Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
Hundreds of angry farmers have besieged the Welsh Labour Party conference in Llandudno with tractors and farm trucks in protest at the Government’s inheritance tax changes.
Hundreds of angry farmers have besieged the Welsh Labour Party conference in Llandudno with tractors and farm trucks in protest at the Government’s inheritance tax changes. GB News has the story.
The demonstration saw agricultural vehicles line up outside Venue Cymru, where Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer made a speech.
Protest organisers Digon yw Digon – which translates as ‘Enough is Enough’ – called for people to “stand shoulder to shoulder with farmers and rural communities”.
Demonstrators brought tractors, slurry tankers, lorries and 4x4s with trailers to make their voices heard.
Placards declared there was “blood on Labour hands” and “Labour war on countryside” as farmers expressed their fury over the new tax measures.
Protesters chanted “save our farms” while tractor horns blared on the promenade, attempting to ensure politicians inside the building heard their message. …
The Prime Minister avoided confrontation with the protesters by leaving the venue through a back gate with a police escort, drawing boos from demonstrators.
High-profile farmer Gareth Wyn Jones condemned the PM’s actions on GB News, saying: “He didn’t come and face the audience, he didn’t come and talk to us, he went out the back.
“He went back to his London hideout while hundreds of farmers turned out to air their frustrations and grievances.
“We need to feed this nation in a sustainable and affordable way, and this Government does not care one iota.” …
Inside the conference, Sir Keir Starmer stood firm on the Budget decisions despite the protests outside.
“Make no mistake, I will defend our decisions in the Budget all day long,” he told delegates, avoiding explicit mention of the inheritance tax changes.
Back in November the UN was all set to boss the citizens of wealthy nations around. The plan was to badger them into giving up meat so their grandchildren would have slightly nicer weather.
Winning? For the moment the UN has quietly packed away plans to tell everyone to give up meat to stop bad weather
Back in November the UN was all set to boss the citizens of wealthy nations around. The plan was to badger them into giving up meat so their grandchildren would have slightly nicer weather.
Possibly, after thousands of farmers stormed across the EU in their tractors this winter, the idea has lost its appeal. Not that the UN has the honesty to explain why they changed their minds, or even to admit they did. But the first installment of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) food systems roadmap has left the activists reeling.
The omission of meat-eating reduction from proposals in a UN roadmap to tackle the climate crisis and end hunger is “bewildering”, according to academic experts.
The group also criticised the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s report for “dismissing” the potential of alternative proteins, such as plant-based meat, to reduce the impact of livestock on the environment.
For the first time ever, some activists even called for “transparency”:
In a commentary published in the journal Nature Food, experts said the FAO’s failure to include a methodology on how the 120 actions it did support were chosen, or a list of authors, was “concerning and surprising”. They called for the next instalments of the roadmap to be more transparent …
A group of academics has written a paper in Nature criticizing the UN group. They can’t believe the UN would miss an opportunity to promote vegetarian lifestyles and fake meat. The head of the FAO group defended himself, saying “Dietary change is mentioned eight times in the 50-page summary report” which sounds like nothing at all, especially when they don’t even mention “reducing meat”.
It may not last, but looks acts and smells like a win. Score 1 for the farmers…. the UN is being badgered by The People.
Coming to a crescendo over the past few months, widespread farmers’ protests in Europe have escalated – across the width and breadth of the continent, from Sweden to Spain, Poland to Portugal — since they first started in the Netherlands Holland in October 2019.
German peasants war, 1514-1526, german peasants’ war, great peasants’ revolt, farmer war, farmer … [+] UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Coming to a crescendo over the past few months, widespread farmers’ protests in Europe have escalated – across the width and breadth of the continent, from Sweden to Spain, Poland to Portugal — since they first started in the Netherlands Holland in October 2019. As tractors take over the streets and highways in wave after wave of protests, the farmers have paralyzed major transport arteries and besieged Berlin, Paris and Brussels.
More lastingly, they have changed the political landscape in key EU countries such as Netherlands. With the shock win in March by the populist Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB), putting it ahead of the governing party in the Senate, the farmers became an important part of the equation in the country’s political future. Major gains are expected for what the legacy media calls the “far right” and “anti-Europe” parties in the upcoming European parliament elections. The farming interest has suddenly climbed to the top of the political agenda in state capitals as well as Brussels.
What happened?
Why have European farmers – until recently, the most coddled and protected part of the continent’s body politic as it emerged from the ashes of World War II — turned against their own governments and Brussels-based benefactors? Is it no more than a “tantrum of the ridiculously privileged?”, asks The Economist.
Europe’s Farmers Betrayed
The picture of the proud French farmer – half of whose income came from EU subsidies and direct payments — as the repository of a bucolic wine-and-cheese rural culture has long been a treasured part of Europe’s identity since it adopted the Common Agricultural Policy in 1962. Agriculture (including forestry and fishing) accounts for just 1.6% of GDP. Yet it absorbs a third of the EU’s total budget and costs an estimated €65 billion annually for direct payments, “agricultural market measures” and “rural development”.
Like most government policies, CAP was implemented with the best of intentions: improving productivity, ensuring a “fair standard of living” for farmers, “stabilizing” markets, establishing a secure supply chain with “reasonable” prices, “harmonizing competition rules across all countries”.
But, as usual with all big government programs, the unintended consequences of an extensive system of price and market controls put in place to guarantee farmers their accustomed standard of living effectively made them wards of state, “as grand an experiment in socialist management as anything Lenin was ever able to accomplish.”
The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, has been hell-bent in pursuing its virtue-signaling decades-long experiment with global climate leadership. With the best of intentions – what could better be intended than “saving the planet” from a climate crisis? — the EU adopted its Farm to Fork strategy as part of the Green Deal to make agriculture consistent with being “carbon-neutral” by 2050. EU bureaucrats assured us that European agriculture – a significant source of greenhouse gases –would be rendered more “sustainable”, “environmentally-friendly” and “biodiverse.”
Europe’s ‘wards of state’ farmers have turned out in fury as another favored constituency – the European Greens — has gained ascendancy and increasingly squeezed farmers’ standards of living. Amid fierce resistance from farmers, Brussel’s bureaucrats have been forced into their first significant policy climbdown from ever-escalating climate regulations.
In early February, the EC was forced to scale back on an array of proposed mandates, taxes, subsidies and disinvestments for promoting “sustainable” farming in an imagined post-fossil fuel “green” future. It dropped the 30% reduction target on greenhouse gas emissions from farming by 2040 compared to 2015; it reversed its quota to halve pesticide use by 2030; and it will allow more land for agricultural use instead of forcing 4 percent of the land to lie fallow “to boost biodiversity and soil quality.” Despite investing in lab-grown meat initiatives, it also agreed to stop advising EU citizens to eat less meat. In both Germany and France, governments delayed cuts to subsidies or planned increases in taxes on diesel for agricultural use.
Have The Farmers Turned “Far Right”?
Europe’s mainly left-of-center governments have long been under the thrall of green parties and their young, urban constituents. In Europe’s epicenter Germany, Joschka Fischer, a leading figure in the German Greens party since the 1970s, was sworn in as minister of energy and environment in Germany’s state of Hesse in December 1985. He served as the foreign minister and as the vice-chancellor of Germany in the cabinet of Gerhard Schröder from 1998 to 2005. The Green party attained its high point as part of the current Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s ruling coalition. Economy Minister and Green party leader Robert Habeck nursed ambitions to lead his Green party to victory in the 2025 general election.
But much had changed by mid-2023. The DeutschlandTrend monthly survey conducted in June, measured voter support for Alternative für Deutschland at 18%, putting it on a par with Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats. A YouGov poll published one week later (June 9th) found that 20% of German voters would give their vote to the AfD, making it the second-strongest party behind the centre-right CDU (28%) and ahead of Scholz’s SPD (19%). The resurgence of AfD, inevitably dubbed “far right” by the mainstream media, has been primarily at the expense of the Greens which have been sent into free fall.
The rightward shift in politics is not restricted to Germany. According to a report based on polling data published in January by the European Council on Foreign Relations, the 2024 European Parliament elections (in June) will see “a major shift to the right in many countries, with populist radical right parties gaining votes and seats across the EU, and centre-left and green parties losing votes and seats.” It warns that “anti-European populists” will likely top the polls in nine member states (Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Slovakia) and come second or third in a further nine countries (Bulgaria, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Portugal, Romania, Spain, and Sweden).
Europe’s Great Farmer Revolt may prove as consequential to the regional political order as the anti-nuclear and anti-Vietnam war movements of the 1970s. Farmers have emerged as the single greatest challenge to the green agenda in Europe as their livelihoods face ever tighter climate regulations, higher costs and competition from cheap imports from Ukraine and non-EU countries. The next European parliament could block laws on Europe’s green deal and take a harder line on immigration and support for Ukraine. Populist leaders such as France’s Marine Le Pen (National Rally), Germany’s Alice Weidel (AfD) and the Netherland’s Geert Wilders (Party for Freedom) all express support for the cause of European farmers. The left-of-center mainstream media sees the farmers’ protests “playing into the hands” of such politicians “who thrive on grassroots grumbling against the metropolitan elites” (here and here).
Europe’s Peasants and History
The “crisis of the Late Middle Ages“, known as Peasant Revolts, were often bloody uprisings and rebellions by peasants in the European countryside against the church, nobles and kings between 1300 and 1500. These rebellions were caused by some combination of declining incomes, rising inflation, taxation, famine, plague, war, and religious differences.
Five centuries later, the European peasantry has once again been goaded to fury. Images of sprayed manure in the entrances of government buildings and select politicians’ houses and a Paris under siege with its supermarket shelves empty of fresh produce have gone viral on Twitter/X and other alternative media. The mainstream media, concerned as it is by “the inexorable rise of far-right nationalists”, has largely muted such inconvenient images.
Can European farmers reverse their ruling elites’ mantra of “net zero by 2050” and devotion to global climate leadership? Or will this just be merely a temporary stalling of the green agenda, a tactical concession by liberal politicians and Brussels-based bureaucrats to farmers’ demands for relief from ever-tightening EU environmental restrictions? Only time will tell but hope remains that the Great Farmer Revolt will bring some semblance of rationality to Europe’s climate policies.
I have worked in the oil and gas sector as an economist in both private industry and in think tanks, in Asia, the Middle East and the US over the past 25 years. I focus on global energy developments from the perspective of Asian countries that remain large markets for oil, gas and coal. I have written extensively on the areas of economic development, environment and energy economics. My publications include “Singapore in a Post-Kyoto World: Energy, Environment and the Economy” published by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (2015). I won the 1984 Robert S. McNamara Research Fellow award of the World Bank and received my Ph.D. in Economics in 1992.
On Tuesday, Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, offered a further concession to demonstrating farmers by dropping her controversial proposal to halve pesticide use within six years.
Ursula von der Leyen offers further concession by dropping her controversial proposal to halve pesticide use within six years.
The European Union has caved in to angry protests from farmers, cutting its target to scrap specific agricultural emissions which formed part of the bloc’s net zero drive.
A demand to reduce nitrogen, methane and other emissions linked to farming by almost a third has been removed from a wider Brussels plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 90 per cent by 2040.
On Tuesday, Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, offered a further concession to demonstrating farmers by dropping her controversial proposal to halve pesticide use within six years.
A recommendation urging EU citizens to eat less meat was also removed from the plan.
The concessions came amid mounting demonstrations by farmers in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Romania ahead of this year’s EU elections.
Spanish farmers on Tuesday joined the movement by blockading major highways with convoys of tractors and burning tyres.
Meanwhile, blockades on supermarket distribution centres have left shelves empty in Brussels, while several people have been injured in traffic accidents caused by farmers’ protests in the Netherlands, as they dumped rubbish and set fires on highways.
Organisers have threatened to continue disruption in the lead-up to the European Parliament elections in June.
The plight of the disillusioned farmers has become politically symbolic ahead of the vote.
To quell their angry protests, which have sometimes become violent and caused destruction to cities, Mrs von der Leyen acknowledged net zero rules targeting farmers would need to be watered down.
Our farmers deserve to be listened to,” she told the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Tuesday.
“I know that they are worried about the future of agriculture and their future as farmers.
“But they also know that agriculture needs to move to a more sustainable model of production so that their farms remain profitable in the years to come.”
The Commission president admitted the proposal to cut pesticide use had become a “symbol of polarisation”.
Brussels is also rowing back on planned rules on animal welfare and allowing the cultivation of land left fallow to restore nature.
The reduction of nitrogen oxide emissions was seen as a key pillar of the EU’s climate change strategy, which sparked the initial wave of farming protests in the Netherlands over the summer of 2022.
The target means farmers will be required to reduce their livestock in order to meet the binding limit on emissions.
Mrs von der Leyen has also tried to get farmers on side by announcing a series of “strategic dialogues” to allow them to voice their concerns directly to EU bureaucrats.
The European Union has caved in to angry protests from farmers and cut a target to slash agricultural emissions as part of the bloc’s net zero drive.
Brussels removes order to reduce emissions linked to agriculture after mounting anger across Europe.
The European Union has caved in to angry protests from farmers and cut a target to slash agricultural emissions as part of the bloc’s net zero drive.
A demand to reduce nitrogen, methane and other emissions linked to farming by almost a third has been removed from a wider Brussels plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 90 per cent by 2040.
On Tuesday, Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, also proposed withdrawing the EU’s plan to halve the use of pesticides, calling it a “symbol of polarisation”.
“Our farmers deserve to be listened to,” she told the European Parliament.
“I know that they are worried about the future of agriculture and their future as farmers. But they also know that agriculture needs to move to a more sustainable model of production so that their farms remain profitable in the years to come.”
A recommendation urging EU citizens to eat less meat was also removed from the plan.
The concessions came amid mounting demonstrations by farmers in Belgium, France, Germany and Italy ahead of this year’s EU elections.
Blockades on supermarket distribution centres have left shelves empty in Brussels, while several people have been injured in traffic accidents caused by farmers’ protests in the Netherlands, as they dumped rubbish and set fires on highways.
Organisers have threatened to continue disruption in the lead-up to the elections for the European Parliament in June.
The ballot is seen as increasingly problematic for Mrs von der Leyen, and other mainstream politicians seeking re-election on a green agenda.
Resistance to the environmental overhaul has been steadily growing, including from the European People’s Party, the centre-Right political group to which commission president belongs.
Agriculture was seen as “one of the core areas to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2040”, according to a draft European Commission plan, reported by the Financial Times.
The draft states that policies should now address the entire food sector rather than farming, which accounts for about 10 per cent of the EU’s emissions, “in isolation”.
The EU has pledged to be carbon neutral by 2050, with a first step of cutting emissions by 55 per cent compared with 1990 levels within six years.
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