Europe’s Green Gambit

Written by Connor Foster | February 18, 2024

German farmers protesting on the side of the road

Farmers across Europe are sparking protests in response to restrictive national and European Union environmental policies. Protestors are demonstrating by blockading roads with tractors, blocking ports, and throwing eggs at the European Parliament. The European Green Deal has been a particular point of tension with targets to create a tax on carbon emissions, water/ land usage restrictions, and pesticide bans, to name a few. Protestors complain that foreign agricultural importers are not required to follow these rules and therefore place unfair competition on European farmers. The stress of these policies combined with the heightened prices of fertilizer and transport due to the war in Ukraine have significantly reduced the prices farmers receive for their products, with a 9% drop from 2022-2023 alone.

There is some irony to the protests in the sense that climate change has already markedly impacted farming operations across the continent. Human-induced higher temperatures can create a wide variety of natural disasters such as wildfires, droughts, or floods. Just last year a wildfire in Greece and a flood in Italy wiped out a great number of farms in both countries. The policies that state governments and international organizations are attempting to impose would help to offset these negative effects. Officials are scrambling for ways to continue making progress on environmental goals while still balancing the needs of farmers. France and Germany have scaled back some of their environmental policies in order to appease the protestors. Moving into the future, it will be important to pay attention to how the EU reforms its farming subsidy budget in order to get an idea of how they will proceed moving forward.