The headline “protests in Europe” doesn’t usually invoke images of tractors or manure. Yet that’s exactly what took place in Madrid, Berlin, Paris, Brussels, and more. Earlier this year, farmers from almost every nation in the European Union staged large-scale demonstrations in their nearest cities. After dumping manure outside government offices and blocking key roads, their tractor convoys cost millions of euros in economic disruption. In many instances, the protests turned violent.
I first heard about the farmer protests after grainy footage of riots and bonfires invaded my Twitter feed. A lot of these posts argued a common political narrative: a small, loud, and conservative faction rejected new environmental regulations. I instantly thought it would make a great opinion piece. I expected to write a straightforward and, frankly, bias-confirming thesis: change is hard, but people need to take their medicine and accept the necessity for a green future.
Research and time quickly dispelled that expectation. This loosely organized, multi-national wave of farmer activists had many grievances, but across the continent shared similar goals born from complicated social issues. Spoiler alert: it’s not just about environmentalism. It’s about how trust between government and the governed slowly erodes, sometimes due to complicated global forces that neither citizens nor leaders fully understand.
Firstly, the farmers claimed they were neglected as the EU globalized its agriculture. This is a valid complaint: in recent years, the EU has signed multiple free trade agreements with non-EU nations, allowing cheaper foreign-grown produce to flood European markets and threatening the income of Europe’s domestic farmers. They can’t compete with cheaper non-EU prices, nor can they outperform industrial-scale farms that are far more protected from the economic risks of international trade. This is also happening at a time of growing farm operating costs, largely due to rising fuel prices.
Red tape and bureaucracy constituted another major aspect of the farmers’ grievances. Even if farmers wholeheartedly supported the EU’s green agricultural regulations, complying with them remained a logistical challenge in its own right. For farmers of varying education levels and a profession so dependent on timeliness, the ceaseless paperwork was becoming overwhelming. One farmer complained that “when our horse poops, we have to tell them how much it poops…where it goes, what day. It’s too crazy to explain.” Even the officials overseeing these programs agreed with the farmers here, as Germany’s own Minister of Food and Agriculture called the system a “bureaucratic monster.”
It’s against this backdrop of these existing grievances—worsening financial burdens, impossibly complicated bureaucracy, and unresponsive government—that environmental policy entered the picture. Countering climate change, especially in agriculture, has been an EU agenda item for decades. It also remains overwhelmingly popular: 93% of EU citizens think climate change is a serious problem, and 88% agree that all member states should become carbon neutral by 2050. To achieve this, the EU’s legislative bodies implemented a wide-reaching policy package known as the European Green Deal. The agricultural side of this Green Deal, called the Farm-to-Fork strategy, introduced a multitude of new restrictions on soil, pesticide, fertilizer, and manure usage to improve soil health and land management. However, none of these policies addressed the main concerns threatening farmers’ livelihoods. Introducing a litany of new restrictions and prerequisites for environmental impact only worsened the Green Deal’s reputation, as paperwork-weary farmers dreaded the thought of yet more forms and red tape. With their major financial concerns left unanswered, the farmers felt backed into a corner. So they got in their tractors and drove.
One summer later, the ensuing political unrest has cost the environmental movement dearly—and, by extension, the environment itself. Instead of unveiling their new plans with optimism and securing the next step forward in climate policy, EU lawmakers found themselves scrambling to contain the public relations fallout from late January all the way into April in some cases. With negative media coverage so close to the EU parliamentary elections, they also were forced to roll back key pesticide, land use, and importation policies to appease the protestors and keep their support bases stable. All the while, far-right pundits capitalized on the farmers’ protests to push unproductive conspiracy theories around global “climate scams.” EU lawmakers started on the backfoot while anti-environmental fringes prospered. This setback could exacerbate already urgent environmental problems that the Farm-to-Fork strategy intended to address, however imperfect its proposed remedies were.
Policies—even well-intentioned and brilliant ones—won’t succeed if lawmakers can’t control their political narrative or build trust with citizens about its impact. Yet the Green Deal had all the right conditions for legislative success: a largely supportive public, a broad coalition of world leaders, and a historically climate-friendly governing body in the EU’s Parliament. In that vein, any concerned observer should ask: why was the EU so unprepared for the “greenlash” against the Farm-to-Fork strategy? What could policymakers have done to avert this? One summer later, what have we learned?
For starters, Green Deal lawmakers weren’t entirely ignorant of potential backlash. In December 2020—nearly a full election cycle before the farmers’ protests—one of the EU’s own sustainability research offices published a report on the Green Deal’s proposed content and implementation. The report highlighted that “creating democratic support and giving citizens the feeling that their needs are being taken into account will be crucial to building broad public support.” The report prophetically warned that without the “right sequencing of policy [promotion],” the Green Deal could risk “losing public support for green measures due to these measures being perceived as putting an undue burden on the poorest.” The EU’s primary solution? In 2022 they held the Conference on the Future of Europe, a part town-hall, part-debate where 800 randomly selected EU citizens debated proposed legislation, including environmental policy. It was a major show of openness and one of the first conferences of its kind in EU history.
However, just one conference did not provide the public input and widespread support the Green Deal needed. The scheduled debates didn’t even allow extended, detailed discussion over specific issues like the Farm-to-Fork agricultural reforms. The conference lumped all of Europe’s major policy challenges into one large-scale discussion, preventing substantive deliberation on the nuances behind most issues. Experts even criticized the broader discussions the Conference did cover. Civil rights NGOs labeled it a “technopopulist experiment” that “failed from start to finish,” criticizing the conference’s format and multi-year scheduling delays as exemplary of continuing EU dysfunction. Another observer from the Carnegie Europe policy group wrote: “ambitious and wide-ranging follow-up will be required if the conference is to generate tangible progress.” Three years, one summer, and several dozen tractor blockades later, it’s safe to say such follow-up was either nonexistent or insufficient. A 20-page European Policy Center report on the conference’s long-term impact may have summarized it best: “the grand rhetoric did little to overcome political realities and, at this point, critics claim that process-related problems and a lack of visibility have left the Conference in the doldrums.”
With this context in mind, I now ask: how was any of this supposed to convince European farmers that the Green New Deal was good for them? I furthermore ask: should we really be surprised that the farmers reacted the way they did?
The unrest we saw in Europe this Spring was dangerous, deeply disruptive, and mired in far-right influence. But it was also a cautionary tale of global significance. The ball was in the government’s court. The ensuing political fallout was a consequence of preventable public relations oversights in the Green Deal’s early stages. These oversights occurred despite the EU recognizing that such lack of outreach would likely undermine their own policy goals. If we as a global community are to achieve the reforms necessary to fight climate change, then lawmakers can’t afford these kinds of setbacks so close to the finish line. Handling “greenlash” should be considered as important and as thoroughly studied as funding, coalition-building, or vote-getting. That’s especially true if we’re talking about systemic reforms in the US at a time when trust in government is at an all-time low. Climate leaders around the world need to wise up and address “greenlash” from day one—not just as an afterthought, but as a central tenet of policymaking, so that people made vulnerable from an environmental transition don’t feel left behind.
How do we accomplish that? Well, for starters, opportunities for public input shouldn’t be a single transnational digital event in which citizens draw lots to participate. Instead of having angry mobs converge on capitols, maybe the government should go to the people earlier in the lawmaking process. Regulators need to spend more time helping citizens understand how their policies will impact lives, jobs, and daily routines. The Conference’s high-concept and shallow design did nothing to accomplish that. Granted, a more focused process of outreach won’t be easy or satisfying with the sheer number of interests and actors at stake—but after seeing yet another opportunity derailed by messaging failures, it may be our best shot at enacting already-overdue environmental reforms. Whether European or otherwise, citizens, leaders, and environmentalists alike must learn from the Green Deal’s aftermath. The Earth cannot afford more setbacks like it.
Featured Image Source: Getty Images
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