Update 22 August: Great news! The European Commission just announced that they won’t wave through the Bayer Monsanto merger! Instead, they are opening an in-depth review, that will take months and gives us more time to stop this merger from hell once and for all.
Bayer and Monsanto just filed their merger for approval -- and European regulators could approve it in less than two weeks.
With your help, we can convince European regulators to stop this merger.
If they succeed, we are facing a nightmare scenario: more bee-killing neonics in our fields, more toxic glyphosate on our plates, and more corporate control over our food supply.
Regulators can still stop this merger, but they’re already getting hammered by corporate lobbyists pressuring them to back off.
That's why we need to move fast -- antitrust regulators have a limited amount of time to take action, and the clock is already ticking.
With your help and the donations of thousands of generous SumOfUs members around the world, we have already made great strides to stop this merger from happening.
We hired some of the world’s top legal minds to prove that the merger is a disaster, in violation of antitrust law and simply can’t go ahead.
We’ve published the results as a legal white paper and you have tweeted and emailed the European and US antitrust authorities in a massive public outcry against this deal. We made sure that everyone from the Financial Times to Bloomberg reported on our white paper.
We’ve turned up at any public event Bayer and Monsanto are planning to protest this merger. Hollywood star Mark Ruffalo even shared the campaign with his followers.
But to convince the regulators to step in, it will take a massive grassroots outcry right now.
A Bayer-Monsanto merger is not inevitable. We have seen again and again what happens when powerful corporations get their way. The merger wave has led to banks deemed too big to fail and only 6 big big agrochemical corporations controlling almost everything we eat. Farmers are being squeezed too, with higher prices and fewer choices.
It sounds grim -- and it is -- but we know we can stop this merger. We did the impossible in 2014 when SumOfUs members helped stop Comcast from acquiring Time Warner in an unprecedented takeover. It was the Department of Justice that laid the finishing blow -- but it was tens of thousands of SumOfUs members and our allies us who made it happen.
More information
Vox. 15 September 2016.
EcoWatch. 14 September 2016.
Reuters. 22 August 2017.
22 August 2017.