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Agriculture

European farmers continue to protest New World Order’s anti-food agenda

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18 minute read

From LifeSiteNews

By Frank Wright

As the farmer-led protests in the EU rage on, globalists are slowly learning that labeling those demanding the ability to provide food for the future as ‘extremist’ is not going to work.

Farmer protests in Europe continue to escalate, with Belgian farmers blockading the capital yesterday, Monday February, 26, with 900 tractors and driving through police barricades.  

Belgian farmers sprayed police with manure and lit bonfires with tires in a fiery day of action which saw barbed wire and anti-tank obstacles placed outside European Union institutions, and police dousing the crowd with water cannons.  

The action comes days after a convoy of Spanish farmers lead an estimated 20,000 people to protest outside the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture.  

The plea of one Spanish farmer at the February 21 protest was stark. Silvia Ruiz, 46, a livestock farmer from the north-central area of Burgos told The Associated Press.  

It is impossible to live from the rural industry, which is what we want, to live from our work. That is all we ask for.

 Video from Madrid showed the scale of the protest, at which AP said banners were displayed reading “Farmers in Extinction” and “There is no life without farming.”

Spanish farmers conducted another four-day national action in early February, their complaints echoing what The Daily Telegraph called “common talking points from what has been an eruption of farmers protests in the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Greece, Italy and Spain over recent months.” Protests have also emerged in England and Wales in recent months. 

Reasons to be fearful

The reasons given by farmers for their Europe-wide action present a direct challenge to the policies of European governments – which they say are resulting in extreme pressure on small-scale farmers. British farmers issued a desperate plea last September, saying they too were “struggling to survive.”

So what are the issues facing European farmers? This report examines the policies and practices which have combined to produce a hostile environment for Europe’s small scale farmers. 

Agenda 21 – a coordinated effort?

A documentary published by the Epoch Times in September 2023 argues that soaring food prices and food shortages “have little to do with climate change – but are the direct result of an environmental policy that was conceived over 30 years ago.”

The reference in the documentary, titled “No Farmers: No Food” is to“Agenda 21,” the United Nations’ “Master Plan for Humanity” for the 21st Century. Now renamed Agenda 2030, with that year being given as the target for the agenda’s implementation, it is a program that dates back as far as 1989. 

The agenda’s seemingly laudable goals to “eradicate global poverty,” reduce consumer waste and combat the degradation of the natural world whilst promoting prosperity can be seen in another dimension. 

An ‘excuse for government to do what they want’

Christian journalist Alex Newman says in the documentary that this noble-sounding agenda simply “gives government an excuse to do whatever they want, under the guise of meeting these goals.”

From its inception, the “master plan” demanded increased “trade liberalization,” the strengthening of “international institutions” backed by a series of “development banks” from government and private finance to drive accelerated global coordination. 

Yet “trade liberalization” and a punitive regulatory environment are two factors cited by farmers across Europe which they say are threatening their very existence.  

‘Green’ farmers also in protest

Farmers who support measures to limit pesticide use and the move to less polluting means of production have also mobilized to protest against “the neoliberal policies in agriculture the WTO has been promoting for decades which have led to the systematic impoverishment of farmers.” 

A group called the European Coordination Via Campesina (ECVC), which represents small-holder farmers in 21 European countries, highlights the worsening struggle for survival faced by small-scale farmers. In a February 25 report, farmers Morgan Ody and Vincent Delobel spoke out in advance of the World Trade Organization’s 13th ministerial conference in Abu Dhabi.  

These are the people who produce Europe’s food – whether conventionally or organically, on a small or a medium scale. They stand united by a shared reality: They are fed up with spending their lives working incessantly without ever getting a decent income. We have reached this point after decades of neoliberal agricultural policies and free trade agreements. Production costs have risen steadily in recent years, while prices paid to farmers have stagnated or even fallen.

The effect on small-scale farmers has been devastating – but beneficial for corporations.  

“All the while, through mergers and speculation, large agroindustrial groups have gotten bigger and stronger, putting increased pressure on prices and practices for farmers.”  

‘Like the Soviet Union’

This argument, coming from farmers supportive of sensible “sustainable development” measures, echoes a warning given by U,S, conservative scholar Victor Davis Hanson. 

Hanson’s segment in “No Farmers: No Food” treats this issue as a matter of the concentration of food production in the hands of the state – or under its direction. 

They feel that humans don’t need meat-based protein. They want to either force people to follow their paradigms – or they want to buy or accumulate farmland and that’s how they’re going to farm it.

It’s sort of like Mao’s cultural revolution or the Soviet Union – and it results in disasters.

At least 45 million people are said to have “been starved, tortured or beaten to death” under Mao’s “Cultural Revolution,” with the forced collectivization of farms in the Soviet Union contributing to a famine which caused the deaths of at least 3 million people between 1931 and 1934. 

Hanson says this example does not deter the “academic mind,” which “always has the answers, but never in the real world.”

What is happening in the real world is, according to Hanson, the systematic global consolidation of farming in the hands of state and corporate power. 

“They want large blocks [of farming] run by the government – or by private consortia” where meat can be largely eradicated by the control of agricultural production. 

The real world action of Bill Gates

Hanson cites the example of Bill Gates’ purchase of large tracts of farmland, coupled with the stated objectives of his “philanthropic” organization.   

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had by 2017 granted an estimated $6 billion of investment in the future of farming according to one small farmer’s campaign group, GRAIN.  

Its 2021 report argued that the foundation is “driving the food system in the wrong direction,” saying “[Gates’] funding overwhelmingly went to research institutes rather than farmers. They were also mainly directed at shaping policies to support industrial farming, not smallholders.” 

Far from providing “the substantial flow of new and additional financial resources to developing countries” exhorted by the 1989 UN statement on Agenda 21,  the Gates Foundation sends 80-90 percent of its funds to U.S. and Europe based NGOs, “buying political influence” and promoting a “corporate-industrial farming agenda.”  

The funding patterns of Gates’ so-called charity “illustrates the point of where the priorities of the Foundation lie.” 

Killing small farmers

These priorities are opposed to those of small farmers – whether in the developed or the developing world. Both populations are plagued with farmer suicides – from India through Australia and the United States, given plummeting prices and the increasing pressure to consolidate farming. Studies in Ireland, France and the U.K. show far higher rates of suicide amongst farmers – a trend that has continued over the last decade, as this 2015 report shows. 

The pressure driving farmers to desperation is related to a model exampled, as Alex Newman argues, on that adopted in China. 

“We are seeing that in China now, where these giant, mechanized, corporate, big-government controlled mega-farms are displacing all these little small family farms,” he says.

The stated aims of Agenda 30 may be an example of Hanson’s “academic answer” – which is contradicted by the real world effects it has produced.  

Ally versus ally?

Diplomatic tensions now accompany farmer protests, and have spread beyond Eastern Europe to the West. 

The Prime Minister of France Gabriel Attal responded to recent protests in France, acknowledging a further dimension of the threat to small farmers’ livelihoods: cheap imports from Ukraine.  

Attal said his government is working to protect French farmers against imports from Ukraine of chicken, eggs, sugar and cereals. 

“Solidarity with Ukraine is obviously essential, but it cannot be to the detriment of our farmers,” the prime minister said.

Attal’s remarks, reported by Britain’s Independent on February 22, recall the ongoing blockade of the border by Polish farmers – undertaken in protest against cheap imports. 

Poland continues to block Ukrainian grain

Farmers have attempted to block imports of Ukrainian grain, with two acts of grain destruction alleged in the past month. Ukrainian news outlet European Pravda reported the following incident  

On the night of 24-25 February in Poland, Ukrainian grain exports suffered the most extensive damage since the beginning of the farmer protests, with the attackers damaging 160 tonnes of Ukrainian grain.

A social media post recorded the aftermath of the grain spill, showing the alleged sabotage. 

The incident comes weeks after a similar event on February 11, when according to the same report, “Polish farmers protesting near the Ukrainian border spilled some grain from three Ukrainian lorries near the Yahodyn-Dorohusk checkpoint.” 

The Ukrainian deputy Prime Minister Alexander Kubrakov complained of “160 tons of Ukrainian grain destroyed…[in] the fourth case of vandalism at Polish railway stations.”

Farmers fighting for a viable life are now fracturing former alliances, showing the state-level impact of the issue of food security. 

Against the grain

Polish farmers began their attempts to block Ukrainian imports in late November, with assurances from the new Polish Minister of Agriculture providing only a temporary pause. The protests follow a troubled year for Ukrainian grain exports, with the EU conceding to demands from Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia with a temporary ban on Ukrainian maize, wheat, rapeseed and sunflower seed from May-June, 2023. 

The ban was extended until September 15. When it was lifted, Reuters reported that “Slovakia, Poland and Hungary imposed national restrictions on Ukrainian grain imports after the European Union executive decided not to extend its ban on imports into those countries and fellow EU members Bulgaria and Romania.” 

The reason supplied was to protect domestic farmers from being undermined by cheap imports.  

“The countries have argued that cheap Ukrainian agricultural goods – meant mainly to transit further west and to ports – get sold locally, harming their own farmers.” 

Following the elections on October 15, the incoming Polish government of Donald Tusk, a noted globalist, appears unwilling to confront the farmers directly. Last week, the Polish government snubbed the Ukrainian delegation, failing to appear at a recent meeting convened by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky to end the crisis. According to Agence France Presse (AFP): 

Ukraine’s prime minister went to the border with Poland on Friday [February 23] hoping to end weeks of protests by Polish farmers but he said no-one from the neighboring government turned up for talks.

Zelensky proposed the frontier meeting, issuing a statement saying Ukraine’s grain did not go to the Polish market “at the request of the Polish side.”

Zelensky’s remarks appear to be contradicted by the continued attempts to export Ukrainian grain into Poland. 

He added: “We are willing and will do everything to resolve this issue.” 

But Tusk’s chief of staff Jan Grabiec told AFP that Warsaw had not sent a delegation because a meeting “makes no sense at the moment.”

He said the two sides were “far” from a deal to end the showdown. 

“Unfortunately, there is not yet a Ukrainian proposition that allows to hope for an end to the deadlock in commercial relations.” 

The two governments are set to meet on March 26 in an attempt to resolve a crisis, which by then will have been ongoing for over ten months. The snub by Tusk’s pro-EU and pro-Ukraine administration shows the extraordinary power of the farmer’s movement in shifting public opinion on an alliance which formerly saw Zelensky receive a “hero’s welcome” in Poland last April. Going against the Ukrainian grain was unthinkable only a year ago.  

Farmers and the future

The farmer protests have been caricatured as “agrarian populism” – a progressive phrase intended as as slur. In characterizing these protests as irrational, and bracketing them with extremism, critics such as the U.K.-based European Consortium for Political Research seek to frames this crisis as one which “emphasizes the antagonistic relationship between the virtuous peasants and people from the countryside on the one side, and the evil and corrupt urban elites on the other.” 

Yet the farmer movement is not driven by fantasies of good and evil, but by basic reality. Farmers across the world claim the current system is threatening their very existence.  

Many are taking their own lives, with many others taking to the streets. It seems that some governments are now taking notice. As the protests continue, the message is breaking through to the would be managers of the Master Plan for Humanity – that if the demand for food and a future without misery is defined as extremist, then it is not the small-scale farmers who must give way. 

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Agriculture

Liberal win puts Canada’s farmers and food supply at risk

Published on

This article supplied by Troy Media.

By Sylvain Charlebois 

A fourth Liberal term means higher carbon taxes and trade risks. Could Canada’s farmers and food security be on the line?

The Liberal Party, now led by Mark Carney, has secured a fourth consecutive term, albeit once again with a minority mandate. This time, however, the Liberals have a stronger hand, as they can rely not only on the NDP but also the Bloc Québécois to maintain power.

This broader base of parliamentary support could provide much-needed political stability at a crucial time, particularly as Canada prepares for a new round of trade negotiations with the United States and Mexico.

For the agri-food sector, the implications are significant. From carbon taxes to trade rules, federal decisions play a decisive role in shaping the costs and risks Canadian farmers face.

First and foremost, carbon pricing will remain a central issue. Carney has made it clear that the industrial carbon tax will stay—a policy that continues to erode the competitiveness of Canada’s agri-food sector, where fuel, fertilizer and transportation costs are especially sensitive to carbon pricing. The tax, currently set at $95 per metric tonne, is scheduled to climb to $170 by 2030.

While consumers may not see this tax directly, businesses certainly do. More concerning is the Liberals’ intention to introduce a border carbon adjustment for imports from countries without equivalent carbon pricing regimes. While this could theoretically protect Canadian industry, it also risks making food even more expensive for Canadian consumers, particularly if the U.S., our largest trading partner, remains uninterested in adopting similar carbon measures. Acting alone risks undermining both our food security and our global competitiveness.

Another looming issue is supply management. Although all parties pledged during the campaign not to alter Canada’s system for dairy, poultry and eggs, this framework—built on quotas and high import tariffs—is increasingly outdated. It is almost certain to come under pressure during trade negotiations. The American dairy lobby, in particular, will continue to demand greater access to Canadian markets. The Liberals have a chance to chart a more forward-looking path. Modernizing supply management could lead to a more competitive, resilient industry while providing consumers with greater choice and better prices.

The previous Parliament’s passage of Bill C-282, which sought to shield supply managed sectors from all future trade negotiations, was a deeply flawed move.

Fortunately, the new parliamentary makeup should make it far less likely that such protectionist legislation will survive. A more pragmatic approach to trade policy appears possible.

On the domestic front, there are reasons for cautious optimism. The Liberals have promised to eliminate remaining federal barriers to interprovincial trade and to improve labour mobility, longstanding obstacles to the efficient movement of agri-food products across Canada. For example, differing provincial rules often prevent products like cheese, meat or wine from being sold freely across provinces, frustrating farmers and limiting consumer choice. Momentum was building before the election, and it must continue if we are serious about building a stronger domestic food economy.

Infrastructure investment is another bright spot. The Liberals pledged more than $5 billion through a Trade Diversification Corridor Fund to upgrade Canada’s severely undercapitalized export infrastructure. Strategic investment in trade gateways is overdue and critical for agri-food exporters looking to reduce reliance on the United States and expand into global markets.

Finally, the Liberal platform was alone in explicitly committing to support food processing in Canada, a crucial pillar of domestic food security. An increased focus on manufacturing will not only create jobs but also reduce reliance on imported food products, making Canada more resilient in the face of global disruptions.

Farmers have long felt sidelined by urban-centric Liberal governments. The past four years were marked by regulatory and trade clashes that deepened that divide. The hope now is that with greater political stability and a clearer focus on  competitiveness, the next four years will bring a more constructive relationship between Ottawa and Canada’s agri-food sector.

If the Liberals are serious about food security and economic growth, now is the time to reset the relationship with Canada’s farmers, not ignore them yet again.

Dr. Sylvain Charlebois is a Canadian professor and researcher in food distribution and policy. He is senior director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University and co-host of The Food Professor Podcast. He is frequently cited in the media for his insights on food prices, agricultural trends, and the global food supply chain.

Troy Media empowers Canadian community news outlets by providing independent, insightful analysis and commentary. Our mission is to support local media in helping Canadians stay informed and engaged by delivering reliable content that strengthens community connections and deepens understanding across the country.

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Agriculture

It’s time to end supply management

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From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Ian Madsen

Ending Canada’s dairy supply management system would lower costs, boost exports, and create greater economic opportunities.

The Trump administration’s trade warfare is not all bad. Aside from spurring overdue interprovincial trade barrier elimination and the removal of obstacles to energy corridors, it has also spotlighted Canada’s dairy supply management system.

The existing marketing board structure is a major hindrance to Canada’s efforts to increase non-U.S. trade and improve its dismal productivity growth rate—crucial to reviving stagnant living standards. Ending it would lower consumer costs, make dairy farming more dynamic, innovative and export-oriented, and create opportunities for overseas trade deals.

Politicians sold supply management to Canadians to ensure affordable milk and dairy products for consumers without costing taxpayers anything—while avoiding unsightly dumping surplus milk or sudden price spikes. While the government has not paid dairy farmers directly, consumers have paid more at the supermarket than their U.S. neighbours for decades.

An October 2023 C.D. Howe Institute analysis showed that, over five years, the Canadian price for four litres of partly skimmed milk generally exceeded the U.S. price (converted to Canadian dollars) by more than a dollar, sometimes significantly more, and rarely less.

A 2014 study conducted by the University of Manitoba, published in 2015, found that lower-income households bore an extra burden of 2.3 per cent of their income above the estimated cost for free-market-determined dairy and poultry products (i.e., vs. non-supply management), amounting to $339 in 2014 dollars ($435 in current dollars). Higher-income households paid an additional 0.5 per cent of their income, or $554 annually in 2014 dollars ($712 today).

One of the pillars of the current system is production control, enforced by production quotas for every dairy farm. These quotas only gradually rise annually, despite abundant production capacity. As a result, millions of litres of milk are dumped in some years, according to a 2022 article by the Montreal Economic Institute.

Beyond production control, minimum price enforcement further entrenches inefficiency. Prices are set based on estimated production costs rather than market forces, keeping consumer costs high and limiting competition.

Import restrictions are the final pillar. They ensure foreign producers do not undercut domestic ones. Jaime Castaneda, executive vice-president of the U.S. National Milk Producers Federation, complained that the official 2.86 per cent non-tariffed Canadian import limit was not reached due to non-tariff barriers. Canadian tariffs of over 250 per cent apply to imports exceeding quotas from the European Union, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA, or USMCA).

Dairy import protection obstructs efforts to reach more trade deals. Defending this system forces Canada to extend protection to foreign partners’ favoured industries. Affected sectors include several where Canada is competitive, such as machinery and devices, chemicals and plastics, and pharmaceuticals and medical products. This impedes efforts to increase non-U.S. exports of goods and services. Diverse and growing overseas exports are essential to reducing vulnerability to hostile U.S. trade policy.

It may require paying dairy farmers several billion dollars to transition from supply management—though this cartel-determined “market” value is dubious, as the current inflation-adjusted book value is much lower—but the cost to consumers and the economy is greater. New Zealand successfully evolved from a similar import-protected dairy industry into a vast global exporter. Canada must transform to excel. The current system limits Canada’s freedom to find greener pastures.

Ian Madsen is the Senior Policy Analyst at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

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