By TONY MOBILIFONITIS
EUROPEAN farmers will converge on Brussels on June 4th in what Jos Ubels, vice president of the The Netherlands Farmers Defence Force, has described as a ground-shaking event.
“Brussels will be shook on their grounds as strong as they’ve ever met because we’re going with all European countries. We’re now working very hard to seek co-operation with all the countries and they are all in favour,” Ubels said this week on Greenwashed, a program on New Zealand’s online talk station Reality Check Radio.
The farmer leader said “Europe is burning hot right now” and he believed the momentum of protests can be resumed in June just before the European elections from June 6th to the 9th. “All the governments of Europe are now changing their governments to more right wing parties, so we think that if we can kick (EU Commission president) Mrs (Ursula) Von der Leyen out of her office in Brussels we can change the European policy as well.”
Von der Leyen and her super bureaucrats have been progressively strangling the agricultural sector with increasing environmental demands such as edicts to slash agricultural land area, fertiliser inputs and production in the Netherlands and Ireland.
The European “green deal” aims to achieve “climate neutrality” by 2050 and includes halving pesticide use by 2030, cutting fertiliser use by 20%, putting more land in non-agricultural use and doubling organic production to 25% of all EU farmland, which requires about double the area of regular farming with higher input costs.
Ubels has been involved in the recent widespread farmer protests that have spread across more than a dozen European countries, choking main highways and bringing the road transport system to a halt. Despite reluctant mainstream media coverage, videos have emerged across social media platforms showing kilometres of tractors and trucks blocking roads and packing into urban centres.
In France, thousands of farmers have taken more militant action, dumping manure into government buildings, blocking and digging up roads with tractors and at one stage encircling the entire city of Paris to block all main thoroughfares.
Farmers across Europe feel betrayed by their governments that planning injections of €10 billion annually into Ukraine while taking away, for instance, diesel fuel subsidies. Meanwhile Ukraine has been caught in trade fraud, shipping truckloads of eggs into France marked as French produce. The trucks were tipped over by farmers on a highway and burnt.
“It’s very important that farmers see what’s coming down in Europe, because its coming to you,” said Ubels. New Zealand farmers already have to deal with endless environmental restrictions including the claim that they are using too much nitrogen, the same claim used against European farms.
Ubels said his NFDF had grown into an organisation from 2019 with good members and a solid base. He said the protests in Europe were swelling and getting pretty aggressive, mainly in France. “It’s extreme what they’re doing there. I understand them, but it’s extreme.”
Farmer and show co-host Jaspreet Boporai said it was surreal to think that in this day and age New Zealand media, which has largely ignored the Europe protests, believes people are stupid enough to not know what’s going on there.
She said she had been looking at the donations that had been pouring on to the NFDF web page farmersdefenceforce.nl and comments such as “we the citizens are behind you en masse – the government has betrayed the country to the new world order”, “persevere to the end the EU and their national policy must go”.
She asked Ubels if people from towns and cities were behind them. “I think the numbers that support us are huge. You can see that the elites that are sitting in their offices in The Hague, the politicians, the heads of the media that get funded by the government – for instance €800 million is poured into one media company by the government and this media company is fully in favour of the government, of course.”
Ubels said the public support was evident every with “an urge for change”. Also with the elections people were “choosing radically different than they ever chose before”. “We just had elections and the biggest party in the Netherlands now is PVV (Party for Freedom led by Geert Wilders) a right wing party, and well, this is by Dutch standards pretty new.”
He said European media was also trying to minimize the scale of the demonstrations, such as one recent one in a German region that attracted 100,000 people and farmers with tractors. Only a small part of the demonstration was shown. Also, the government back in November turned off the public traffic cameras on the highway network. But Ubels said he was encouraged by the results so far from the farmers standing up and taking action.
“I just want to shout out to the people in your country but also all over the world, I never thought that going out on the streets – take a stance for yourself, take a stance for the farmers, get up and do something – that it would actually help … but we stood up and we changed everything actually – it’s still not good enough and we’re still not there – but I never thought the country would choose so differently on the elections. This is only caused by the farmers going on the streets … and you can bring change, for sure.”
Boporai co-hosts the Greenwashed show with Don Nicholson, a former president of the NZ National Farmers Federation. Nicholson said he previously worked in the public sector in agriculture and essentially they worked to make farming more expensive, because markets allegedly demanded it. He said the taking of increments out of every gram of beef “has just got too much and you’re feeling it in the Netherlands and we’re feeling it here. The sheep and beef farmers of this country are at the end of their tether right now.”
Ubels said that in years gone by the major farmer organisations consolidated and built to the point where they had €800 million in the bank. He confronted the then leaders, suggesting that they should buy a major retailer to sell farm produce. The advice wasn’t taken and the funds were wasted.
“I said you could buy the biggest retail company in the Netherlands … then you could help the farmers way better than you could now, but now they are government funded and close to the government.”
Nicholson said he had just read the website of the German national farm organisation and it didn’t give him much hope as it appeared that they simply wanted to be in the pocket of all the government agencies. Ubels said there are 55,000 farmers in the Netherlands and the main farmer organisation the LTO, claimed to have 35,000 members. He said the group’s yearbook indicated it was more like 4000.
