once diminished dominating trump begins act

“Everybody is entitled to have their own opinion, but opinions are not facts,” Frans Timmermans, the commission’s executive vice-president, said when defending the nature restoration law in the European parliament. Water is poorly absorbed by dry land, and more than 300 landslides were the result.

In Emilia-Romagna, one of Italy’s most important agricultural regions, six months’ worth of rain fell within 36 hours in the middle of May. Spain is turning into an unproductive desert – the Spanish government set aside €2.2bn (£1.9bn) this month to help farmers deal with the country’s ongoing drought. They will be left to cope with unproductive land and the vagaries of climate change-induced extreme weather, affecting their lives and livelihoods.įarmers in Europe are already suffering from droughts and floods. Many in the private sector and the farming community are already working together to implement changes in line with the proposed law that reduce risk and increasingly make good economic sense.ĭefending the status quo, as the parliament’s agriculture committee opted to do, will not help farmers. “But if ecosystems degrade, if soil degrades, if forests and marine ecosystems degrade, they are not able to absorb carbon or mitigate heat.” Sinkevičius rightly argues that the nature restoration law would “give nature a chance to be the vital force we need for our future and our economies”. “We can do excellent work in decreasing emissions,” the EU environment commissioner, Virginijus Sinkevičius, told the Guardian recently. Politicians railing against restoring nature are defending a broken system that must be overhauled for the sake of all On top of this, degraded soils from overproduction and poor management as well as reducing agricultural yields make the climate emergency worse: rather than absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, they release it. At least 10% of Europe’s greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, with the food sector as a whole responsible for as much as a third of EU emissions. The argument that today’s system of industrial agriculture, fed by fossil fuels and pesticides, will increase food security, secure climate action and offer long-term protection for rural communities is found wanting. Even the private sector refers to the law as a key tool and opportunity to take concrete and effective action. Hand in hand with another commission proposal to cut the use of pesticides, the nature restoration law would require changes to current farming methods to reduce harm to wildlife, increase water harvesting, prevent soil erosion, enhance pollination and encourage a more diverse production of crops. Research by the European Commission shows, however, that the climate crisis and biodiversity loss are “ already jeopardising food production” in Europe and that the situation will only get worse. These MEPs, mainly from the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP), claim that a move to more nature-friendly agriculture would negatively impact farmers and even jeopardise EU climate commitments by making it more difficult to build wind and solar farms.

Yet certain MEPs are using the war in Ukraine as an excuse to defend post-second world war industrial farming methods and to attack commission plans to make farming more nature-friendly. Sixty-four per cent of people in 12 European countries, including the UK, say the cost of food is their biggest worry, ahead of concerns about the cost of housing and heating.Ĭhanging farming practices to align food production with efforts to manage the climate crisis and restore nature is the only solution to ensure affordable food for all. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, soaring inflation has pushed up food prices.

Once diminished dominating trump begins act