MERDE, DAS IST EIN HAUFEN MIST!

From the earliest days of Cold Spring Shops, we have called attention to the dubious political economy of farm subsidies.  "It is amusing to hear U.S. trade officials complaining about the dumping behavior of other countries whilst tolerating the export subsidies for grains, sugar, cotton, and tobacco (yes.) I am still waiting for the opportunity to buy a Lands' End button-down made in Pakistan, Afghanistan, or Iraq from cotton grown in one of those countries, but my government won't let me."  That post also called attention to the sponsored research hustle.  (There is a line, somewhere, between externally funded pure research and externally funded advocacy.)  Twenty years on and the follies are still with us.

Today, though, let us focus on the European farmers' protests, which have spread (literally, manure!) beyond Germany.

It's not clear, reading Pajamas Media contributor Kevin Downey, what the real complaint is.

The power-hungry scapegraces in the World Economic Forum (WEF) thought they could scare the world into killing off our farmers to make the weather gooder or something cute, but the world has had enough.

Farmers in Western Europe are fighting globalist b*llshit with the real thing: they are spreading manure on government buildings everywhere, and that's just the beginning.

It's true that there are sustainability weenies who would like to see the end of industrial farming, but that's not the current gripe, either in Germany or now in France.

American news media hasn't mentioned this much, but French farmers have been protesting over escalating diesel fuel taxes and the introduction of cheaper food from Latin America, which they see as a one-two punch to drive them out of the farming industry and compel them to sell their land, most likely to the French government.

Food from Ukraine is currently duty-free and is also a threat to French farmers' profits. The French government is also trying to drive prices down at the supermarkets. French farmers see all of this as an existential threat to their livelihoods.

Thousands of tractors have clogged French highways. Tires and hay bales have been stacked up in streets to cause barricades.

In the United States, there's a predictably bipartisan outcome in the sweet land of subsidy.

Never mind that for at least as long as I have been following these things, the log-rolling of members of Congress in districts with a lot of food stamp recipients supporting farm subsidies in return for support for public assistance has been the quintessence of bipartisanship.  Perhaps the best thing Our Political Masters could do for hungry people is ... go away.

Those duty-free Ukrainian exports?  When the managed economies of the West did the dumping, it was fine.

The dirty little secret of trade policy is that the advanced industrial economies, whether under the rubric of Common Agricultural Policy or in reverence of the Minutemen and the State Volunteer Regiments who marched with Grant and Sherman, all protect domestic agricultural production and ship the surplus overseas under the rubric of foreign aid.

The more general lesson, though, is that when Canadians choose to produce cheese with milk from their own pastures, they give up an opportunity to produce cheese with maple syrup from their forests.

When you're dealing with the European Union, though, prepare to be overwhelmed with nuance.  Nick Dalton, yet another guy writing for The Conservative Woman, also suggests the best thing for Europe would be for Their Political Masters to go away.

As with any story, there are many factors behind these protests, but the backdrop is the EU Common Agricultural policy. That supermarkets can make huge profits – for no risk – while farmers can barely survive without financial support owes a lot to the failed subsidy-and-quota philosophy of the CAP, still alive in all but name. Not only was it inefficient within the confines of the EU – producing wine lakes and butter mountains – but to this day it has the added effect of these surpluses being dumped at below cost on world markets and wrecking farmers’ incomes overseas; a double whammy of market failure as a direct result of bureaucratic meddling.

For decades, layer upon extra layer of environmental regulation has imposed increased costs on a naturally risky business, and the forced farm closures now creeping across the Low Countries under the guise of environmentalism (driven by organisations such as the Gates Foundation and World Economic Forum, but all under UN Agenda 2030) only add further uncertainty and insecurity. More recently, German government covid funds were used to subsidise fuel prices and lower taxation on farms, actively favouring larger farms and penalising the small ones. Now those funds have dried up, the grants are coming to an end.

Any industry will inevitably become addicted to such support, and governments to the control it buys them, and nobody said weaning farming off subsidies was going to be easy.

Sooner or later, though, reality comes to bat.

It is ironic, then, that the criticism of the farmers comes largely from the same direction as the rules and market imperatives which force them to farm intensively. Big Agri and its political allies have made small-scale farming uneconomic, and the risk is now real that the family farm as we know it will die out. That the number of farms in Germany has halved in 30 years and that few farmers can look to the next generation of their family to continue the business shows that this is an industry in genuine crisis. If the ‘left’ don’t want the farmers to side with the ‘far right’, they need to stop pushing them away.

I’m not saying that the farmers blockading Berlin would all switch overnight to organic farming, but I guarantee a lot of them would want to run a small traditional, profitable farm with low fuel and chemical inputs, subsidy-free, that they can pass on to their kids, if given the choice. It’s not their fault that the regulators have created a market so dysfunctional it can’t cope with even small moves back towards ‘normality’.

Whatever other external factors might be in play, these are working people protesting at their family businesses being driven to the wall by what they see as illogical and immoral diktats handed down from above. With a cost of living crisis that shows no signs of receding, surely we should be supporting those who provide our sustenance, not penalising them.

It’s demeaning to the debate to use the ‘far right’ cliché to characterise circumstances as nuanced as these protests, which no simplistic left-right dichotomy can describe. But if we are to be reduced to anachronistic generalisations, I would argue that it’s the meddling and anti-competitive, globally coordinated policies of the ‘far left’ that have made this situation inevitable.

It has been a long time coming and the warning signs have been plain to see. The grey-suited bureaucrats tucked away in their urban ministries, even those who own a pair of wellies or can tell one end of a cow from the other, have ignored the gathering storm and now it is upon them.

So it always is with pointy-headed pseudo-intellectuals, isn't it?  Make the closing argument, Mr Hinderaker.

The Left is trying to make our lives worse in many ways, one of which is raising the price of food. This is done by banning chemicals needed to grow crops cheaply (or at all), by banning or limiting animal husbandry, and by imposing environmental regulations that raise the cost of producing food. The French farmers’ most immediate concern may be the prices they are getting from supermarkets, but more broadly all of these farmers’ movements represent the interests of all of us who want to eat. The farmers are just the ones on the firing line.

These days, the pitchforks are real, with the torches and muskets remaining in storage.  The problem with vanguards, though, is they never know when to stop pushing.