European officials have set a goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions by more than half by 2030, as scientists say Europe has become the fastest-warming continent on the planet. But the EU has weakened or shelved some proposedagricultural policies as a concession to protesting farmers.
Several of the demonstrations have turned violent, like protests in February and March in Brussels, the seat of EU government. Farmers pelted police with beets and then sprayed liquid manure on them before police responded with tear gas and water cannons.
French farmers are calling on the government to provide financial aid as there’s a high risk that this year’s wheat harvest will be the lowest in at least a decade because of heavy rains.
Three weeks into the season, field surveys show a drop of at least 15% for wheat production from a year earlier, but it could be as much as a 28% decline, according to lobby group AGPB. That would indicate production of as little as 26 million tons this season.
“The drop in harvests is catastrophic for cereal growers,” AGPB President Eric Thirouin said in a statement, adding that their aggregated loss of income may exceed €1.6 billion ($1.7 billion).
The slump in one of Europe’s top grains exporters comes as bad weather also batters crops in other major shippers, including Russia. That risks reviving food inflation ahead.
AGPB on Monday invited Agriculture Minister Marc Fesneau to meet farmers in a bid to see urgent action taken by the government. His ministry is assessing the damage before they can provide farmers with insurance support, he said.
The farmers are seeking compensation, tax relief, deferral of loan payments of loans payments, the group said.
This spring was the nation’s fourth wettest ever, with rainfall at 45% higher the 10-year average, according to Meteo France. Floods and landslides across the country have caused severe damage to agricultural areas. Sunshine has also been almost 20% lower than the seasonal average.
You’d imagine everyone in the agri-food industry, particularly those in power, would have scrambled to ensure that farmers knew exactly what scientists were predicting. Instead, when the Government-endorsed, industry-led expansion plan, Food Harvest 2020, was published in 2010 – funded with millions of public money – it did not address the most critical farming factor: the scientific modelling which predicted that agriculture would soon face very different weather patterns than before.
The plan promised a vision of a “dynamic, forward-looking agri-food industry”, but farmers had to do the hard work of reshaping their farms and finances. Yet, within the Government’s particular model of expansion, it seems there was little, if any, space given to making sure farmers had the climate data they needed to plan ahead for a more sustainable business which met the changing conditions. It contributed to a vacuum within which climate scepticism and denial would inevitably flourish.
A few years after the plan was published, I spoke to a farmer in Donegal who was perplexed and worried about how the extreme weather affected his land. The rain had become so intense that he had to stop what he was doing when it fell. He’d been farming all his life and had “never seen it this bad, and neither has my dad”. He didn’t know what to expect in the future or whether he should continue to farm as he did. “Something is changing,” he told me. “I just don’t know what it is.” Desperate for advice and local information about how climate change was affecting his farm – and how best he should prepare for it in the future – I asked him what others in his sector were saying? “Nobody is talking about it.”
In 2018, the extreme snow in spring – which the State agriculture agency Teagasc claimed was “unique” – was followed by a prolonged drought during the hottest summer period on record in over two decades. Farm income dropped, and the stress of trying to keep animals alive in the cold, and well-watered in the heat, brought some farmers to breaking point. But 2018 was no outlier; later that year, Sweeney warned that the weather would likely become even more extreme in the years ahead.
In helping farmers – and the rest of us – to access high-quality, up-to-date climate data, perhaps Met Éireann and RTÉ could take inspiration from France Télévisions, the national public television broadcaster. Last year, following one of the hottest summers on record, the broadcaster decided to expand its daily seven-day weather forecast to include a climate change report. Every evening at 8pm, 3.6 million viewers watch the forecaster explain the climatic conditions with a live display counter showing how much hotter the country is compared to a century ago. Viewers can scan a QR code to send questions to scientists (Sunday evenings are reserved for questions sent in by children). In the future, the team plans to use 3D models and augmented reality to further explain the complexities of climate change.
Dairy farmers are coming out of a brutal 10 months of wet weather. They’re being told to prepare for longer winters ahead, so they’ll have to budget for more animal feed, housing and slurry storage from now on. None of this is surprising; the predictions were always there.