Hundreds of fed-up Germans driving tractors rumbled into Berlin and parked in a long line leading up to the stately sandstone columns of the Brandenburg Gate in mid-December. Many donned yellow jackets, now the trademark garb of European populism. They blew horns and waved signs saying the German government had declared war on them.
The country’s center-left leaders, faced with a budget deficit, decided to get rid of tax breaks on diesel used in agriculture, a move that cost the government about 900 million euros ($1 billion) will save – and one that might wear climate benefits — but will cost individual farmers as much as 20,000 euros ($21,500). Many producers and farmers saw the cuts as the last straw in a series of events, such as inflation, the war in Ukraine and new environmental regulations, that had already made life more difficult for them. Protests mostly in the form of tractor blockades soon spread across the country.
Then they erupted across the continent. In recent weeks, roads and town squares have been blocked in almost every country in the European Union by farmers angry over a number of regulations, including policies intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. EU officials, who met earlier this month only feet from protesters clash with police in Brussels, scrapped plans for the bloc’s first ever target to reduce climate pollution specifically from food production.
The protests highlighted how difficult it is for governments to limit agricultural emissions, not just in Europe but globally, policy analysts told Grist. Farming is responsible for about 10 percent of climate pollution in both Europe and the United States, and climate scientists largely agree that limiting emissions is key to limiting global warming. The EU’s reversal on agriculture-specific climate targets highlights the need for a carefully planned ‘just transition’ – a shift to climate-friendly farming that does not ignore farmers’ economic needs, says Tim Benton, who directs research on food production and food production. the environment at Chatham House, a think tank based in London.
“Farmers are increasingly fed up with being seen as the whipping boy of food system emissions, in terms of being told they’re bad people and bad stewards of the land,” Benton said. “If we’re going to make transitions, then we have to bring people with us.”
With echoes of France’s populist yellow vest protests in 2018, farmers from Spain to Slovenia choked highways with tractors, leaving their hump stacks of filth and manure in front of government buildings, throw eggs and firecrackers at the police, and setting hay bales and tires on fire. The farmers have a litany of complaints — high fuel and fertilizer costs, cheap imports and competition with foreign producers, volatile commodity prices — but one thing in particular united them: the European Union’s climate policy, which they see as out of touch and overbearing.
EU officials, who agreed in 2020 on a target to make the continent carbon neutral by 2050, were set to make a recommendation this month to cut pesticide use in half and 30 percent of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions by 2040 to reduce. on the streets of Brussels, the European Commission – the EU’s executive branch – rejected the proposal, although they kept a broader target of cutting 90 percent of the bloc’s total emissions by 2040. Officials also postponed a recommendation to leave some farmland fallow to preserve biodiversity, and they abandoned a plan to promote lab-grown and plant-based meat to limit climate pollution from the livestock industry.
“We’ve seen this slide, this reversal from a very ambitious agenda a few years ago to basically nothing left,” says Patty Fong, director of the climate program at the Global Alliance for the Future of Food in the Netherlands.
The proposals would need approval by the EU parliament after elections in June, when the far-right is expected to make gains. In view of the polls, right-wing politicians in Europe tried to capitalize on the farmers’ discontent they pressure to dismantle the EU’s climate policies, according to Danielle Resnick, a research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute and the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC “The discourse is being hijacked in some quarters,” Resnick said.
Lacking popular support, top-down mandates and emissions targets are unlikely to work, Benton and other policy researchers told Grist. The key, they said, will likely involve investing billions of dollars to encourage farmers to use environmentally friendly growing practices and to ensure that they will make a living even if yields decline as a result of those changes.
As an example of a step in the right direction, Benton cited the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate bill that the US Congress passed in 2022. That legislation did not come with a specific target for reducing agricultural emissions, but it did target $20 billion. to “climate-smart” farming and tens of billions of dollars more to spur the transition to renewable energy.
In Europe, lawmakers have set ambitious climate goals, but they haven’t done the extensive planning — or investments — that the transition requires, analysts told Grist.
“No one is really proposing a long-term plan that says, ‘We have to switch. We need massive amounts of funding to make this transition to more sustainable agri-food systems. This is how we are going to pay for it. And this is how we will support farmers in this transition,” said Julia Bognar, head of the land use and climate program at the Institute for European Environmental Policy.
A challenging task for governments is figuring out where to get all that money to help farmers. Bognar pointed to the huge subsidies the EU already hands out: around one-third of its entire budget – some 56 billion euros ($60 billion) each year – goes to farmers, agricultural companies and rural development. Bognar suggested reallocating some of those payments would be one way to free up cash. For example, the EU could reduce funds that support environmentally damaging practices, such as intensive livestock production at factory farms, and promote funds for practices that combat emissions (say, planting carbon-storing perennials such as trees).
Still, dairy and meat companies weren’t likely to let those livestock subsidies slide without a fight. And there’s no guarantee that money set aside for “climate-smart” agriculture actually goes to practices that help the planet. In the US, for example, a good portion of the Inflation Reduction Act funding could flow to equipment at factory farms, such as methane digesterswhich capture methane emissions from manure but still tend to pollute the air and water.
“It’s very easy to say we need to have a just transition,” Benton said. “But I can’t think of an example where we really got it right.”
