It’s lucky that today’s anti-agriculture tyrants weren’t around when the Fertile Crescent was just getting going.
But they’re here now.
And they seem hell-bent on destroying farms.
That’s what thousands upon thousands of European farmers are saying, anyhow, and we should listen to them. After all, they provide the food we eat. We need to eat in order to survive. If we don’t survive, we can’t continue living. So, whatever we do, let’s keep the farmers.
But that’s not current policy, at least in Europe. In the Netherlands, Belgium, and elsewhere, powerful political interests continue their crusade to shut down thousands of farms in the glorious cause of pursuing “climate goals” which, they believe, by being achieved will enable the fine-tuning of the weather and the creation of the best environment.
Or at least to say they gave it the old college try.
“I want to have the possibility to continue my dad’s farm,” Brendt Beyens told the AP. “But right now I feel like the possibility of that happening is slowly shrinking and it’s getting nearly impossible.”
So once again, thousands of tractors are clogging the streets, this time in Brussels, the capital of Belgium (video of the protest is on Twitter). The farmers object to being destroyed. They have a point.
Nor is it just about the livelihoods of sodbusters. With food prices rising worldwide and the threat of serious famine looms in Africa and parts of Asia, it’s also about saving lives.
My advice for today is don’t destroy farmers.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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3 replies on “Don’t Destroy Farmers”
Here in the US, billionaires with concerns about climate change are buying huge tracts of farmland. Bill Gates has about 270,000 acres. Jeff Bezos owns 420,000 acres of farmland. Between the two of them, Mark Zuckerberg and Oprah Winfrey have about 2,500 acres of farmland in Hawaii.
Bill Gates wants us to give up meat. Can would-be oligarchs like Gates and Bezos limit our food supply? Isn’t farmland vital to our survival? Maybe there should be a limit on the amount of farmland one person can own, in the name of antitrust. I would advise that we not destroy food production in the name of fighting ‘climate change’.
This is just more of the plans of the elites, TPTB, (choose your own term)
to decide who gets food to survive.
Call it genocide or democide. It’s all the same.
The “farmer problem” runs in both directions, at least in the US.
For about a century now, even as farm production has become so efficient that only a low single digit percentage of Americans continue to be farmers and we produce more food than ever, the demands keep on coming that taxpayers subsidize the ability of people to earn a living doing what their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers did — not because it needs to be done, but because their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers did it.
Which has led to everything from food stamps (the purpose of which is to subsidize the purchase of farm goods — “feeding the poor” is incidental, which is why until the pandemic they could be used to buy flour and ground beef, but not a hot burger) to ethanol subsidies to paying farmers to not farm (my ex-wife received two government checks a year on some inherited farm acreage that was mostly steep hillside covered with rusted equipment).
I come from a farm family, spent part of my childhood living (and working) on a subsistence farm, and much of my teen time hauling hay, helping a friend’s family with milking, etc. That was in the 1970s and early 1980s, and even then much of “family farming” was essentially a workfare program. So far as I can tell, it’s only gone downhill from there.