2024 European farmers’ protests: Europe’s climate agenda appears dead on arrival | Vox
2024 European farmers’ protests: Europe’s climate agenda appears dead on arrival | Vox
Road-clogging, manure-dumping farmers reveal the paradox at the heart of EU agriculture.
Imo a very good article outlining the contradictions that underlie EU farming policies from an outisder's perspective.
(via climate@slrpnk.net)
Farmers are on the wrong side of history but we continue to empower them for irrational sentimental reasons. An unfortunate cocktail.
True. Sunlight tastes way better anyway, thats how I get all my calories.
It if wasn't farmers making your food, it would be you making it. If it wasn't other people providing all the goods and services farmers need, they would be doing it.
Human society is interdependent. Farmers are not aristocrats, they are ordinary citizens providing a service in return for money. Including quite a lot of taxpayers' money, incidentally.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The protests have come as the EU seeks to pass a slate of laws as part of its Green Deal, a sweeping climate plan that includes checking the worst harms of industrial agriculture, which takes up more than a third of the continent’s landmass and contributes disproportionately to its ecological footprint.
This year, with the specter of right-wing populism looming over upcoming European Parliament elections (part of the EU’s legislative branch), farmers’ protests across the continent have succeeded at not only stalling new sustainability reforms, but also undermining existing environmental regulations.
Lobby organizations like Copa-Cogeca, which represents large farmers’ unions across the EU, and CropLife Europe, a pesticide trade group, pressure governments to entrench the status quo, including maintaining CAP as an ever-open spigot gushing taxpayer money.
Soon thereafter, members of the Italian delegation to the EU, joined by representatives from 11 other countries, called on the Council of Europe to “ensure that artificially lab-grown products must never be promoted as or confused for authentic foods,” ostensibly in the public interest.
Alan Matthews, an Irish economist and preeminent expert on the CAP, recently argued that part of the problem is the changing social capital of farmers: “Instead of being seen as heroic producers of a vital commodity, they are increasingly described as environmental villains and climate destroyers.
It called for reductions in production of meat and dairy, higher consumer prices of highly emitting foods, more incentives for farmers to embrace green practices, and, as a political hint, more ambitious policy plans.
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