Becoming a Legitimate Lobby: How the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) Has Handled Representatives from the Chemical Industry, 1971-1982

• In Event: Risk Government: Putting Industries Back in the Analysis of Science-based Regulatory Tools - I

Abstract

In 1971, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) of the World Health Organization (WHO) started to identify occupational and environmental carcinogens on the basis of the existing literature in epidemiology and toxicology.  Those classifications have been used worldwide by public administrations (such as the European Union or US institutions), occupational physicians and workers unions in order to monitor or ban various chemicals. It is therefore not surprising that IARC meetings have been targeted by major industrial actors willing to avoid a classification of their products as carcinogenic. My presentation focuses on the first period of that defensive reaction, 1971-1982. 
Drawing on the general correspondence of the IARC secretariat in charge of the classification program, I show how and when the industry emerged as an ordinary participant to IARC scientific meetings. The historical turning point was the asbestos classification as carcinogenic in 1976. Since then, companies and industrial associations such as Bayer, Du Pont, Monsanto or the European Chemical Industry Council (Cefic) have begun to fear IARC classifications and to dispatch observers to assist in their drafting. 
Internally, the IARC secretariat wavered between suspicion against lobby pressure and hospitality toward those industry people who could provide information about chemicals that was not available elsewhere. I show how that tension has been handled and how a definition of a legitimate representative of the industry has emerged. 
In contrast with the idea that a “lobby” is a clear category, I show how social actors are struggling to define it.

Author

• Valentin Thomas, INRA - IRISSO, Université Paris-Dauphine