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Despite months of farmers’ protests across Europe, lawmakers have been unable to quell their anger. Earlier this week, protesting farmers blocked the Polish-German border, threw bottles at police in Brussels and organized a large rally in Madrid.
The protests are driven not only by country-specific grievances, but also across Europe, from soaring energy, transport and fertilizer prices to the import of cheap products such as grain and meat. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 raised many of these concerns.
But climate change is also a factor to watch. Extreme weather events such as floods and droughts place a huge burden on the agricultural sector. At the same time, farmers are protesting against EU environmental regulations aimed at preventing the very effects of climate change that would seriously harm their profits.
why? Let’s take a look.
Climate change and the European agricultural sector
As global temperatures rise, extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and intense around the world. Europe is no exception. Over the past few decades, the continent has frequently experienced severe natural disasters such as droughts, forest fires, heat waves, storms, and heavy rains.
Agriculture is one of the most affected sectors. For example, Reuters reported that EU olive oil production fell to an all-time low from July 2022 to June 2023 due to the drought that hit Europe’s major producing countries. In Spain, production levels of crops such as wheat, barley and rice have fallen dramatically over the past decade.
Additionally, heavy rains last year delayed harvest and damaged wheat crops in parts of France, Germany and Poland, Reuters added. In Italy and Greece, unusually wet weather has led to the spread of fungal diseases that damage the quality of apples and pears. In 2023, large-scale wildfires broke out in Greece, wiping out around 20% of annual agricultural income, The Guardian reported.
And things are set to get even worse. According to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), if global average temperatures rise by 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, a third of southern Europe’s population will face water scarcity.
How does the EU intend to deal with this issue?
In 2020, the European Commission approved the European Green Deal, which set the ambitious goal of making the EU climate neutral by 2050. This means the European Union “needs to significantly reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and find ways to compensate for emissions.” the remaining unavoidable emissions,” says the European Council website. The agreement calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030.
The Green Deal introduced a “farm to fork” strategy to overhaul the EU’s agricultural sector, which accounts for 11 percent of the EU’s total greenhouse gas emissions, but one EU official called its “problem child” He praised it. financial times report. There is broad agreement that the sector needs a major overhaul on climate change.
Nitrous oxide (N2O), also known as laughing gas, is one of the big problems in this field. The main source of N20 emissions, which are 298 times more potent than CO2, is soil on farms where synthetic nitrogen (N) fertilizers are used. The From Farm to Fork strategy therefore includes a 20% reduction in fertilizer use by 2030.
The strategy includes halving the use of pesticides, another major source of GHG emissions, by 2030, dedicating more land to non-agricultural uses and increasing organic production to 25 percent of all agricultural land in the EU. This includes increasing. guardian report.
Anger over green transition
Lawmakers say environmental regulations will help in the long run, but no one is happy, with European farmers saying they are too strict, unfair and uneconomical.
The agricultural sector already has extremely low profit margins, and the situation has worsened since Russia invaded Ukraine, especially with rising energy costs and cheap imports of food products such as eggs and sugar. This disrupted farmers’ markets in neighboring Ukrainian states. Green transition policies are further increasing the burden on farmers.
When you talk to foreign policy Caitlin Welsh, a global food security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in the magazine: If taxes are imposed on farmers, their production will decrease. Farmers are going to protest. ”
Tom Vandenkenderaer, a Belgian member of the European Parliament, said the pressure on farmers was becoming unbearable. He told the Financial Times: “That’s the number of policies coming out at the same time. We need to slow down.”
He added that farmers feel they are being attacked by climate change activists who want to hold them accountable for the damage they have caused to the planet. “They feel their entire way of life is under attack.”
Withdrawal of green policy
The backlash has put EU governments at a disadvantage. In the first week of February, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that the European Union would withdraw the proposal to reduce pesticide use because it had become a “symbol of polarization”. .
Shortly after Ms von der Leyen’s statement, the European Commission published its recommended 2040 climate targets. The target aims to cut overall emissions by 90 percent by 2040, but it is also less likely to reduce agricultural emissions of methane and NO2, another powerful greenhouse gas emitted by livestock. does not recommend anything specific.
Additionally, several countries have rolled back key environmental regulations. For example, Germany postponed cutting diesel subsidies for agricultural vehicles, and France put on hold a national plan to reduce pesticide use.
Nevertheless, the EU urgently needs to curb emissions from the agricultural sector to meet the goals of the Green Deal. It remains to be seen how the bloc will achieve that without further instigating farmers’ fears and putting their livelihoods at risk.
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