“Green Deal” Faces Reckoning in Europe

With the European Union elections just over one month away, liberals in the European Parliament are facing a major backlash over their “Green Deal” platform that could hand conservatives – led by farmers and agricultural workers – major gains.

According to The Guardian, Belgian MEP Philippe Lamberts, co-leader of the Greens, is now warning that the Green Deal is at “very high” risk of being killed off as liberals face poor poll numbers in the lead-up to election day. “The likelihood of [the right] killing the Green Deal is very high,” he said. “I mean, they make no mystery that after winning the ideological battle on asylum and migration their next target is the European Green Deal, and what they call the ‘woke’ economy.”

While this news has incited panic on the left, it has been cause for celebration among European conservatives, who have long been ignored and silenced by the liberal parties that have dominated Europe for decades.

It is even more encouraging for farmers, who have in recent months staged fervent protests throughout Europe in opposition to Green Deal policies. Throughout the continent, farmers have used tractors to block roadways and demonstrated outside government buildings.

Recognizing the perilous electoral situation they now find themselves in, E.U. liberals tried to rush the Green-Deal through just before Easter, but could not find enough votes to pass the bill.

Retired Professor Augustus Friedrich von Vormelker, who lectured at Austrian and German universities and advised German President Richard von Weizsäcker, called that failed vote “devastating” for proponents of the Green Deal. “These politicians now have nothing to put into their campaign-ads,” he said.

The passion and urgency of the anti-Green Deal protests is easy to understand. Economist Dr. Etienne Chastain, who formerly advised Eurosceptic French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua and French conservatives, told me that the Green Deal would be “hell on earth for farmers.”

“If the EU Parliament voted for it, Brussels would run every European farmstead,” he told me. Most small family farms would become economically unviable overnight, threatening both the European economy and food security on the continent.

Even short of new laws, the burdens on European farmers are already enormous. Existing regulations have already production costs to the point where farmers are in need of financial assistance. Without government subsidies, farmers find it impossible to comply with the existing climate regulations. But to be eligible for the subsidies, they have to submit an agricultural calendar to Brussels, detailing when they intend to sow seeds, fertilize crops, and harvest their produce.

“If by mistake a farmer chooses a windy day, he would be fined or even lose the entire subsidy for planting on another day” one German farmer told a local news station during a protest in February. “The bureaucrat will always turn a mistake or accident into a crime to punish a farmer.”

The E.U. also adopted its so-called “Farm2Fork” strategy in May 2020 which called for a 20 percent reduction in fertilizer and 50 percent reduction in pesticide use by 2030, along with entirely removing 10 percent of existing farmland from agricultural use. Those policies alone are expected to reduce European agricultural yields by 12 percent over the next decade.

As a result, Europe will be forced to import more food from Latin America and other European nations outside the E.U. – handing even more power, money, and influence to the globalist politicians and business leaders who pushed for the change in the first place. Meanwhile, family farms will suddenly be unable to turn a profit.

The Green Deal policies would expand Farm2Fork and add even more regulations and restrictions on farming practices. As one farmer who owns small farms in Germany told Paris Radio Nova, the Green Deal’s chapter on agriculture contains absurdities that “make farming ridiculous, expensive, and ineffective.”

One such policy he pointed to is a new requirement that transporting even one animal more than 30 miles only be done using a vehicle offered by a company certified by the E.U. for that purpose. This policy, he said, would only increase costs for the consumer.

Another example is a regulation that farmers must mix any manure laid on soil into that soil within 12 hours. To ensure compliance, farmers must use a special smartphone app to photograph the manure before and after mixing – a process that took several hours during tests of the app because the website became backlogged or disconnected.

The Green Deal has four main goals—“reimagining” land ownership, reducing the amount of land available for farming, dramatically reducing the number of livestock, and restricting water rights for farms. According to some estimates, Europe’s livestock population would have to be reduced by 10 to 15 percent to comply with new emissions standards.

The proposal would also effectively force sales of private property due to noncompliance with onerous new requirements on the “decarbonization” of buildings. Any structures that don’t meet the new codes must be rebuilt with “green-friendly materials.” Property owners who don’t comply will face fines.

Inevitably, few farmers already struggling to make ends meet will be able to afford the expensive updates and will be forced out of farms that have been in their family for in many cases generations.

“In other words, the E.U. deprives these families of their property, often the family’s heritage,” said Professor von Vormelker. “Wild nature would replace it, at least in the imagination of these insane bureaucrats. How bizarre!” he added.

Thankfully for Europe’s small farms, E.U. liberals have already backtracked on some of the more extreme proposals and are now facing a dire situation in the polls heading into the elections next month.

However, as professor von Vormelker warned, the left is unlikely to give up on their vision of a “Green Revolution” – whether in Europe or elsewhere. In the United States, he told me, the same Green Deal concepts are “heavily promoted” by far-left climate groups, including the so-called “Union of Concerned Scientists.”

According to its website, the Union of Concerned Scientists was established five decades ago at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and comprises 250 academics. The group calls for “sustainable agriculture,” which encourages all aspects of the Fork2Farm program, including water supply control and so-called carbon management on farms.

Dr Chastain emphasized that, like Brussels, the Union of Concerned Scientists describes these interventions with the same word, “agroecology,” adding that he thinks “this ordeal is just around the corner” in America.

“As we feared in the 1990s, Brussels, not local governments and parliaments, decides on issues most crucial for Europeans,” he stated. Whether farmers and conservatives emerge victorious this June or not, Americans should pay close attention to what’s happening in Europe, lest they face a similar crisis of their own at home.

Ben Solis is the pen name of an international affairs journalist, historian, and researcher.