Anti-ESG Farmers Waging Manure War: 2 Dead, 5 Injured; Police Splattered, Roads Slick with Waste Over Last Several Months
For the better part of the last 12 months, farmers in Europe have been mounting serious and heavily attended protests against the destructive and financially ruinous progressive and climate change regulations their governments have been forcing on the farming and food production industries.
This is a story that the U.S. establishment media has been desperate to ignore because some of these protests have paralyzed Europe and have shown that the everyday European citizens are done with meekly sitting back as their governments destroy their livelihoods with obscene over regulation aimed at pushing the global warming religion and their environmental, social, and governance plans, commonly known as ESG.
These protests have been occurring all across Europe and even recently in India. And they have also begun to have serious, even tragic, consequences.
Last month five were injured during a protest near Berlin, The New York Times reported, when a manure slick spread on a highway caused several cars to crash. In January,a woman and her 12-year-old daughter, who were participating in the protests, died after a vehicle struck a roadblock set up by demonstrators in southern France, according to the BBC.
(The crash appeared to be accidental, the BBC reported.)
Another massive farmer protest arose last week in Belgium, according to The Associated Press, near the European Union’s headquarters in Brussels, where farmers sprayed liquid manure on riot police, threw eggs, and otherwise shut the city down as they protested the destruction of their farms thanks to the stringent regulations they have to navigate to maintain their businesses.
The farmers are rising up in Brussels.
More than 100 tractors dumped manure and threw beets in protest of EU regulations that will destroy their livelihoods. pic.twitter.com/pag8HxSWUe
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) March 27, 2024
The regulatory onslaught has been forcing European farmers and ranchers to upgrade machinery and facilities to meet the ever more stringent climate change regulations while far cheaper foreign foodstuffs have flooded the EU because foreign food procedures don’t have to obey the harsher, more expensive operating costs being forced on Europe’s food producers.
In February, farmers flooded into Brussels with some 900 tractors and farm vehicles bearing down on the barbed wire and concrete blocks erected about the European Council building. As the farmers mounted their protests, the city’s riot police used water cannons to try and bat down the protests, the AP reported.
After some of the farmers broke through the police cordon, Belgian Interior Minister Annelies Verlinden demanded that officers make arrests and to identify the “rioters,” even as she gave lip service to the right to protest, writing on X, according to the AP, “The right to protest is dear to us so it must be used with respect.”
Marieke Van De Vivere, a farmer from northern Belgium, told the AP that Europe’s many governments are “ignoring” the plight of farmers.
She urged government officials “to be reasonable to us, to come with us on a day to work on the field, or with the horses or with the animals, to see that it is not very easy … because of the rules they put on us.”
Government functionaries in Belgium are far from alone in being confronted by Europe’s infuriated farmers.
[firefly_poll]
Early in March, a protest in Wustermark, just west of Berlin, Germany, saw similar unrest as farmers sprayed police with manure, causing traffic to snarl and also resulting in some car accidents that injured five motorists, Agriculture Trends reported at the time, citing German news sources.
The regulations are causing more and more farmers to sell their land and walk away from their lifelong occupations — and in many cases laying waste to family-run farms that have been operating for generations.
The New York Times, for instance, told the story of a French chicken farmer who has decided to shut down and sell out because he just can’t afford to stay current with the tidal wave of climate change restrictions constantly washing over his business. And many others are joining him in looking for the exits, a fact that is causing a crisis in European food production.
The fight over the strict climate change regulations with which Europe’s farmers have to contend is also having the unintended consequences of causing various countries and regions to reimpose hefty tariffs on foreign food imports, a financial war that may save some farms, but will also force everyday citizens to pay far more for their food, according to a report by the Deutsche Presse-Agentur/Ghana News Agency.
Unfortunately, because Europe’s political leaders have done little to address the concerns farmers and ranchers have over the ruinous regulations they face, the protests are continuing, leading to the prospect of more injuries and potential deaths.
The fault lies at the feet of Europe’s arrogant governments for pushing destructive regulations in fealty to their climate change obsession, heedless to what it is doing to the people who have toiled to feed their nations. And the same, destructive, obscene regulations are being pushed by regulators in the U.S., as well.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
