The war on agriculture

Contrary to popular belief, the farmer’s greatest contribution to society is not the food on our plates. The farmer’s greatest contribution to society is society itself. The sequence of actions that allow the climate change crowd to expend mental resources arguing for emissions reductions begin in the fields. If not for the farmers, the entire world would be a tragedy of the commons. How is that for a positive externality?

Yet, in typical fashion, agriculture as a whole has been under constant threat for years now by its very benefactors. The Dutch protests are just a reaction to the latest in a string of inane ideas motivated by the worst of the alarmists. Like with the oil industry, the alarmists ignore the fact that western countries have the most sustainable agricultural practices in the world. They also ignore the fact that the sustainability of agriculture is not due to regulation, rather it is basic economics. Those “inconvenient truths” must be ignored otherwise the climate change scheme would lose all of its momentum. The alarmists would prefer that those practices move to other countries, so they can signal some virtue about their country doing more to fight climate change than anywhere else. In order to avoid their wrath, we must ignore the fact that other countries would have higher emissions per calorie produced while being unable to even come close to providing as much global food security as we can.

Ironically, in my childhood, they still had television commercials about starving African children. You know, the "for a dollar a day” variety. Those commercials were factually wrong. They should have said that for just a dollar a day, you can provide enough of an incentive to a farmer somewhere to produce a crop that will feed an African child. Seems like a fair trade. I haven’t watched television for most of my adult life, so I don’t know if those commercials are still around. If they aren’t, they need to be brought back as a reminder that there are billions of people that need as much excess farming as possible because even if the west remains rich enough to feed ourselves while reducing agricultural productivity, most of the world is not so lucky.

Sri Lanka’s collapse should be a wake up call to the alarmists. Yes, there are a variety of factors involved.

• The textile industry was decimated in the last couple of years.

• The tourism industry was halted and re-opened with a “bio-bubble” scheme — hardly an appealing vacation getaway.

• Oil imports became scarce amidst rising prices caused by worldwide sanctions on Russian oil.

But the most ridiculous policy came when the country tried an immediate pivot, in the midst of other pandemic polices, into the world’s leading organic farming hub by banning the importation of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Farming output quickly dropped by 50% and the country began an economic collapse that it never recovered from in a country where a full third of people are employed in the agriculture sector. Needless to say, Sri Lanka did not become the world’s leading organic farming hub and the government completely gave up their plans after just one yield. But the damage was done and it made the country even more reliant on agricultural products imported by the U.S. — imports that became more expensive, again, due to the equally ridiculous policies of the west in response to Russia-Ukraine.

As a wake up call, though, the failure in Sri Lanka seems to have fallen on deaf ears. The Netherlands — one of the world’s largest exporters of agricultural products (though, a good chunk of that is intellectual property) — is the next target of the alarmists. The newly created “Minister of Nature and Nitrogen Policy” in the Dutch parliament announced the goal of a 40% reduction in nitrogen emissions and a 39kt reduction in ammonia emissions for the agriculture sector by 2030.

Many of these changes will be “area-specific”. In other words, they will impact some parts of the sector more than others. Those located close to “Natura 2000” areas, which from what I gather is just European Union nomenclature for conservation areas, must reduce emissions by 70%, but regardless of location, farmers need to reduce emissions by at least 12%.

Other specifics of the program are not developed yet, such as how these reductions will be achieved. Aiming for lofty goals without the slightest idea of how to achieve them is quite typical of the alarmist crowd. They have all these wonderful ideas about how much they want to accomplish, but are almost always short on actual details. In other words, their grand plans operate in the reverse order, which is why they always miss their targets.

One of the mechanisms, however, that the Dutch government has been attempting to use to get rid of farmers has been buying out their land. Note, similar strategies are gaining popularity by alarmist governments around the world. To date, most in the sector has had no interest in taking the government up on this nonsensical buy-out offer, so the new regulations (when they are completed in 2023) will likely be an attempt to compell or force farmers to concede.

To stir the pot further, it is unclear what the Dutch government (truly) intends to do with the land afterwards. A conspiracy theorist may think they are just buying up the land to eventually consolidate it under a larger enterprise owned and controlled by The Powers That Be. But that may be giving the alarmists too much credit. More likely, when the government realizes that agriculture was the backbone of the their economy and destroying the sector was a terrible idea, they’ll attempt to build up some other form of industry on the land. The new industry will surely have higher emissions and be less productive than agriculture — an exercise in bad governance typical of western society in the last few decades. That is, of course, if the Netherlands can first stave off a Sri Lankan style collapse. I’m not so sure they can.