Thanks, Associated Press, For Reporting on E.U. Farmers’ Victory over Harmful Climate Regulations

From ClimateREALISM

By Linnea Lueken

A recent article from the Associated Press (AP), “E.U. scraps pesticide proposal in another concession to protesting farmers,” reports that the recent farmer protests across Europe are beginning to force the European Union (E.U.) to scrap environmental proposals that would harm farm productivity. The E.U.’s caving on its draconian agricultural climate policies should benefit food production in Europe.

The AP reports that the E.U.’s executives have “shelved” a pesticide use reduction plan, which protesting farmers say “increase bureaucratic burdens and keep them behind laptops instead of farming, adding to the price gap between their products and cheap imports produced by foreign farmers without similar burdens.”

The farmers are right. Pesticides improve crop yields by destroying the insects that would otherwise damage potentially large amounts of produce. The higher yields generated through the use of agricultural pesticides and fertilizers keep E.U. farmers’ produce prices competitive with foreign imports, many of which come from countries with much less regulation.

The AP also reports that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has agreed to drop some of the policies that would force farmers to leave portions of their land fallow, or uncultivated.

Another story, by The Telegraph, reports that the European Union has also agreed to reduce its agriculture-related emissions targets for farmers, and a recommendation to curb E.U. citizens’ meat consumption was eliminated.

As Climate Realism covered with interest last year, the protests began in the Netherlands, where the European Commission and Dutch government conspired to buy out thousands of farmers and force them to stop raising livestock in order to dramatically cut nitrogen runoff and methane emissions. All of this was done to meet the E.U.’s green ‘Natura 2000’ scheme and assist in the push for net-zero.

Since then, farmers protests have spread to Bulgaria, Spain, France, Poland, Greece, Ireland, Germany, Lithuania, and other nations in the European Union, as well as smaller flare-ups in Scotland.

Crop production is not being harmed in Europe or globally by climate change, as Climate Realism has pointed out in more than 190 articles, but climate change policies imposed on the agricultural sector, restricting the use of fossil fuels to limit emissions, have and will hurt food production, harming humanity as a whole.

Contrary to activists’ claims, organic farming is not better for the environment; it takes more land to produce the same amount of food as traditional agriculture, and would potentially increase deforestation by 8-15 percent. Swedish researchers have also found that organically farmed crops actually have a larger emissions impact than conventionally farmed produce.

Organic farming on its own would have enough of a negative impact on farmers’ yields, but in many places, including in the non-E.U. member state of Great Britain, governments have also pushed proposals to reduce in the amount of land used for farming. So not only will organic farming reduce yields on what land is currently used for agriculture, but that volume would be further diminished by the limited amount of available land for farming. Fertilizers and the fuel needed to run farming equipment have been likewise targeted by E.U. green policy; it is no wonder that farmers are fed-up across Europe.

It is good that the European Commission appears to be backing down on some of their more extreme “green” demands. It is also good that organizations like the Associated Press and the Telegraph are reporting on the success farmers’ protests have had so far in the E.U., reining in unjustified, harmful farm policies, that would have no impact on climate change. Farmers in other locations like Canada, which is also imposing strict restrictions on agriculture, could follow the E.U.’s farmers’ examples and publicly protest climate policies that serve no purpose beyond harming food production. The E.U. commission’s backtracking on its draconian climate proposals suggest that when enough peoples’ daily lives are disrupted, and store shelves are empty, even authoritarian leaning politicians can take the hint and put average peoples’ well-being above their own climate virtue signaling inclinations.

Linnea Lueken

https://www.heartland.org/about-us/who-we-are/linnea-lueken

Linnea Lueken is a Research Fellow with the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy. While she was an intern with The Heartland Institute in 2018, she co-authored a Heartland Institute Policy Brief “Debunking Four Persistent Myths About Hydraulic Fracturing.”