This afternoon, farmers from all over the European Union met outside the European Parliament to march on the Berlaymont, the European Commission’s HQ. Organised by COPA-COGECA, the umbrella body for 22 million European farmers, the demonstration should by all rights be a wake-up call for Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. The unions will hand over a petition signed by 6,335 organisations, along with a symbolic pair of boots, in protest of the EU’s plans to carve up the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and cut farming subsidies.
The budget, announced today, includes folding CAP into a single national spending envelope and shrinking subsidies by 20-25%—that’s a cut of between €80 and €100 billion in real terms. It also proposes a €100,000 cap on the payment any one farm can receive and gives cash-strapped member states leeway to raid the farmers’ pot for other priorities, such as defence and industrial policy.
Today’s march is only the latest eruption in a long-running revolt of farmers versus Eurocrats. Just a few months earlier, in May, Polish farmers gathered in the northwestern city of Szczecin to express their fury at the EU’s agricultural policy. Among other concerns, they demanded that the Polish government scrap newly imposed, overbearing regulatory restrictions and refuse to cave to the EU’s environmental mandates. This was in many ways a continuation of the 2024 protests, when Rural Solidarity, the largest farmers’ union in Poland, staged a series of protests and convoys against the European Green Deal, as well as grain imports from Ukraine.
Some of the biggest farmers’ protests began in the Netherlands in 2019, after the Council of State, the country’s highest administrative court, ruled that the Netherlands was in a so-called nitrogen crisis. It accused the Dutch government of failing to adequately cut nitrogen emissions to EU-approved levels. The government, it warned, would have to take “drastic measures” to reduce emissions, particularly in the agriculture industry. In order to do this, the government planned to buy out the most polluting farms to shut them down. Around half of the country’s livestock would also have to be culled.
In response, furious farmers took to the roads. In October 2019, thousands of tractors flocked to Dutch motorways in the direction of the Hague, causing the worst traffic jams in the country’s history. But this was only the beginning. Demonstrations continued throughout the next few years. Convoys of tractors parked across supermarket distribution hubs and cut off ferry ports. Farmers dumped mountains of manure and torched hay bales on major motorways. Incredibly, the Dutch government still refused to back down. In 2022, it was revealed that around a third of Dutch farms would have to close to meet the EU-imposed targets. And in 2023, the government produced a list of roughly 3,000 “peak polluter” farms that would have to be forcibly closed.
Similar, albeit less dramatic, protests were staged in Ireland in 2023, when the agriculture minister admitted that, in order to meet the targets set out in the European Green Deal, farmers would have to cull around 200,000 cows. This was one of the few realistic options to allow Ireland to meet the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030. In other words, the Irish government was seriously considering needlessly slaughtering animals to ‘save the planet.’ Thankfully, months later, the government admitted it had no plans to actually go ahead with this, and that it was simply a hypothetical scenario.
These are all just one slice of the EU’s broader attack on farmers. Its 2020 Farm to Fork scheme ordered member states to, by 2030, set aside a tenth of farmland for nature, convert at least one-quarter of holdings to organic produce, cut fertiliser use by 20% and to halve chemical pesticide use—though the latter was eventually scrapped.
It’s simply baffling that governments feel emboldened to treat farmers this way, on the say-so of the EU. After all, agriculture is vital to many of these nations’ economies. The Netherlands is actually the second-largest exporter of food in the entire world. And food, drink, and horticulture products make up almost 10% of Ireland’s total goods exports—far ahead of any other sector. While agriculture makes up around 3% of Poland’s total output, it still employs 1.2 million people. In the EU as a bloc, almost nine million people—or 4% of the entire EU workforce—earn their living directly from a farm. This means that any changes the EU foists upon the agriculture industry, be it the result of Net Zero or budget changes, can be catastrophic for farmers across the continent.
Presumably, it’s difficult to understand the importance of dusk-till-dawn, dirty, hands-on labour when you’re only brush with soil is the potted plants in your climate-controlled office in Brussels. Yet the decisions drafted by out-of-touch Eurocrats have the power to wipe out not just livelihoods, but also generations’ of family legacies. On a more practical note, the EU’s careless treatment of farmers also threatens the continent’s food security. Where does the EU think dinner will come from if Europe’s farms have all been driven out of business or forcibly shut down? The bloc already imports €171.8 billion worth of food and agricultural goods a year—an 8% jump since last year. If the EU is intent on forcing its remaining farmers off the land, it will swap local produce for long, fragile supply chains that can snap in a single season of drought or at the outbreak of war. As many of the protesting farmers’ placards remind us: “No farmers, no food, no future.”
Why, then, do Europe’s elites refuse to listen? Why do they insist on relentlessly targeting the people who put food on our—and their—plates? A large part of it can be explained by the European establishment’s fanatical adherence to green ideology. But where the latest budget restructuring is concerned, it could be that the urban elites really are just that detached from how the real world works and how real people live. Many have undoubtedly convinced themselves that their grass-fed prosciutto and organic kale come from the supermarket, rather than from the land—and from the hard work of people who likely vote for scary ‘far-right’ parties.
Hopefully today’s protest in Brussels will force our arrogant elites to pay attention to the plight of the farmers, before empty shelves do. The EU needs to start listening. Or else Europe goes hungry.
The EU’s War on Farmers
Farmers demonstrating in Brussels, 16 July 2025.
Javier Villamor
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This afternoon, farmers from all over the European Union met outside the European Parliament to march on the Berlaymont, the European Commission’s HQ. Organised by COPA-COGECA, the umbrella body for 22 million European farmers, the demonstration should by all rights be a wake-up call for Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. The unions will hand over a petition signed by 6,335 organisations, along with a symbolic pair of boots, in protest of the EU’s plans to carve up the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and cut farming subsidies.
The budget, announced today, includes folding CAP into a single national spending envelope and shrinking subsidies by 20-25%—that’s a cut of between €80 and €100 billion in real terms. It also proposes a €100,000 cap on the payment any one farm can receive and gives cash-strapped member states leeway to raid the farmers’ pot for other priorities, such as defence and industrial policy.
Today’s march is only the latest eruption in a long-running revolt of farmers versus Eurocrats. Just a few months earlier, in May, Polish farmers gathered in the northwestern city of Szczecin to express their fury at the EU’s agricultural policy. Among other concerns, they demanded that the Polish government scrap newly imposed, overbearing regulatory restrictions and refuse to cave to the EU’s environmental mandates. This was in many ways a continuation of the 2024 protests, when Rural Solidarity, the largest farmers’ union in Poland, staged a series of protests and convoys against the European Green Deal, as well as grain imports from Ukraine.
Some of the biggest farmers’ protests began in the Netherlands in 2019, after the Council of State, the country’s highest administrative court, ruled that the Netherlands was in a so-called nitrogen crisis. It accused the Dutch government of failing to adequately cut nitrogen emissions to EU-approved levels. The government, it warned, would have to take “drastic measures” to reduce emissions, particularly in the agriculture industry. In order to do this, the government planned to buy out the most polluting farms to shut them down. Around half of the country’s livestock would also have to be culled.
In response, furious farmers took to the roads. In October 2019, thousands of tractors flocked to Dutch motorways in the direction of the Hague, causing the worst traffic jams in the country’s history. But this was only the beginning. Demonstrations continued throughout the next few years. Convoys of tractors parked across supermarket distribution hubs and cut off ferry ports. Farmers dumped mountains of manure and torched hay bales on major motorways. Incredibly, the Dutch government still refused to back down. In 2022, it was revealed that around a third of Dutch farms would have to close to meet the EU-imposed targets. And in 2023, the government produced a list of roughly 3,000 “peak polluter” farms that would have to be forcibly closed.
Similar, albeit less dramatic, protests were staged in Ireland in 2023, when the agriculture minister admitted that, in order to meet the targets set out in the European Green Deal, farmers would have to cull around 200,000 cows. This was one of the few realistic options to allow Ireland to meet the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030. In other words, the Irish government was seriously considering needlessly slaughtering animals to ‘save the planet.’ Thankfully, months later, the government admitted it had no plans to actually go ahead with this, and that it was simply a hypothetical scenario.
These are all just one slice of the EU’s broader attack on farmers. Its 2020 Farm to Fork scheme ordered member states to, by 2030, set aside a tenth of farmland for nature, convert at least one-quarter of holdings to organic produce, cut fertiliser use by 20% and to halve chemical pesticide use—though the latter was eventually scrapped.
It’s simply baffling that governments feel emboldened to treat farmers this way, on the say-so of the EU. After all, agriculture is vital to many of these nations’ economies. The Netherlands is actually the second-largest exporter of food in the entire world. And food, drink, and horticulture products make up almost 10% of Ireland’s total goods exports—far ahead of any other sector. While agriculture makes up around 3% of Poland’s total output, it still employs 1.2 million people. In the EU as a bloc, almost nine million people—or 4% of the entire EU workforce—earn their living directly from a farm. This means that any changes the EU foists upon the agriculture industry, be it the result of Net Zero or budget changes, can be catastrophic for farmers across the continent.
Presumably, it’s difficult to understand the importance of dusk-till-dawn, dirty, hands-on labour when you’re only brush with soil is the potted plants in your climate-controlled office in Brussels. Yet the decisions drafted by out-of-touch Eurocrats have the power to wipe out not just livelihoods, but also generations’ of family legacies. On a more practical note, the EU’s careless treatment of farmers also threatens the continent’s food security. Where does the EU think dinner will come from if Europe’s farms have all been driven out of business or forcibly shut down? The bloc already imports €171.8 billion worth of food and agricultural goods a year—an 8% jump since last year. If the EU is intent on forcing its remaining farmers off the land, it will swap local produce for long, fragile supply chains that can snap in a single season of drought or at the outbreak of war. As many of the protesting farmers’ placards remind us: “No farmers, no food, no future.”
Why, then, do Europe’s elites refuse to listen? Why do they insist on relentlessly targeting the people who put food on our—and their—plates? A large part of it can be explained by the European establishment’s fanatical adherence to green ideology. But where the latest budget restructuring is concerned, it could be that the urban elites really are just that detached from how the real world works and how real people live. Many have undoubtedly convinced themselves that their grass-fed prosciutto and organic kale come from the supermarket, rather than from the land—and from the hard work of people who likely vote for scary ‘far-right’ parties.
Hopefully today’s protest in Brussels will force our arrogant elites to pay attention to the plight of the farmers, before empty shelves do. The EU needs to start listening. Or else Europe goes hungry.
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