2019 CAFLP Annual Conference Panel Recap: “Negotiating Conflicts of Interests in Food: Controversies and Corporate Capture”

“I’m an intellectual scholar… you can’t influence me with money!”

This panel discussed the widespread and significant issues associated with conflict of interest in the food industry.

Paul Thacker, an investigative journalist, presented his perspective on this topic and highlighted the role of financial conflicts of interest in the dissemination of misinformation to the public. Indeed, Thacker suggested that companies often fund university research, hire academics as advisors and speakers, support vanity journals, ghostwrite studies, fund think tanks to put out white papers and serve “independent voices” in order to legitimize their products and increase public consumption. He also talked about the strategies that companies implement when they are criticized by journalists such as himself, and called these strategies the “denial playbook.”

Erica Di Ruggiero, an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto Dalla Lana School of Public Health, spoke of her research and discussed how it intersects with issues of conflicts of interest. As part of her research, Di Roggiero looks at global agenda-setting in policy and knowledge utilization/exchange strategies that are used to influence public health decision-making at national and global levels. Di Ruggiero spoke about the commercialization of research and the multitude of actors and constituencies that shape the modern global arena. She discussed the conflicts of interest that arise from the intersection and interplay of public and private partnerships. Di Ruggiero also addressed several governance-related issues and critiqued the roles of public/private partnerships and international institutions in the prevention of non-communicable diseases, the promotion of health and health equity.

The common theme that linked these two speakers was the role of large corporations and transnational institutions in the funding of research that ultimately produces outcomes that are biased in their favour. The speakers provided numerous examples of the negative outcomes and ethical dilemmas created by such systematic deception of the public. Both speakers provided suggestions on how transparency could be increased and issues of conflict of interest could be mitigated, including the classification of conflict of interest as a form of scientific misconduct, the universalization of reporting standards for conflict of interest, requiring disclosure of funding and specific conflicts of interests of individual authors of scientific reports. Indeed, such changes could prevent disinformation and help ensure that the public is able to make informed and free choices with respect to their consumption of food and the maintenance of their health.