Ursula von der Leyen offers further concession by dropping her controversial proposal to halve pesticide use within six years

The European Union has caved in to angry protests from farmers, cutting its target to scrap specific agricultural emissions which formed part of the bloc’s net zero drive.

A demand to reduce nitrogen, methane and other emissions linked to farming by almost a third has been removed from a wider Brussels plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 90 per cent by 2040.

  • Flughoernchen@feddit.deEnglish
    611·
    9 months ago

    This is so sad. We need a better plan to implement these goals, keeping things as easy and profitable as possible, not abandon them altogether. Now I fear we’re at another point of just doing nothing, making matters worse each year for everyone, especially farmers.

    • tryptaminev 🇵🇸 🇺🇦 🇪🇺@feddit.deEnglish
      28·
      9 months ago

      The smaller farmers are in a death cult, that demands to maintain the conditions on which the large agricultural industry can destroy them in a continued mass and price battle. We would desperately need smaller farms again, to implement sustainability and it would come at no or only modest price increases as currently the prices are made by the food processing industry and supermarkets, instead of the farmers.

      Europe is spending hundreds of billions to destroy it’s food security in the long run and the farmers demand to be destroyed alongside, as nobody wants to ask the question, why we run a system like this.

      • bartolomeo@suppo.fiEnglish
        5·
        9 months ago

        I often enjoy your comments and this one is no exception.

        There are communes you can buy from and there are food subsciption services from local farms but they are significantly more expensive. It’s absurd that the method of farming that will not kill us is priced out of reach of the majority of people, while the method of farming that will kill us is subsidized by our own tax dollars (depending on the country, of course).

        Same with energy. In the U.S., the fossil fuel industry is subsidized to the tune of about $20 billion a year, while green energy (although it does have some minor tax breaks for individuals etc.) is mostly left to compete in a “free market” a.k.a. unsibsidized. It’s utter madness. Either allow a real “free market” (renewables are now cheaper) or give the subsidy to the method of production that doesn’t threaten every single living thing on the planet.

  • AllNewTypeFace@leminal.spaceEnglish
    26·
    9 months ago

    Wait until the EU elections. If the far right sweep them, as many are predicting, we will probably see diesel subsidies funded by scrapping renewable energy and sustainable transport projects.

  • trollercoaster@feddit.deEnglish
    71·
    9 months ago

    Victory for the farmers, or victory for the pesticide industry?

    In some places the food and agricultural supplies industry is running the farmers’ lobby groups and is pretty much lobbying against the actual farmers in order to improve their own ability to exploit them.

  • riodoro1@lemmy.worldEnglish
    72·
    9 months ago

    I have a feeling the ecosystem won’t give too many fucks about our protests. Let’s see those sad farmer faces when a heatwave wipes out their crop. Then they’ll be asking for subsidies.

    Fuck this species and all the worst to us in an upcoming apocalypse of our own making.

  • moitoi@feddit.deEnglish
    99·
    9 months ago

    The issue isn’t reducing emissions or eating less meat. I’m sorry but farmers were idiots after WW2. They believed everything what politics said to them and implemented everything. In others words, they implemented “producing more for cheaper”.

    In a documentary, a farmer said that he double his production of pork because politics said he will make twice the profits. This is just an example. We could go further with agro-chemicals.

    They believed people whom promised magical money. Farmers shouldn’t be mad at the ecology but at the capital which drive them in the actual situation. The capital after WW2 changed how they have to produce. The agri-food business makes profits out of it not the environment.

    And, farmers since the 60s and 70s invested in new production facilities to produce more meat. But, if people want to reduce their consumption of meat, famers can produce the quantity they want, they won’t sell it. And, agri-food corporations will lower the buying price and farmer will be fucked up.

    Well done farmers. You enslaved yourself to the capital and now are blaming everything except what you did…

    • federalreverse-old@feddit.deEnglish
      301·
      9 months ago

      Producing more plant-based food is actually a lot more efficient, as animals poop out a significant amount of the calories you feed them. Hence, you’d actually need a lot fewer imports.

      Producing animal products in the current amounts is a lose-lose-lose-lose-lose scenario: people work a lot harder to produce unhealthy products from tortured creatures which are bad for the environment, creating additional cost everywhere.

    • sic_1@feddit.deEnglish
      111·
      9 months ago

      As if that stopped then from implementing harmful laws. Remember article 10, requiring digital upload filters.