"They Just Rolled Over Preemptively" - EU Abandons Most Green Goals In Face Of Big Ag, Right-Wing Screaming

[hatrack]

The EU’s great green deal cave-in has been nothing less than spectacular. As aggressive lobbying and violent farmers protests ramped up in the last year, Brussels has killed plans to cut pesticide use by half, to green farming practices, to ban toxic “forever” chemicals, to rein in livestock emissions and, last week, to restore nature to 20% of Europe’s land and seas. The aim may have been to create breathing space. Predictably, that hasn’t worked. The bloc’s anti-deforestation regulation seems likely to be the next green reform for the chop, with 20 agriculture ministers reportedly calling for it to be pared back and suspended on Monday, citing “administrative burdens”.

Why is this happening? It is clear that centre-right parties fear an expected far-right insurgency in June’s parliamentary elections. But veteran observers also see a strategic bid to set a “brown” agenda for the next European Commission, in the same way that the Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion youth protests in 2018 set a green agenda for the current one.

The difference, says Pieter de Pous, of the independent climate-change thinktank E3G, is that “unlike with the school strikes, the commission and EU ministers didn’t even wait for the election results to come in this time. They just rolled over pre-emptively”.

If they keep rolling, the next victims may be the world’s forests. That would be a global gamechanger, because the EU’s deforestation law is a green jewel in European commission’s president Ursula von der Leyen’s crown that has garnered praise and inspired imitations beyond the EU. It introduces traceability requirements on commodities such as beef, soy, coffee and cocoa in deforestation hotspots – and bans on products whose origins cannot be verified. EU consumption of these commodities has caused about 10% of global forest loss.

EDIT

The narrative impulse for the EU’s fade to brown has been “farmers with pitchforks”. But farmers’ demands have been many and various, and typically centred on three grievances: a financial squeeze caused by fixed low retail pricing for their products, high input prices turbocharged by commodity speculation around the Ukraine war, and fears that the trade deal between the EU and South America’s Mercosur bloc will increase imports from countries with lower environmental and animal health standards. Yet while the TV cameras focus on flames and manure in the streets in Europe, but the policymakers focus on demands from the biggest agribusiness trade associations. Just last week, more than 20 of them submitted a joint letter warning of “serious disruptions in all commodity supply chains” to Europe unless “red tape” and “administrative burden” are removed from the deforestation law.

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/02/eu-green-deal-far-right-environment-agribusiness-extremists

[Think. Again.]

1. K&R

[2naSalit]

2. Face it, folks...

We're toast. The devastation from nature beating us to death will go more quickly as time goes on. Like water circling the drain, it spins faster the closer it gets to the actual drain.