Current agricultural policy is primarily intended to serve the interests of the environment and the climate, and only secondarily food security; This leads to a situation where it is not profitable to be a farmer – diagnoses the latest report of the Brussels think tank MCC Brussels entitled “The silent war on agriculture.”
The author of the expert opinion, Richard Schenk, reports how EU agricultural policy priorities have changed in recent decades.
In the first phase of its existence, food security and affordable prices were the main objectives of EU policy. Conceived in this way, it allowed farmers to obtain an adequate income in exchange for feeding Europe and the world
– recalls the report.
The current European agricultural policy is almost unrecognizable as such. It is primarily intended to serve the interests of the environment and the climate, and only secondarily food security. The aim of this new transformation is simple: radically reduce the amount of agriculture across the EU and replace it with emissions trading systems. Highly intensive agriculture in Europe produces agricultural products with the lowest possible use of resources and environmentally harmful emissions. Shifting agricultural production from Europe to other parts of the world would not only conflict with our own climate goals, but also with our independence
– warns the MCC expert.
As he notes, government interventions resulting from the implementation of EU regulations have in many cases already led to the unprofitability of the agricultural business model.
In the Netherlands and Flanders, livestock farming has become a battleground between environmentalists and farmers. In other cases, forms of agriculture that have been practiced for centuries are threatened with loss of profitability by new European regulations, as is the case in Finland, where the forestry sector is at risk of falling short of climate change mitigation policies. Across Europe there is a risk that entire industries will become unprofitable
– Richard Schenk sums up.
He says “wishful technocratic thinking” has reached its political limits as farmers and rural communities have revolted against imposed regulations.
Dutch and Flemish farmers showed their potential to overthrow existing governments and win elections. The case of Finland, in turn, shows that Member States have started to draw conclusions from experiences such as those in the Netherlands. Instead of waiting for overly ambitious environmental policies to come into effect, they started to fight against them at European level. (…) Although Finland alone could not stop the Natural Resources Recovery Regulation (NRL), it did weaken many provisions that would have made it impossible for many Finnish families to make a living from forestry
– emphasizes Schenk, who predicts that the growing problems of farmers in the subsequent Member States, caused by the implementation of climate ideology in agriculture, can reverse the negative trend.
This week, the European Parliament’s Committee on Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (ENVI) accepted the agreement on the Regulation on the Recovery of Natural Resources (NRL), previously negotiated by the EP and the EU Council. As MEP Anna Zalewska, a PiS member of ENVI, warned: “the biggest concern is the effects of the proposed regulations on the agri-food sector. Requirements for the restoration of areas that are drained peat swamps, the possibility of state interference in private property; detailed and ambitious biodiversity targets for agricultural and forest ecosystems.
As she added, the implementation of these regulations in Poland “could lead to the liquidation or, at best, to the need to reprofile the activities of thousands of farms – and, as a result, to the loss of the source of income for many farmers and weakening the competitiveness of Polish agriculture in the common market.”
kk/PAP
Source: wPolityce