European Farm Protests Implicitly Demand New Economic System, with Hot Debate in U.S. Farm Belt

Nov. 28, 2019 (EIRNS)—The mass farm protests this past week in Europe, with huge protests focussed on Berlin, carry the implicit demand for a new economic system, given the fact that farm commodity prices are kept too low for family agriculture to continue. In addition, farmers are hit by government and EU “green” mandates on how to farm, dictating practices for chemical usage, animal husbandry, emissions control, including nitrogen and smells. These green regulations are more advanced in Europe than in the U.S., and public hysteria is more extreme, giving rise to greenie attacks on butcher shops, farm equipment, livestock pens, and even family members and children of family farmers.

In France, farmers at the tractor rally in Paris stressed that the “whole farming profession” is under assault—grains as well as livestock. There, in Berlin, Dublin, Brussels and Amsterdam, and elsewhere, farmers are all denouncing the EU deal-making for so-called “free trade” with Canada and the Mercosur (Common Market of the South) countries, which is just a means for the cartel commodity trading firms to further ruin all the farmers in all the nations involved.

Cattle and beef are in the crosshairs in particular, from the Wall Street/City of London commodities wing. Besides being looted through low prices, cattlemen are the target of the CO2 reduction fanatics, blaming beef eaters and cows’ flatulence for ruining the climate.

In Ireland this past summer, cattle raisers staged pickets at packing plants, to protest getting a price per head below their production costs. On Sept. 15, a deal was struck with the government, to take steps for relief to the farmers. A Beef Market Task Force was to be set up. But nothing has happened, and this week, hundreds of farmers came to Dublin for two days, from as far away as Kerry and Cork, with a hundred tractors, disrupting the city center, and blocking the entrance to Parliament. They demanded to see Agriculture Minister Michael Creed. Signs included, “No Farmer, No Food, No Future.”

In the U.S. there are hot policy discussions among cattlemen in particular. On Oct. 2, a meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, titled, “Rally To Stop the Stealin,’ ” brought out some 500 ranchers, feedlot operators and others from throughout the High Plains cattle sector. In October, a mass Twitter campaign was conducted, #Fair CattleMarkets, which in one week generated over 35,000 Tweets, delivering the message on low cattle prices, and unfair consolidation of the packers. It was aimed at President Donald Trump and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue.

At the Oct. 25-26 Kansas Cattlemen’s Association Convention, Marcia Merry Baker, representing the Schiller Institute, was invited to speak on the topic, “The Green New Fraud & Big Money’s Role in the Climate Change Phenomenon.” Bob Baker, for EIR, also briefed the group, reporting, for example, on the Fed’s repo bank bailout, and the imminent blow-out of the bankrupt financial system. Baker showed photos of the Oct. 17 mass farmer demonstrations in 17 German cities, in Paris, and elsewhere, which not one U.S. farmer had heard of, thanks to the media’s information warfare.

The response of Kansas cattle producers, who want to know more about it and defeat the green assault, is not at all restricted to cattle, although the state ranks in the top six in terms of production. Moreover, cowboys statewide are angry over the onslaught of windmill farms eating up farmland. As of 2018, Kansas ranked first in the nation for power generation from wind, with 39% of its electricity—on a good day—coming from wind farms. There is heavy pressure on farmers to give up their land for wind farms, hitting especially the wheat growers, whose output places Kansas as first or second, with North Dakota, in U.S. production.