Talking about Germany: We’re talking about farmers getting squeezed out by supermarkets and other traders and by subsidies geared towards increasing farm size. It has been decades-long state policy to shaft small farmers and benefit large ones.
Yeah, and that’s intra-capitalist competition. In the end there can be only one Big Ag corporation.
I’m not sure what you want, are you some kind of liberal? Small time capitalists are still capitalists, even when they’re losing to big capitalists.
That exact subsidy regime is what they’re protesting.
They want more subsidies with fewer strings attached. Not no subsidies.
They can’t afford those bills.
Because they’re overleveraged. Because they’re capitalists who bet (invested) too much in technological capital.
Do you still not get what automation means here? They are owners and managers, not workers. They manage robots or energy slaves. A tractor isn’t a hammer.
Bullshit. Intensive animal farming needs to end, meat needs to become more expensive (and also btw butcher’s wages need to be increased), protein imports need to end (i.e. South American soy), but Europe has plenty of agricultural land to produce meat sustainably. There’s plenty of landscapes we can’t preserve without animal agriculture as European bisons aren’t really a thing, any more, neither are wolves which would be necessary to keep the bisons in check should they be re-introduced on a larger scale and we refuse to hunt them.
Bud, these farmers are all about CAFOs. Intensive animal farming delivers almost all of the animal products.
And extensive animal farming has no future either. Not only is extensive animal farming responsible for massive deforestation and GHG emissions from ruminants, but land is limited, and it’s already being used for such activities.
I’d love to see the industrial animal farming system disappear tomorrow, and it would be the same farmers in the streets, along with masses of commodity fetishists complaining about the cost of living because the price of meat and eggs went to the Moon.
When we’ll return to the land on mass, in a few decades, because that’s the only way to survive, you and your kids will have to deal with these farmers you see today, and their kids, as the ones that don’t sell will be large land owners who will not be sharing land with you (nor tools). You will be their serf.