Farmers Building up Resistance

Why Destroy Farming?
by Diethelm Raff and Daniel Günthert, MD, Zurich

Since 1958, the agricultural policy of the EEC has been designed to fundamentally change farming, to make do with increasingly fewer farms and fewer farmers and instead employ more and more people in industry. At the same time the growing population had to be supplied with farming products at reasonable prices. The result was that the decreasing number of farmers had to produce more at stagnating or lower prices. At the same time consumers had to pay more for intensified food processing. But the proportion of the average household budget spent on food has gradually decreased. The farmers had to increase their per acre yield or productivity for each cow, as well as the size of their farms and buildings just to maintain their living standard. The predictable effects, intentionally brought about by the EEC, had consequences for each individual farmer: expand or give up. And more and more farmers inevitably gave up. This led to a gradual disintegration of rural life. Fewer farmers mean fewer craftsmen and thus fewer businesses in the service sector in rural areas. If, in addition, there is no adequate public transport system, the towns find it easier to attract the working population, making it difficult for small rural businesses to survive. Tourism might offer an alternative in certain regions, but this would mean that country people would automatically have to gear themselves to urban ways – or the region becomes depopulated, as can be observed in large areas of Europe. The result is that many structures of civil society like co-operatives, local associations, the fire brigade, cannot be maintained any longer, and that there are fewer neighbours that one can turn to them for help.
The EU has spent billions on this policy of ‘structural change’, a large share of which, however, has been swallowed by the processing industries. Now the EU’s expansion to the east, comprising 13 or 14 new member states by 2004, is under way. This east expansion is mainly due to geo-strategic and military reasons in order to make the former Eastern bloc countries fully a part of the new great power politics of the EU – and the US. Everyone knows that this will lead to economic chaos. These candidate countries will be able to offer much cheaper farming products which the current EU countries cannot hope to compete with. This means that within a very short space of time additional millions of farmers in the present EU countries will face ruin. The remaining big farmers will run huge farming operations like in the Soviet Union or in the United States. But not only in the current EU countries but also in the candidate countries – especially in Poland – farming is already being adapted to EU standards. According to the EU, millions of Polish farmers are ‘too many’.
At the same time the EU is under increasing obligation to the World Trade Organisation WTO to admit farming products from all over the world to their home markets. World market prices for farming products, though, are generally much lower than in the EU. This will further worsen the situation for the farming and rural communities. As Zbigniev Brzezinski, the influential geo-strategic advisor, puts it in his book The Grand Chessboard, the WTO is a tool of the USA to serve their interests, and it is this very same WTO, which is forcing large-scale American farming practices on Europe.
No doubt this Americanisation or Sovietisation leading to widespread destruction of rural life in the next two or three years will provoke fierce resistance against the EU and the WTO. Those in power will look for ways to avoid this.
The EU has resolved to take military action against insubordinate countries if their exports are threatened. For this new security policy the EU needs money. The new EU superpower also needs a lot of money to connect its metropolises using high-speed train links. This will enable the few metropolitans concerned to efficiently pursue their business in the big cities of Europe—passing by the impoverished countryside on their way to work. Since these links will be so costly, the EU has decided to drastically and swiftly reduce the farming budget, which at present amounts to 50 % of the entire budget. This will mean that direct payments made to farmers will be reduced considerably. Since farmers’ incomes today largely incur from these direct payments because they are no longer allowed to sell their products freely and the European farming market has been centrally managed for years, farmers will become the victims of the new colonialists.
It is also a fact that in 1992 the decision was taken, with the introduction of Agenda 21, that citizens should drastically reduce their consumption of processed products such as meat, cheese and eggs. So far citizens have shown too little obedience; this will no doubt have to change.
A year ago experts asked themselves how the new rulers were going to implement their plans so quickly. Hardly anyone suspected how perfidious, unscrupulous and power-hungry the new rulers would be. If these people manage to make the population see the destruction of the farming community and rural structures as a stroke of ill fate instead of blaming the EU or the WTO, no protest will be voiced. Biological weapons can be used against one’s own population to fake natural epidemics, and the strategists can even pose as a friend in need. These are the true plans of the EU!
Last year at a lecture given at the University of St. Gall, Richard Sennett explicitly said that society in the future will consist of a huge mass of impoverished people dominated by a wealthy elite. In this society there will be no room for human rights, man’s inherent dignity and equality.