By Romegas

Much has been reported about the farmers’ protests across the EU, but very few have put their finger on the main sore, with the mainstream media, in particular, being predictably guilty of missing the elephant in the room – the EU.

Scouring the thousands of mainstream media articles, one remains none the wiser – and one needs to resort to specialist alternative blogs to understand how the EU’s so-called Green Deal, the Paris Climate Accords and the changes to the EU’s CAP agricultural subsidy system to enforce Net-Zero have effectively declared war on European agriculture. One such blog is Dr. Richard North’s Turbulent Times, where in customary terrier-like fashion, he follows the trails to their source.

Net-zero: tractors in Brussels

by Dr. Richard North

One of the indisputable benefits of Brexit is that we no longer have to pay such close attention to EU politics. The downside of that is that the politics don’t get any less complicated so that, once Brussels-related issues do raise their heads, there is a massive catch-up job to do.

That has been the case with the farmers’ protests which had yesterday reached the heart of EU territory, with hundreds of tractors blockading the European Parliament as their owners dispersed manure and other desirables about the perimeter.

However, it didn’t take long to work out that the farmer’s main casus belli is the EU’s so-called “Green Deal”, part of its long-term strategy for bringing agriculture into line with net-zero, thus fulfilling its self-imposed Paris Agreement commitments.

The particular evil of its strategy is that changes the basis of the CAP subsidy system. In order to qualify for payment, farmers are now required to conform with increasing strict requirements aimed at reducing emissions. This covers the 2023-2027 period, driving what the EU calls “agriculture’s transition to a sustainable farming model”.

The mechanism adopted to implement this strategy is the CAP Strategic Plan (CSP), with a requirement that each member state produces its own – in a recognition that there cannot be a “one-size-fits-all” solution to climate change.

The way this works is at two levels. Firstly, all farmers receiving CAP income support must comply with a set of statutory management requirements and basic standards for environment and climate standards for “good agriculture and environmental conditions” (GAECs) – a linkage which, in Euro-speak is called “conditionality”.

This concept is not new but, from 11 January 2023 the conditions were “considerably strengthened” compared to the 2014-2022 CAP, among others by including upgraded “greening” requirements.

Then, once they have been approved by the Commission, the nationally defined CSPs kick in, to which is attached fully 32 percent or close to €98 billion of the total public CAP funding, geared at delivering “specific environmental benefits for climate, water, soil, air, biodiversity, and animal welfare”. These requirements “go beyond the conditionality”, with payments geared to specific performance criteria.

The Commission says that combination of the conditionality, applicable on 90 percent of the land and of specifically targeted instruments on at least 47 percent of that land, together with farm investments and advice, helps the EU advance towards meeting the objectives of the EU “Farm to Fork and Biodiversity Strategies”.

In the way of the EU, the strategy has a legislative base. The rules for strategic plans were set out in Regulation (EU) 2021/2115, promulgated on 2 December 2021.

The 186 pages of dense text were to take effect from 1 January 2023, little more than a year for the member states to plan and execute as complex policy and scarcely enough time for farmers to absorb the detail and understand the implications.

But it was the national elements on the strategy which confused the picture and fragmented the farmers’ response. First off the starting block were the Dutch, with the media understanding blurred as national and EU initiatives were conflated and confused.

The Guardian for instance, wrote of “Dutch policy” which had been “green-lighted by Brussels”, apparently unaware of the overarching role of the CAP Strategic Plan.

In the period from the promulgation of the Regulation at the end of 2021, to the start date of the CPS strategy in 2023, I can find no trace of any reports of the new strategy in the UK national press and, even in the specialist press, reports were few in number and often confused.

Member states were obviously struggling to meet the requirements of the new Regulation, so much so that by March 2022, Euractiv was recording complaints by EU Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski, who said the majority of plans submitted fell short of the Commission’s environmental ambitions.

A month later, it was reporting that only 19 has submitted their plans to Brussels and, of those, France was singled out as “not meeting the environmental commitments” of the new strategy.

It was also clear at that time that the Commission was taking a hard line, laying down the foundations for the protests to come. Member states, including France, were told that must “strengthen the resilience of the agricultural sector”, “reduce its dependence on synthetic fertilisers”, and “increase the production of renewable energy”.

France, in particular, was told that it should “transform its production capacity by promoting more sustainable production methods” and was accused of “lack of ambition” concerning the limitation of greenhouse gas emissions in livestock farming, “despite the significant public support for the sector”.

By October, Germany was still in trouble having submitted a revised plan. Again, it was accused of “lack of ambition”, with environmental organisations complaining that it did not go far enough.

Unsurprisingly, given the background, German farmers were next in line for mass protests, with the British media failing to detect the EU’s fingerprints.

As the protests spread, now taking in the massive demonstrations in France and the blockade of Paris, we now see the tractors in Brussels. But there have also been reports of unrest in Lithuania, Romania, Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal.

Yet, despite the Europe-wide eruption of protests and the blockade of the European Parliament – which might have given some clue as to the root cause of the unrest – the BBC in one of its notoriously arrogant “explainers” managed completely to misunderstand the situation and focussed on the “national character” of farmers’ “concerns” – an error shared by Politico and others.

In her long piece, BBC writer Laura Gozzi failed to mention the EU’s CSP, scarcely mentioned climate change and made no reference at all to net-zero nor the Paris Agreement. So voluble on the climate change crisis, the BBC seems to fight shy of acknowledging the consequences of bowing to the hype.

Faced what amounts to a Europe-wide insurrection, with massive public support – as an Elabe poll shows that 87 percent of French people support the farmers’ cause and 73 percent of them considered the EU was a handicap for farmers, not an asset – the EU and member states governments have been falling over themselves to offer concessions to the protestors.

Macron has done enough to convince the farmers to stand down their protests – for the time being – and the EU has climbed down on the timing of some of the CSP measures. But the EU Regulation is still in force, member states are still committed to implementing the CSP strategy, and the environmental lobby is whingeing about “hypocritical” European politicians weakening climate policies.

The immediate crisis may have been averted, but the tractors will be back.