By Alind Chauhan, India Express
Even after months of farmers’ protests across Europe, lawmakers have failed to quell their anger. Earlier this week, protesting farmers blocked the border between Poland and Germany, threw bottles at the police in Brussels, and organised massive rallies in Madrid.
Behind the protests lie country-specific, as well as pan-European grievances, ranging from spiking energy, transport and fertiliser costs, to the import of cheap products like grains and meat. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has contributed to many of these concerns.
Climate change, however, is also a notable factor. Extreme weather events such as floods and droughts have hugely burdened the agriculture sector. At the same time, farmers are also protesting against the EU’s environmental regulations which aim to prevent the very climate change impacts that have severely harmed their interests.
With soaring global temperatures, extreme weather events across the world are becoming more frequent and intense. Europe is no exception — in the past few decades, the continent has witnessed frequent and severe natural hazards like droughts, forest fires, heatwaves, storms and heavy rain.
Agriculture is among the worst-affected sectors. For instance, the EU’s olive oil production fell to a record low between July 2022 and June 2023, owing to a drought that hit Europe’s major producers, Reuters reported. In Spain, production levels of crops like wheat, barley, and rice have dramatically dropped in the last 10 years.
Moreover, in parts of France, Germany, and Poland, heavy rainfall last year delayed harvest and damaged wheat crops, the Reuters report added. In Italy and Greece, unusually wet conditions led to a break of fungal diseases that damaged the quality of apples and pears. In 2023, Greece also saw widespread wildfires that wiped out about 20 per cent of annual farm revenue, The Guardian reported.
And things are slated to only get worse. According to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), if the global average temperature increases to 2 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels, a third of southern Europe’s population will face water scarcity.
How EU plans to deal with the problem
In 2020, the European Commission approved the European Green Deal which set an ambitious target of making the EU climate-neutral by 2050. This means the bloc will have to “drastically reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and find ways of compensating for the remaining and unavoidable emissions,” the European Council’s website said. The deal requires cutting GHG emissions by at least 55 per cent by 2030.
The Green Deal introduced the “From Farm to Fork” strategy in order to overhaul the EU’s agriculture sector, which accounts for 11 per cent of EU’s total GHG emissions, and was described by one EU official as its “problem child”, the Financial Times reported. Most agree that the sector needs a major climate overhaul.
Credit: Our World in Data
Nitrous oxide (N2O), also known as laughing gas, is one of the major problems for the sector. At 298 times more potent than CO2, the primary source of N20 emissions is farm soils where synthetic nitrogen (N) fertilisers are used. Therefore, the From Farm to Fork strategy includes cutting fertiliser use by 20 per cent by 2030.
Credit: Our World in Data
The strategy also entails slashing the use of pesticides — another major source of GHG emissions — by half by 2030, devoting more land to non-agricultural use, and increasing the organic production to 25 per cent of all EU agricultural land, The Guardian reported.
Rage against the green transition
Although the lawmakers say that environmental regulations will help them in the long run, European farmers are none too happy, claiming that regulations are too strict, unfair, and economically unviable.
The agriculture sector already runs on very thin margins, and after Russia invaded Ukraine, things only got worse, especially with skyrocketing energy costs, and cheap import of food products like eggs and sugar. This disrupted the farmers market in Ukraine’s neighbouring states. The green transition policies are further adding to the burden on farmers.
Speaking to the Foreign Policy magazine, Caitlin Welsh, a global food security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said: “As you’re imposing these stricter climate regulations on farmers, there’s a cost, and the cost has to be borne somewhere … If the cost is imposed on the farmer, well then the farmer is going to produce less. The farmer is going to protest.”
According to Tom Vandenkendelaere, a Belgian member of the European Parliament, the pressure on farmers is becoming unbearable. He told the Financial Times: “It is the number of policies hitting them at the same time. We need to slow down.”
He added that farmers feel attacked by climate activists who hold them responsible for damaging the planet. “They feel their whole way of life is under attack.”
Rollback of green policies
The backlash has pushed the EU governments on the back foot. In the first week of February, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, announced that the bloc would scrap the proposal to reduce pesticide-use as it had become “a symbol of polarisation.”
Soon after von der Leyen’s statement, the Commission released its recommended 2040 climate targets. While the targets aim to reduce overall emissions by 90 per cent by 2040, they do not recommend anything specific on reducing agriculture’s emissions of methane, another potent GHG emitted by livestock, or NO2.
Moreover, several countries have rolled back key environmental regulations. For instance, Germany has delayed a cut on diesel subsidies for agricultural vehicles, and France has put a hold on a national plan to reduce pesticide use.
Nonetheless, the EU still urgently needs to curb emissions from the farm sector to meet the Green Deal targets. It remains to be seen how the bloc does so without stoking more unrest among farmers, and putting their livelihoods in peril.