THE STATE OF AGRICULTURE 2024

EUROPE’S FARMERS MELT DOWN/PART 1 of a 2 part series

ROB MILLS

PERRYVILLE, MISSOURI

Agriculture was the priority of man from Day One.  He had to eat. Therefore, he learned to grow. I admit there is mystery in how civilizations developed. But it’s true to say they did. 

As man made his way through the centuries, the continent of Europe became a destination. When the Romans arrived to further conquer the world, the Germanic Tribes, Gaul and Britania were already in business. As Caesar’s legions took over, the crops grown in their new domain were sent back to feed the Romans, as they did what Romans do.

Gaul was the most developed farming area Rome seized in ancient Europe. Having learned primitive uses for metal by the early years of Century 1 AD, the ancestors of modern France were   versed in growing wheat, olives and grapes well before the Parisian café scene, Monet & Rousseau arrived centuries later. Gaul’s ancient ag scene benefited from imported Roman innovations such as aqueducts.

By the time the United States was born in the late 1700’s, Europe had been in the ag business for a long time. It was Europeans who settled the New World, immigrants bringing the techniques of farming with them as they sailed across the big pond. 

From the 1500’s on, the agricultural engine of Europe co-existed with wars, holy and secular among its nations. This continued off and on for centuries. But the war that began in 1939 and ended in 1945 decimated parts of the continent, forcing a two-thousand-year-old world to rethink how to live and do business.

And like their ancestors from Day One, before anything else, man had to eat.  So, the modern European ag machine was born.

FROM NECESSITY TO PROSPERITY

A military jeep ride from Paris to Berlin in May 1945 was a journey from emotional rage to physical destruction. The French had been raped as a people by the Nazis. But in the end, their side crushed the enemy. Berlin was more a pile of rubble than a city. The legacy of an anti-Christ who led his people to near obliteration. But necessity demanded reconciliation between the abuser and the abused. The Russians, once allies, were now a post war enemy of the West. Therefore, Konrad Adenauer, the first West German leader, made a point to embrace the occupation, forging a strong alliance with the U.S. The U.S.S.R. closed off all road access to Allied controlled Berlin in late June 1948. Germany was split. The Cold War was on.

And as it began, it brought with it one of the problems of the “hot” war that had just ended… no food in sight. Berlin was rescued by the U.S. airlift that brought fuel, food & water to the city for over 15 months, ending in September 1949. But it was evident that self-sustaining food production had to be reestablished on the continent. The implementation of The Marshall Plan, a U.S financed rebuild of the Euro infrastructure, was the jump start European agriculture needed to get going. Like their ancestors many times before, they went to work. 

When Flannery O’Connor’s iconic “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” was published in 1953, her story quoted one character as saying, “the way Europe acts, they must think we’re made of money”. It’s correctly stated that by the early 50’s, billions of dollars had been poured by Uncle Sam into the Euro rebuild. But with the investment, evidence of money well spent emerged.  A decade after the end of WW2, the GDP of Western Europe was heading towards 500 billion dollars a year. The aftermath of a hellish, global war had led to what is now known as “The Golden Age of Capitalism.”  And the ag sector produced like never before.

Two millenniums before, metal had brought historic change to ancient ag production. The late 1940’s saw innovations in the areas of chemical fertilizer, high yield crops and pesticides. There were advancements in tractor & combine manufacturing. These developments provided Euro farmers with the tools they needed to create massive amounts of food. Especially from the fields of France and Germany came the crops that fed Europe and were marketed worldwide, creating immense wealth.  Where years before nothing but death and destruction occurred, business was now in session…and people were getting rich.

Then other issues and questions began to rise. Would smaller European countries be overwhelmed by its larger neighbors? How would the emerging Europe compete with its emancipator, the United States? The view that “wouldn’t it be better if the wealth was shared” began to be expressed in the capitals of Bonn, Paris, Athens & Rome. A common market, a unified Europe. Was this the way of the future? A military alliance already existed, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), formed in 1949. Why not an economic union? And perhaps decades down the road, a political one.

These discussions over a period of years eventually led to The Treaty of Rome in 1957. It created the European Economic Community. Signed by France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, it established a free market among the signers, where all tariffs, customs barriers, etc., were removed. Other nations eventually joined in. The United Kingdom attempted to, but were rebuffed by France in the early 1960’s. (The U.K was ok’d in 1973)

From the beginning, friction existed between Euro farmers and EEC political leaders. What at times seemed to be absurd, illogical uprisings by farmers, had a much deeper meaning behind them. Years down the road, the chickens as they say, came home to roost. And the stakes were much higher than anyone could have foreseen.

TWO DIFFERENT WAYS OF APPROACHING A PROBLEM

To give an example of how differently the U.S. and European ag communities dealt with issues, let’s go back to the mid 1980’s. In the United States, the family farm was under siege. The era of corporate takeover had begun. Families saw a lifetime of toil surrendered to buyouts to avoid financial collapse. In response, the US music community organized “Farm Aid”. The movement, spearheaded by Willie Nelson, initially raised seven million dollars through a major concert held in September 1985, to assist family farmers through “The Good Food Movement”.  The annual concerts have raised 78 million dollars in their 39-year run.

The movement has been peaceful.  Its helped the cause of rural farming. Only once in the U.S. did things get tense between farmers & law enforcement. In February 1981, Wayne Cryts and 500 friends raided a bankrupt silo in the city of New Madrid, Missouri and took back his soybeans. The financial demise of the silo had brought about the seizure of his soybeans by the Federal Government. Facing losing everything, Cryts risked a confrontation. He was arrested, jailed and fined $300,000. But in 1983, he was acquitted of contempt charges brought by the Feds. In the end, federal law was changed to prevent a similar scenario from happening again. 

In contrast European farmers have shown little inclination to calmly discuss what was on their minds. The ink was hardly dry on the Treaty of Rome, when in 1960, 25,000 French farmers rallied in the city of Amiens to denounce the legendary French leader, Charles Dr Gaulle. With a “Groundhog Day” like repetition protests occurred year in, year out. In 1968, the “Common Agricultural Policy” and its innovator, EEC President Sicco Mansholt drew the rage of farmers, with Mansholt hung in effigy and one person killed in Brussels, Belgium. 

Whereas in America fundraising concerts were held, the mode of European farmer protests included burning vehicles and tires, blocking highways and spraying law enforcement with liquid pig bowel movement. The government of Poland responded during one protest by buzzing protesters with fighter jets, probably flying high enough to avoid the flying poop. But some protestors behaved with traditional European manners, handing out pastries to motorists stranded by the mayhem.    

European farmers, as crazy as they seem to be at times, have had a recurring gripe undergirding their beefs… the European Union’s socialist leaning economic policies. In their view, sharing and share alike doesn’t reward hard work. And where all the money went was the major problem. Over the decades angry rallies led to the beginning of an organized political movement favoring free market policies. The intended result… to change the political terrain of the EU. 

A political shift to the right had begun, threatening the liberal, socialist order in power since the end of the Second World War.  But in 2022, Vladimir Putin brought war back into the day-to-day reality of European life. The mid 90’s Bosnian conflict had been destructive to the former Yugoslavia. But Ukraine brought millions of refugees, hundreds of thousands of casualties and…the destabilization of European ag markets to the EU world. There’s little question why the European farmer protests erupted early this year in Brussels. 

Just where all this is heading is a question mark. The major issues involved are commodity prices, Ukrainian grain dumps on the EU market, shifting political power trends and the threat of a NATO-Russia war. Add Donald Trump’s alleged intention to pull the United States out of NATO, and Europe is a Pandora’s Box where the lid is rattling and about to blow off.

A continent that has seen change and trouble throughout its history, is at a crossroads once again.

In Part 2 of this article, we’ll look at where all this could wind up.  ∆

ROB MILLS: Contributing Author