der Leyen spoke about Africa, the Asia-Pacific region, China and India before her first mention of the United States. Even then, von der Leyen signaled the EU will be ready to stand its ground in any impending stand-off. “We will be pragmatic, but we will always stand by our principles. We will protect our interests and uphold our values — because that is the European way.” At the final reckoning, she hinted the EU might move out of its old diplomatic comfort zones and find new friends: “We must look for new opportunities wherever they arise. This is the moment to engage beyond blocs and taboos. And Europe is ready for change.”