Why Europe’s ambitious Green Deal hinges on farmers

The growl of diesel-powered tractors, the stench of burning tires, manure sprayed at police. This week, in the normally staid Belgian capital of Brussels, months of protests by farmers across the 27-nation European Union became something much closer to a farmers rebellion.

And at its heart is a policy challenge with much wider, international implications: How can governments stem the rapid overheating of our planet, and build more environmentally sustainable economies, in a way that is politically sustainable as well?

For while the farmers’ grievances vary from country to country, their protests have been eagerly embraced by right-wing populist parties. The parties are taking aim at the EU’s ambitious European Green Deal, designed to make Europe the world’s first climate-neutral continent by 2050.

With far-right groups already expected to make major gains in June’s elections for the European Parliament (that take place every five years), EU leaders have responded to the protests by beating a hasty retreat on a range of climate measures affecting agriculture.

Both France and Germany have shelved policies that would increase the price farmers pay for diesel fuel. The EU’s executive commission has backed away from Green Deal constraints on the use of inorganic fertilizers and some pesticides.

EU leaders still say they are determined to find longer-term arrangements that address farmers’ concerns while maintaining their commitment to their green economic agenda.

How, and whether, they succeed will be closely watched by the rest of the world.

Lisi Niesner/Reuters

Polish farmers block a motorway while protesting low grain prices, taxes, and green regulation. The banner reads, "We want to eat Polish bread."

The EU does have one major reason to feel confident. Opinion surveys show that most European citizens by far rank climate change as a serious problem, and 88% say they’re on board with the EU’s 2050 carbon-neutral target.

Many of the farmers themselves are concerned by the effects of global warming. High on the list of protesters’ grievances in Greece, for instance, has been the lack of adequate, timely compensation for last year’s devastating wildfires and flooding there.

But if EU countries are going to meet their targets, they cannot avoid the kind of measures their leaders have now hurriedly sheathed: reductions in the use carbon fuels such as diesel, and in the emission of hydrogen pollutants and methane from fertilizers and dairy farming.

Agriculture accounts for only about 1.5% of the EU economy, but it accounts for 10% of the bloc’s emission of the greenhouse gases that fuel global warming.

And while a shift to more sustainable agriculture is likely to require government money, getting that money could prove to be the easiest part.

One key question will be where that money is spent.

European farmers already get huge EU subsidies; they amount to nearly one-third of the bloc’s central budget. But most of that by far goes to a relatively small number of large farming businesses. Smaller farmers are left feeling economically squeezed.

That has been especially true in the past few years, when the war in Ukraine has caused fuel and fertilizer price hikes, while farming families have also had to deal with the general increase in consumer prices.

Farmers in Poland, especially, but other wheat producers in Europe, too, have also seen their earnings fall as a result of the EU’s decision to allow tariff-free sales of Ukrainian grain. That helps explain many of the protesters’ call for Brussels to abandon a potential new free trade deal with farmers in South America, seen as likely to drive down the price of their own crops.

But there’s an even tougher challenge, of which money is just one part, that has made the political message of the Green Deal’s populist critics so alluring.

It is the need to address the sense of dislocation felt by farmers who are being made to change the way they work and live to facilitate a climate transition being promoted by urban politicians who are far less affected and far better placed financially to adapt.

This has been an especially important catalyst for the protests in Germany, powerfully symbolized by the dangling of farmers’ empty work boots from streetlights and signposts – expressing a sense of loss eloquently described by one local writer late last month.

Jolted by the protests into reassessing their approach, European leaders will have to acknowledge that mood. One obvious option under discussion would focus emission-reduction efforts on the large-scale farming enterprises best able to cope with the transition, while giving more flexibility, and direct support, to smaller farmers.

But the EU will now be keenly aware of the need for more careful management of the changes being required of other parts of its economy if it is going to make the Green Deal work, from the coal mines of Poland to the automakers of Italy.

And while climate change experts will be rooting for the EU to succeed, they are alarmed by its leaders’ scurrying retreat in the face of the farmer protests.

They are worried that this smells of political panic, and that it will encourage opponents of climate action to try to block, or at least whittle down, other key aspects of the Green Deal.

As one Belgian environmentalist, reacting to the Brussels street clashes this week, quipped, maybe “we should get tractors.”