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.
What are you even arguing? Why do you think farmers are protesting?
If I may: The point is that the current generation of farmers is expendable to humanity. The ability to continue to generate food is not (as you alluded to in your own fallacy above).
If farmers are rapidly destroying their and our ability to generate food the way we have in the past millenia (by depleting soil, overusing water reserves, accelerating loss of critical biodiversity, and encouraging climate conditions not conducive to farming), we should maybe not be listening to their whining.
Yeah people don’t get this, we can’t keep doing things the way we have before.
It has nothing to do with being fair or people’s lively hood (although we should put effort into good transition plans). We can’t do certain farming practices anymore cause nature if forcing our hand.
Also, it’s not that there are no alternatives. Vertical farming, for example, is developing extremely fast as an environmental friendly way to produce food. Demands are changing and like every serious business they should strive to adapt instead of clinging to an aging business model.
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.
The original article contains 3,455 words, the summary contains 251 words. Saved 93%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
