The farmers challenging the EU’s green agenda
“ Europe will sabotage its chances of developing a green economy if it pushes ahead with proposals to ban so-called forever chemicals on health and safety grounds…”
Europe will sabotage its chances of developing a green economy if it pushes ahead with proposals to ban so-called forever chemicals on health and safety grounds, the chief executive of one of the world’s leading chemical companies has warned.
Mark Newman, head of Delaware-based Chemours, said “the race to decarbonise through hydrogen is going to be thwarted” if the EU decided to ban a class of high-performance, long-lasting fluoropolymers known as PFAS. “You can’t have electric vehicles without fluoropolymers, you can’t have semiconductors,” he added.
These synthetic chemicals are used in millions of applications from non-stick cookware to textiles, batteries and smartphones. The chemical industry argues that their strong resistance to water, oil, temperature and corrosion makes them indispensable to many green technologies.
However, the molecules do not break down easily and accumulate over time in humans and in the environment. Studies have linked several variants to slow foetal and baby growth, kidney cancer and other health problems. The substances have been found in the blood of 97 per cent of Americans, according to the US government.
Newman is one of the first senior chemicals executives to push back publicly against the EU proposal to restrict the use of all variants of PFAS, roughly 10,000 different chemical compounds.
“It’s really amazing to me that we would think of walking away from a group of chemistries . . . that enables the green economy.” Such a decision would direct investment out of the bloc, and “deindustrialise” Europe, he said.
The ban would be particularly detrimental to Chemours, owner of the Teflon brand and one of the world’s leading PFAS producers. The company derives roughly a quarter of sales and ebitda from the division producing these materials.
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The health and environmental risks surrounding the chemicals have meant that chemicals companies are facing a rising tide of litigation. BASF saw an 83 per cent rise in legal cases, while Clariant, the Swiss chemicals company, has been named as a defendant in about 1,000 US PFAS lawsuits, UBS analysts said in a recent note.
Spun out of DuPont in 2015, in large part to safeguard the parent company against PFAS liabilities, Chemours is facing several lawsuits in the US over the compounds.
The EU’s proposed ban, led by Germany and the Netherlands, is several years in the making and considered to be the most radical chemical legislation ever proposed.
Last month, the EU opened a six-month consultation on the proposals, while investors have also been calling for an end to the use of the chemicals. Many US states are moving to limit the use of PFAS as well.
Newman told the FT he believed that a ban on all PFAS variants would be “unenforceable . . . Are you going to take apart everything at the border and look for fluoropolymer?”
The prospect of a wholesale ban has sparked deep concern in the semiconductor industry, where fluoropolymers are critical to the manufacture of the most advanced chips.
Newman said that in many cases there was no near-term alternative to these highly resistant compounds. “Are you willing to wait another 20 years for an alternative, when one may not exist?” he said.
Instead it was possible to manufacture the compounds more safely, preventing emissions of the molecules into the environment, and to dispose of products properly at the end of life, he said.
“We could have a hydrogen [industry] today and manufacture [PFAS] responsibly,” he said.
Chemours has invested $75mn-$100mn every year since 2018 to prevent PFAS emissions into the air and water and would continue that level of spending, Newman said. The company aimed to reduce emissions by 99 per cent before 2030.
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The farmers challenging the EU’s green agenda
Brussels needs a greener agricultural sector to help meet its climate goals. But farmers say they’re being asked to do too much
A convoy of tractors in Arnhem, Netherlands, protests against the Dutch government’s nitrogen reduction policy to meet EU targets. The sign reads ‘Come on child, we are no longer welcome in this country’ © FT montage: Jeroen Meuwsen/Orange Pictures/BSR Agency/Getty Images
By Andy Bounds and Alice Hancock in Brussels and Eleni Varvitsioti in Athens APRIL 17 2023404
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The barns and milking sheds of Takis Kazanas’s farm are dwarfed by the majestic mountains that overlook the Thessalian Plain.
Cattle have been raised on this green expanse of land in northern Greece for millennia, but now regulators in Brussels are discussing rules that will lead to farms like his being treated as industrial plants, akin to steel mills or chemical works.
Should that change come into force, the farm on which the 66-year-old and his four sons manage 300 cattle and 230 acres of land will be legally obliged to cut greenhouse gas emissions and pollution levels. With ambitious climate targets to hit by 2030, Brussels is finally forcing farming to go green.
Kazanas already captures biogas from cow dung and, instead of using chemical fertiliser, spreads homemade manure over the land. “That’s what the EU says and that’s what I do,” says Kazanas, who started with 30 cattle in 1986. “Today, everyone blames cattle for methane production and pollution . . . I have a different opinion.”
He is one of many farmers growing tired of what they see as environmental diktats being handed down by a bureaucracy 2,500km away.
The sheer scale of the transformation that the European Commission is asking for in its Farm to Fork strategy — halving the amount of pesticides applied by 2030, cutting the use of fertilisers, doubling organic production and rewilding some farmland — would be remarkable even in less urgent times.
Yet it comes as the war in Ukraine has upended global food markets, and as farmers face a cut in subsidies in the Common Agricultural Policy, the €55bn-a-year programme that has underwritten Europe’s food security since 1962.
The EU argues that the agriculture sector is badly in need of environmental reforms. One senior EU official working on climate policy calls it “our problem child”.
The sector accounts for 11 per cent of the bloc’s total greenhouse gas emissions — a proportion almost as high as it was 20 years ago.
Nitrous oxides contained in fertiliser, as well as animal urine and excrement, are a significant part of the problem, with heavy nitrogen concentrations encouraging invasive species to swamp other plants, leading to the loss of biodiversity.
But the sector is very hard to regulate; the EU’s 9.1mn farms vary in type and scale, running from industrial concerns with thousands of “livestock units” — the measure for farm animals — to smallholders with a handful of vines and a few goats.
It also typically operates on very thin margins. There are organic producers surviving on local trade and pig farmers exposed to fierce international competition, where even a small increase in the price of feed can wipe out annual profits.
The turning point for many farmers came after Russia invaded Ukraine, right as the commission unveiled the Farm to Fork targets. Almost overnight, says a senior commission official, “the debate has changed”.
Now, the EU’s farmland is becoming a new battleground over its green ambitions. Nervous governments are scaling back the commission’s proposals, under pressure from an organised, well-funded farming lobby with close links to politicians.
The Dutch government recently paused work on a programme to shut farms to reduce nitrous oxide emissions, after the nascent Farmer Citizen Movement (BBB) rode a wave of anger against the plans to triumph in provincial elections in March.
In recent days the governments of Poland and Hungary have temporarily halted imports of grain, dairy products, meat, fruits and vegetables from Ukraine after farmers complained about cheap imported Ukrainian food depressing prices.
The growing resistance poses a significant challenge to the EU’s aim to cut emissions by 55 per cent by 2030 compared with 1990 levels, in line with its international commitments. If Brussels cannot bring farmers on board, its pledge to hit net zero emissions by 2050 may be at risk.
The bloc’s proposals are not suitable for a “wartime economy” in which farmers should be freed to produce, says Christiane Lambert, co-president of the powerful EU farmers’ union Copa-Cogeca. “The people making decisions about farming know nothing about it.”
Farmers fight back
For many farmers, opposition to the incoming changes is a matter of survival.
Tom Vandenkendelaere, a Belgian member of the European parliament, says the pressure on farmers is becoming unbearable: “It is the number of policies hitting them at the same time. We need to slow down.”
He says farmers feel vilified simply for doing their job by activists who accuse them of damaging the planet and blame meat-eating for climate change. “They feel their whole way of life is under attack.”
Boeren op een Kruispunt, an independent non-profit offering mental health counselling to farmers in Flanders, northern Belgium, has reported a 44 per cent increase in demand in 2022 compared with 2021, he says.
According to the French Institute for Health, farmers are three times more likely to commit suicide than other professionals. As Caroline van der Plas, leader of the BBB, told the Dutch parliament this month: “People who provide our daily food . . . are dismissed as animal abusers, poisoners, soil destroyers and environmental polluters.”
EU policymakers argue the measures are in the interests of farmers in the long run. The increase in gas prices has driven up the cost of fertiliser and chemicals. Decades of intensive farming has leached nutrients from the soil so more has to be used to achieve the same output.
“It’s a myth to say either you have more nature or you have more food,” argues one EU official. “The major fundamental threats to food security include climate change and biodiversity loss.”
Virginijus Sinkevičius, the EU’s environment and fisheries commissioner, agrees. “What is very important to me is to understand that those environmental proposals never go against the farm. They are for [farms] because without nature farming is not possible.”
“It is a significant change for our farmers, but inevitably they will have to be part of the solution,” he adds. “Maybe that won’t happen overnight.”
But an industry that already feels its back is against the wall is unlikely to give in.
The number of farms in the EU has shrunk by more than a third since 2005. While the average farm has got bigger, farm income has remained consistently low, at about €20,000 a person.
Bram van Hecke, who helps out on his family’s dairy farm near Ostend in Belgium, says he and his father and brothers feel squeezed between the environmental demands of politicians and those of supermarkets who do not want to pay for it.
“If you go to a bank saying I want to invest but my income will halve they are not going to give you a loan,” he says. “Producing more is a viable business, while being extremely environmental might harm your business.”
Van Hecke, who is also head of Flemish young farmers group Groene Kring, says an EU directive to tackle nitrogen pollution that requires farmers to use GPS to record muck spreading and not farm within 5 metres of water costs his farm €10,000-€15,000 annually.
“The average land price in Flanders is €63,000 per hectare — we lose about 4 hectares to the nitrates directive. You can do the maths,” he adds. “The government is saying we are going to increase your costs but there is no vision for helping increase income.”
At a macro level, that might be the point. Agronomists say that parts of Europe are cultivated too intensely. In 2021, the EU exported €197bn-worth of agricultural products to countries such as China and imported €150bn, generating a surplus of €47bn.
Krijn Poppe, an agricultural economist in the Netherlands, is in favour of a rethink. “Exports should not be at the expense of climate and nature,” he says. “In some regions, like the Netherlands and Flanders, farming’s environmental footprint is too big.”
Citizens in these “city states”, as he calls them, also want recreation areas, nature reserves, clean water, housing and transport.
The answer, says Poppe, is returning to a time when consumers paid higher prices for less intensively reared food. “In the 1980s, the Dutch consumed less protein, and 40 per cent was animal based, 60 per cent plant based. Now we eat more and the [protein-to-plant] ratio is 60/40.”
Poppe says some farms will inevitably disappear since many are too small to compete. “An economist who looks at total welfare would probably see no problem,” he adds. “A politician who wants to protect farmers’ jobs will have a more negative opinion.”
Little wonder that farmers themselves see this as an existential moment. Franc Bogovič, a fruit grower and member of the European parliament from Slovenia, says the plan for a 50 per cent cut in pesticide application by 2030 — one of the targets set out in a hotly contested directive currently under negotiation by EU lawmakers — would wipe out much of his production. “I have been in this sector for many years and I have never felt such a big objection to a policy,” he says.
He is especially upset that the new regulations came after a massive overhaul of the CAP to encourage green production took effect in January. The CAP, which subsidises farmers, has shrunk over the years and money is increasingly funnelled to environmental projects and side businesses rather than to food production. “They are trying to go beyond the agreed CAP, which only started this year,” he says.
“People are afraid of the future and how they will continue. People will be in big trouble if they must cut their vineyards, their orchards, their meat production, which was financed by loans five years ago. You need 20 years to get your money back.”
‘Why does Brussels hate us?’
Despite the backlash, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has not slowed the pace of policymaking since the Ukraine war started. “Farmers are asking, ‘Why does Brussels hate us?’” said Vandenkendelaere.
One theory is von der Leyen needs support from the Green party in the German coalition to secure a second term. Another is that she believes agriculture — particularly livestock farming — is damaging the planet.
EU Farm to Fork goals
Cut the use of chemical and hazardous pesticides by 50% by 2030
Reduce fertiliser use by 20% by 2030
Lower by 50% the sales of antimicrobials for farmed animals and in aquaculture
Increase the amount of land devoted to organic farming to 25% in 2030 from 9.1% in 2020
Bigger livestock farms to comply with clean air and water regulations that apply to heavy industry
“The commission is convinced that the transition to a resilient and sustainable agricultural sector, in line with the European green deal and its Farm to Fork and biodiversity strategies, is fundamental to food security,” von der Leyen’s spokesman Eric Mamer says, declining to confirm whether she ate red meat or dairy products. “The president’s personal nutrition choices . . . have no influence on the commission’s proposals,” he says.
Brussels has made some changes since the war in Ukraine started, he notes. It has allowed farmers to plant animal feed crops on the 10 per cent of land that has to be left uncultivated in order to recover, a condition of getting subsidies. It also suspended rules requiring the rotation of crops.
But it is national governments that have slammed the brakes on. European Commission proposals can be amended by the 27 member states and issue by issue they have blunted its ambition.
The blanket cut in pesticides has been sent back to the commission for a fresh impact assessment. Ministers complained that instead of considering the starting position of each country, it imposed the same proportionate cut on all. The Netherlands, which already uses much more pesticides than Poland, for example, would still be able to.
They also took issue with the plans for only taking into account the amount of chemical applied, not its toxicity.
For the industrial emissions directive revision, which will oblige bigger livestock farms to comply with clean air and water regulations that apply to heavy industry, the commission admitted in February that it had got its numbers wrong when launching the proposal last year.
It set the threshold for compliance at pig, poultry and cattle farms with at least 150 livestock units (LSU), claiming only 13 per cent of Europe’s commercial farms would be affected, but its calculations were based on farm data from 2016. When it reran the study with data from 2020 it emerged that six in 10 poultry and pig farms would be included.
A law to create legally-binding targets to reverse environmental decline, also proposed as part of Farm to Fork last year, is being resisted as it would inevitably lead to the loss of agricultural land. Some drained peatland, for example, would be soaked again. The aim is to cover at least 20 per cent of the EU’s land and sea areas by 2030 with nature restoration measures.
Separate legislation last year to reduce deforestation was also opposed in countries such as Sweden and Finland, which won concessions to ensure they could continue to exploit plantations.
In June, the final part of the Farm to Fork package arrives, a law that will oblige countries to monitor and improve the condition of their soil.
Some 16 EU agriculture ministers signed a letter to Brussels in January complaining that the policies could lead to the “abandonment of agricultural and forestry land in the union”.
“This in turn, will most likely have a negative impact on food security, supply with renewable raw material (for wood construction or the bioeconomy) and renewable energy sources, such as locally available biomass,” the letter said.
‘Farmers need help too’
Some believe the best way to deal with opposition is to buy it off.
EU agriculture commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski has already called for more CAP funding because inflation — which hit almost 10 per cent in the eurozone last year — has eroded its real value. The CAP “is only 0.4 per cent of EU gross domestic product to ensure food security, environmental security and climate security”, he argues.
The private sector agrees. FoodDrinkEurope, which represents manufacturers, has written to von der Leyen calling for some of the billions in subsidies for the green transition to go to agriculture.
“The EU Farm to Fork strategy is not properly resourced or equipped to deal with today’s market realities and future pressures,” it wrote.
Several governments have made the same call, pointing out that increased interest rates raised the price of the investment needed.
Back in Greece, Georgios Georgantas, the agriculture minister, says farmers like Kazanas need support if they are to continue feeding Europe. With climate change already affecting yields, “we need to keep farming at the current levels”, he says, “or even increase it”.
To achieve this, Athens has created a €525mn fund to help young people take up farming. “The EU needs to go through the green transition. But this has created pressure on farmers,” he adds. “Other industries are getting help. Farmers need it too.”
Data visualisation by Chris Campbell
More Big Reads on agriculture
THE FUTURE OF FARMING
Surging costs of inputs such as fertiliser and the threat of climate change are driving a return to pre-industrial methods
SHIFT ON GENE-EDITED CROPS
The European Commission is considering easing regulation on the technology. But critics say it is an untested risk
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Extinction Rebellion threatens ‘unprecedented’ disobedience in UK
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Extinction Rebellion threatens ‘unprecedented’ disobedience in UK
More than 40 green groups demand UK stops supporting fossil fuel industry ahead of major protest in capital
Extinction Rebellion said 30,000 people are due to descend on the capital this weekend for the four-day climate protest © Mark Kerrison/In Pictures/Getty Images
By Attracta Mooney in London APRIL 18 2023222
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Extinction Rebellion, the activist group, on Tuesday threatened the government with “unprecedented” civil disobedience unless it stops supporting the fossil fuel industry ahead of what is expected to be the UK’s largest ever climate protest.
A coalition of more than 40 environmental groups, including XR and Greenpeace, called for ministers to stop issuing new licenses and approvals for oil, coal and gas projects and set up emergency citizens’ assemblies to “let the people decide how to end the fossil fuel era quickly and fairly”.
XR, the event organiser, said 30,000 people were due to descend on the capital this weekend for the four-day climate protest involving almost 200 environmental and social justice groups.
The ultimatum follows raised concerns over the UK’s commitment to tackle climate change after the government admitted last month its new net zero strategy would fail to cut greenhouse gas emissions enough to hit its own targets.
Three generations of the same family delivered the “fresh demands”, saying the government had until 5pm on Monday 24 to respond or their campaign would be stepped up “in new and inventive ways”.
Hester Campbell, 43, a mother who delivered the demands with her two children and her father, said: “The government is failing in its duty to protect us and we are calling for that to end.”
An escalation of action could include activists joining the picket lines of striking UK workers. The country is grappling with the biggest wave of public sector staff strikes for a generation over pay and working conditions.
Rob Callender of XR said that if the government failed to respond by the deadline, XR would design a “plan for the greatest acts of civil disobedience in this country’s history”.
The demands come four months after XR said it was quitting its focus on civil disruption and switching to building alliances with other organisations in a bid to unite as many people as possible.
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Callender said that since its announcement in January the government had “made policy announcements that effectively double down on deadly climate chaos”, such as backing new oil and gas drilling projects in the North Sea.
“This is their last chance to show us that they are serious about saving our lives and our futures by agreeing to enter negotiations around our demands,” Callender added.
The so-called “Big One” event will coincide with the London marathon on Sunday, with XR warning of “logistical disruptions” across the city during the action.
A spokesperson for XR said the protest, which begins on Friday and billed to be peaceful and non-disruptive, is expected to be larger than those in 2019 which sought to bring London to a standstill.
“It is going to be nice and busy but it is not intentional disruption in the way you have seen from XR in the past,” said XR’s Marijn van de Geer.
Austin Harney from the Public and Commercial Services Union, which represents civil servants and employees in the commercial sectors, said it was important that “workers stand in solidarity” on fighting climate change.
War on Want and Equity, the unions for performing arts and entertainment workers, are among the groups who have also backed the demands.
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