OPINION
As magician and sceptic Penn Jillette puts it: if you live in a beach-house in the US, you probably shouldn’t be trying to tell starving people in the rest of the world that you’re’ fighting the technology that could feed their children… Unless you and yours are starving, you need to SHUT THE FUCK UP!
Jillette was addressing ‘progressive’ food evangelists: the sort of people who sit in their mansions, writing earnest columns for the Guardian, demanding the wholesale dismantling of ‘industrial agriculture’, not to mention the elimination of herds of cows and sheep. None of these people have ever had to scratch for a meal, and it shows.
Just as they’ve never scratched for a meal, these pampered ninnies are total strangers to the natural environment. It’s no coincidence that the Greens’ vote is almost exclusively concentrated in the wealthy inner-suburbs of the biggest cities. The ‘environment’ is something these people watch David Attenborough pontificate about on the telly, or fly over on the way to their latest overseas holiday.
These are the people who, each with the carbon footprint of a small aluminium smelter, are calling farmers the enemies of the environment.
Farmers across the world are arcing up.
The conflict between farmers and environmentalists has been simmering for years, and in 2023 it finally boiled over into electoral politics. The Dutch BBB (BoerburgerBeweging) or Farmer-Citizen Movement began in 2019 as a series of protests against environmental regulations that had a disproportionate impact on farmers. In March 2023 it became a winning political party […]
Years of increasingly harsh agricultural regulations and widespread farmer protests in the Netherlands and elsewhere had led up to this point. Back in 2019 when US Senator Ed Markey and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s original “Green New Deal” resolution called for the eventual elimination of “farting cows,” drastically cutting agricultural output for environmental interests struck many people as a novel concept. By 2023, conflicts between farmers and legislators had broken out across the globe.
Sometimes, it almost seems like a good idea to let the stupid smug pricks in their EVs win. Just so they can get a taste of what their ‘de-industrialised’ world would look like. Like Sri Lanka, for example.
Sri Lanka’s government banned synthetic fertilizers for about six months in 2021, eventually rolling back the ban due to its exacerbation of mass food shortages and undernourishment across the country.
But, socialists that they are, the sight of a bunch of peasants on the other side of the world reduced to eating their pets is of no concern to these cosseted idiots. It’ll work next time. Greta says so!
In 2022 the Dutch government pushed unprecedented crackdowns on agriculture to reduce nitrogen emissions. “Farms next to nature reserves must cut nitrogen output by 70 per cent,” the Economist reported. “About 30 per cent of the country’s cows and pigs will have to go, along with a big share of cattle and dairy farms.” This would result in the loss of about 11,000 working farms, according to the Irish Times. Ireland’s government followed suit in 2023, pushing to cull 200,000 dairy cows over three years for the purpose of cutting greenhouse gas emissions […]
Regulatory moves of this sort have resulted in mass farmer protests erupting not just in the Netherlands and Ireland, but also Italy, Spain, Poland, and several other countries in 2022 and 2023. Already in the first month 2024, protests in Germany have broken out in opposition to newly announced legislation to cut subsidies and raise taxes on agricultural production. “Convoys of tractors and trucks gathered on roads in sub-zero temperatures in nearly all 16 federal states, while protesters clashed with police and leading politicians warned that the unrest could be co-opted by extremists,” Reuters reported on January 8.
Yet, even knowing that their idiotic policies will result in mass starvation isn’t enough to move the zealots of Gaia. With the insouciance of Mao shrugging off the mass starvation of Chinese peasants, they simply write it off as the necessity of ‘saving the planet’. ‘If you cut off one finger, you still have nine,’ they sneer over their wagyu and champers in business class.
Many enemies of agriculture […] often quite consciously choose environmental conservation over human enrichment, even while hundreds of millions of people suffer from undernourishment to this day (a problem that can be alleviated by increased agricultural supply driving down prices).
“We have to move away from the low-cost model of food production,” said the Dutch politician MP Tjeerd de Groot. DutchNews.nl reports that, “Dutch agriculture has to become a lot less efficient or the environment will suffer even more, say agro-environmental scientists.”
The sleek Mr de Groot has clearly never gone without a day in his life. Nor has Guardian loon George “Moonbat” Monbiot – scion of a wealthy, upper-middle class family and beneficiary of a hyper-privileged Oxbridge education.
George Monbiot, award-winning environmental activist and columnist at the Guardian, takes this perspective to its logical conclusion in his Sunday Times (London) bestselling 2022 book Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet, in which he advocates for government abolition of farming.
Libertarianism.org
Let’s see this over-privileged prat go and tell that to villagers in Africa or India. I’m sure they’d take great pleasure in chasing him out of town with their pitchforks and shovels.