Farmers say this is the Green Deal being weaponized to take away freedoms.
Farmers are protesting European Union policies and doing so violently! They say policies disguised as Green supporting that penalize Farmers but not corporations and Big Oil are driving them out of business. Furious farmers across the European Union say this attack on the small farmer makes food insecurity inevitable and question what the population will be eating.
About 1/3 of the EU budget goes to farmers for the food that sustains them about 55 billion Euros in 2021 alone was spent on farm subsidies. The protests have been almost non stop for months and WOKENESS as well as anti-Semitism is being vilified as the cause of legislation taking away farm subsidies instead of the real villains; corporate and government entities that want to control Europe's food sources!
The list of Farmers grievances is long: soaring costs, increasing bureaucracy, new European Union regulations in its Green Deal and imports diluting their markets. Farmers in Italy, Germany, Brussels, France, Ukraine, Spain, Switzerland, Romania and Poland demonstrated Friday as part of ongoing protests against European Union farming policies and to demand measures to combat production cost hikes, reduced profits and unfair competition from non-EU countries! Dozens of tractors jammed streets in Brussels near EU institutions less than a week later as farmers aimed their resentment at the bloc's leaders meeting nearby for a summit.
In short, farmers felt their economic and political interests were being shortchanged by a gang of greedy railroads, creditors, and industrialists using the Climate Crisis to force European populations to obey or starve as they would be the only sources of food! The worse issue is that buyers want the ability to control the pricing of goods instead of the farmers creating Agro-business food cartels.
Farmers say this is the Green Deal being weaponized to take away freedoms. When Ursula von der Leyen promised in July 2019 to launch the Green Deal within the first 100 days of her mandate, she surprised many commentators in the Brussels bubble. The choice of member states to appoint Ursula von der Leyen, a politician from Germany’s CDU (Christian Democratic Union) party, as president of the European Commission was not expected to result in revolutionary policy announcements on environmental issues. In short it was to reduce greenhouse gases causing global warming and becoming an existential threat to human life on the planet.
The enemy was the Big Oil concerns refusing to take steps to slow down climate change and instead pointing the finger at anyone else. In the eighties they said it was the fault of consumers who didn't recycle, in the nineties they said it was the fault of the meat industry and the flatulence of cows, in the 2000's it was poor countries burning trees for fuel! The truth is Fossil fuels – coal, oil and gas – are by far the largest contributor to global climate change, accounting for over 80 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions and 90 per cent of all carbon dioxide emissions. As greenhouse gas emissions blanket the Earth, they trap the sun's heat melting the ice caps and releasing methane that traps more heat. But why is the EU trying to pit environmentalists against the Farmers when their goals are the same to protect nature and Europe's access to food!
Farmers say it is a fight for survival and they won't stop now. In France, farmers have blocked large stretches of motorways, creating a crisis for new Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, who travelled to a farm in the south-west to offer a string of measures in a bid to soothe their frustration. Ironically this conflagration created by political manipulations of the left and right in the European Union comes before a series of potentially unifying summits scheduled to occur in 2024 between environmentalists and Farmers. So the question is was this the plan all along to divide these two groups? The Strategic Dialogues planned would bring together farmers, cooperatives, rural communities, consumer organizations and environmental groups, among others, to find together solutions to current problems facing farmers and the broader agri-food sector. A number of thematic meetings will be organized in the first half of 2024.
In 2023 there was a different focus, The unsustainable use of EU natural resources, in particular the degradation and pollution of soils, is a major driver of the climate and biodiversity crises. It has already cost thousands of lives and billions of euro. Droughts, wildfires, water scarcity and flood risks are rapidly increasing, and are already tragically affecting three quarters of European countries. Loss of yields due to degraded environment, pollution, droughts, heatwaves, floods and new pests come at a cost to farmers and fishers. But they are also costly for citizens as they increase food prices.
The Internal market of European farming is not equitable laws from different nations vary and this causes disparity of prices with no rules that support all farmers unilaterally. The subsidy funds support farmers directly through the European Agricultural Guarantee Fund and rural areas, climate action and the management of natural resources through the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development. Quiet as it is kept there is a lot of poverty in Europe especially in the farming sectors., many who cannot even feed their local communities.
Analytics firm Everstream listed agricultural commodity shortages in Europe as one of its top supply chain risks in 2024, citing in part production halts in 2023 during a turbulent year for crops. A major priority for EU countries in addressing increasing levels of food insecurity is to help Ukraine export its agri-food production, which has been severely compromised by the Russian invasion. Ukraine is a key producer and exporter of food staples, such as wheat and maize (corn). Ukraine is the world's largest exporter of sunflower oil (50% of world exports), the third largest one of barley (18%), the fourth largest one of maize (corn) (16%) and the fifth largest one of wheat (12%). In 2021 Ukraine exported cereals worth almost $12 billion (about €11.5 billion).
In the 12 months from August 2022 to July 2023, total EU imports from Ukraine amounted to the equivalent of 4.6% of EU average wheat production and 22.2% of average maize production in 2018-2022.
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