I've seen a bit of confusion regarding this. First, it's 10% of Denmark's total land area, which is roughly equivalent to 15% of farmland area. Second, the conversion of farmland area into nature and forests is mainly for improving water quality, as excess nitrogen from agriculture has essentially killed the rivers and coastal waters through oxygen depletion from algae.
Regarding global warming and CO2, the area conversion of peatlands will help, but the major change here is the introduction of a carbon tax for the entire agricultural industry. And to end confusion regarding other emissions than CO2, it's actually a CO2-equivalent (CO2e) tax, which includes a range of other gasses. E.g., 1kg of methane is 25kg CO2e.
If you'd like to read more, see the two PDF documents below, which are the main official documents. They're in Danish, but upload them to Claude or ChatGPT, and you'll have a much better source of information if you'd like to know more about the specifics and how the actual implementation is planned.
I am very conflicted on a carbon tax for the agriculture industry. It is going to sidle a cost to an industry of razor thin margins. The transition from regenerative agriculture is expensive & rising food costs has a destabilizing effect.
There need to be changes, but I am not convinced that this will have the desired effects. Its quite possible this leads to a net conversion of farmland to residential or commercial property rather than nature.
Currently the public subsidizes the agriculture industry by paying for the consequences of the industry's carbon emissions. Also, that subsidy distorts industry choices in favor of carbon.
The industry might be accustomed to profiting from the subsidy, but that doesn't make them entitled to it! And certainly the industry has had plenty of time to anticipate and adjust to the problems of carbon emissions.
I think we should start doing more taxes combined with subsidies. Give everyone a $1/t carbon tax. Give everyone a ~$1/t farming subsidy based on current carbon production. Nobody loses, but everyone is incentivized to decrease carbon production and the faster ones profit more. Phase out the subsidy over X years if you like.
Otherwise, you’re right. We’re upsetting the balance of a very complex, very important system and causing a regressive tax in the form of price increases.
> It is going to sidle a cost to an industry of razor thin margins.
Will it or will farmland value take a dump but remain unchanged in use?
I always thought of farmland these days as a use of last resort and if it could be marketable for buildings, it’s already not economically worth it as a farm except speculatively
It should be fine, I believe. Just in terms of land-use, livestock is several times less efficient than other kinds of agriculture for the same food output. So a shift from meat to other food crops would be a net win, even as it frees up land for other purposes.
Many farmers will receive a one-time payment on land sales and some will use this windfall to subsidise their transition from growing livestock to more environmentally-friendly food.
Depends on the type of agriculture? If it make veggies cheaper in comparison to meat, I'm all for it. Hopefully it spurs development of sustainable nice tasting protein sources ;) (like synthetic meat etc.)
It comes with quite a lot of compensation and subsidies, so they're less angry than you might expect. Also, an important note here is that they were part of the negotiations, and as such were part of the agreement which was proposed to the parliament.
All that being said, you're right, they're not exactly thrilled with the government adding taxes and monitoring them more.
I had to look it up, Denmark is allegedly a world leader in pig farming exports. You make a really interesting point that I feel like garners more discourse.
No. The document spells out that denmark intends to remain a "strong" producer of agricultural products by increasing the yield from other, less ecologically damaging, farming areas.
another point is: since WW2, denmark has one of the highest, if not THE highest, percentages of area under agriculture. During WW2, we temporarily allowed agriculture on very poor farmland. It was meant to cease after the war, but our strong farmer lobbyists kept extending the permission.. So it is not about giving up 'good farm land', it is about stopping abusive agriculture which is only possible with extreme chemistry. Source: am Old dane.
Nah, these policies are aimed into increasing food imports (therefore decreasing food security btw), because it's easier for politicians to steal money with off-shore businesses.
And the farmers alao get shafted in the process, farmers are always totalitarian's first target. Venezuela, Rwanda, Zimbawe, Cuba.
What percentage of output is accounted for in the lower tier (not good) farmland? If the land is truly suboptimal the additional costs will not scale with the reduction of output.
I'm sorry I'm not directly answring your question. But part of the answer is, that we are not really intending to fix the CO2 issue. A/the major point with the initiative is that we have effectively killed marine/water life in our local rivers, lakes and near coastal areas, primarily by the leakage of fertilizer from low-yield farming areas (algae remove oxygen from our water, having thus killed off marine life).
Because of this, we are no longer discussing the economics of it - once you kill off all marine life, the price is 'always' too high (the way we see it..)
So, it might help or not help CO2, but our immediate concern is making it possible to have life in our local water bodies, and more oxygen than 0%.
I'm describing it a bit crude, but this should paint the general picture. If we run out of food and starve, we can return to killing allmarine life again :-)
"Danish Crown, one of Denmark’s largest Danish meat producer, is facing significant financial challenges as pig deliveries to its processing plants have dropped in the 2023/24 financial year."
On the other hand Tican is doing pretty well and are hiring, while Danish Crown is firing. So at least some of the pigs which would normally go to Danish Crown, is being sent to Tican instead. Tican is also giving farmers a better price per pig. https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/seneste/mens-danish-crown-lider-lo...
Danish Crowns problems aren't entirely due to external factors, part of it is also that Danish Crowns is struggling to run its business properly.
Because the pigs get transported alive to Germany and Poland to get slaughtered, as wages are lower there. Denmark, with a population under six million, still produces 32 million pigs per annum.
Before I go into rage mode, I suppose I should ask, why Farmland?
Both Denmark and Netherland are big in agriculture export and they are very good at it. I am not against planting trees but it on top of farm land doesn't make any sense to me.
Haiti cut down all their trees. When a hurricane passes through it moves what little top soil they have into the ocean.[1] Haiti overfished their costal waters. Now they do not have fish to eat and worse can not participate in the single biggest economic driver in the Caribbean, scuba diving.
Planting trees on farms is incredibly important for maintaining and protecting the soil. The Americans learned that the hard way in the 1930s. [2]]
> The Americans learned that the hard way in the 1930s.
Grasses, not trees, maintained and protected the soil for what became the US Dust Bowl.
The "Great American Desert" was essentially treeless. As your [2] links points out, European agricultural methods "[exposed] the bare, over-plowed farmland. Without deep-rooted prairie grasses to hold the soil in place, it began to blow away."
You left out the part where Haiti was destabilized and crushed by colonial debt. And I don’t think that lack of fish is what’s keeping the tourists away. But hey, weren’t we talking about Denmark ?
Denmark drained the only source of natural diversity it had, its marshlands, after World War I and turned the entire country into farmland. Outside the cities, it is endless fields of farmland. And now its chickens have come home to roost, having poisoned the soil and rivers. This is entirely Denmark's fault, and now they're trying to reverse some of the damage they did.
Denmarks agricultural performance is not great at all. it's way too expensive to produce stuff. if it wasn't for EU subsidies the agricultural sector in Denmark would loose over 50% of their profits. To drive the point home the agricultural sector in Denmark only makes up 3.6% of the bnp and 4.3% of exports while taking up 60% of Denmarks total area and employing around 3.9% of the working population. i think Denmark can easily let go of 10% while only having miniscule effects on the economy. Denmark is a very small country and technically has no truly wild nature.
> Denmarks agricultural performance is not great at all. it's way too expensive to produce stuff. if it wasn't for EU subsidies the agricultural sector in Denmark would loose over 50% of their profits.
Agriculture in the EU is renowned for not being financially unjustified. For decades it's been a finantial no-brainer to import the bulk of agricultural products from south America and Africa. This is not new or the result of some major epiphany, it's the natura consequence of having an advanced economy and a huge population with high population density. The EU already imports 40% of the agricultural products it consumes.
EU subsidies were created specifically to mitigate the strategic and geopolitical risk of seeing Europe blockaded. Agricultural subsidies exist to create a finantial incentive to preserve current production capacity when it makes no finantial sense, and thus mitigate a strategic vulnerability.
3.6% of bnp seems like little but I think agriculture counts for more than, say, management consulting that goes through 5 intermediaries (does it get counted towards the bnp 5x then? I'm not sure). At the end of the day money is only an abstraction while food, you can actually eat it.
A lot of “farmland” is unproductive and kept in usage only by heavy subsidies. Additionally, I think a more important/interesting part of the article is taxation of livestock - you reduce the land needed significantly when the amount of livestock is reduced. I’m not vegan/vegetarian but it is “obvious” we should reduce meat consumption for a wide range of reasons and focus on raising livestock in ways that are beneficial to the wider environment.
Yes, the least productive 10% of land represents a much smaller percentage of food production. This is often land in areas that are most environmentally sensitive.
In the UK we pay farmers to raise lamb on marginal land yet they still aren't competitive with lamb shipped from the other side of the world. I'm not sure why we should be subsidising that, especially when there is a lot of environmental damaged associated with it.
Just having farmland be fields is not very good for the land or the eco system. Breaking up farmland with hedges, woods, wetlands or whatever nature decides it should be is often a good idea. Next best thing is to manually plant trees.
One thing I have wondered was the relative benefits of a concentrated wilderness versus distributed habitat.
The common agricultural policy set-aside distributes payments for the wilderness across many farms (for equity, one supposes), whereas a concentrated wilderness would benefit few (and probably only the landowners).
the Netherlands exports so much food (and meat...) that it becomes a burden on local wildlife and milieu, mostly due to nitrogen emissions, pesticides and fertilizer.
I think it's the same for Denmark, though the mostly hold pigs in stead of cattle.
I think that there is an official and an unofficial reason. The official is that something must be returned to nature before climate change destroys everything. The unofficial is, in my opinion, that EU politicians are terrified by US elections.
In all western countries, far right groups are crawling to grab more and more power gradually. Those groups feed basically on farmer followers, ruthlessly brainwashed with fake news, antiscience and outrage, and the system has proven to work well (See US).
Until now traditional parties believed that could control the situation and appease the farmers with more money, and maybe even benefit of some votes of grateful people on return. The wake up has being brutal. Each euro given to farmers is just a victory reclaimed by this groups, that nurture a higher discontent.
So now that they are coming for they political heads and the time is running out, traditional politicians feel the pressure to take some delayed unpleasant decisions before is too late, and getting rid of the fake farmers to build a market from there is a first step. If fake farmers can sell subsidized meat for a lower price, the real farmers suffer for it.
> The official is that something must be returned to nature before climate change destroys everything.
Nature is an abstraction, not a weird angry god. We need to capture GHG and stop emitting more but that’s pretty much it. That will most likely involve reforestation as it’s a good carbon sink but using the expression “returning thing to nature” is not a correct way to frame it.
There is developed areas (cities/towns/industry) and farm land.
Most of the land not suitable for farming was turned into farm land. Through extremely hard work over the past 150 years. Like straightening rivers, draining marshes, and planting up the heath.
Because it’s becoming increasingly obviously dumb to be paying farmers money to pretend like they are farming their land. What I mean is that if we removed the subsidies the farmers wouldn’t farm their land, the market just doesn’t work to support their production. So we are essentially saying “if you pretend to farm your land we’ll make sure you profit” but even at that they of cause need to try to keep the pretend farming profitable enough that the entire charade pays off, but that means dumping a ton of fertilizer on the land, which tends to run off and ruin streams and seeps into the ground water. Most recently this has led to the agricultural industry competeley and likely semi permanently destroying the fishing industry around one of the major pars of Denmark. So at this point the farmers have to stop.
There’s a natural way of doing that, which is to cut subsidies and let the market handle it. But the farmers have political power because they have a lot of money because of the policies they’ve set up back when they had political power because they had a lot of money… Anyways, so what is actually happening is that the farmers have decided that if their land is unprofitable then the government needs to pay a hefty price to them for it.
The government could just cut the subsidies which means we would use less money, then buy the land in bankruptcies, likely just with the money we spend less. Instead we’ll see a lot of additional spending to buy the land, and then down the line subsidies will increase to “make up” for all the land they “lost”.
> Because it’s becoming increasingly obviously dumb to be paying farmers money to pretend like they are farming their land.
This is a particularly ignorant and clueless opinion to have.
The whole point of Europe's common agricultural policy is to preserve the potential of agricultural production as a strategic asset. Europe's strong economy and huge population density, coupled with cheap access to agricultural production from south America and Africa, renders most agricultural activity economically unfeasible. The problem is that this means Europe is particularly vulnerable to a blockade, and in case of all out war the whole continent risks being starved in a few months.
The whole point of EU's common agricultural policy is to minimize this risk.
Owners of farmland are provided a incentive to keep their farms on standby even if they don't produce anything exactly to mitigate this risk. It would be more profitable to invest in some domains such as, say, real estate. Look at the Netherlands: they are experiencing a huge housing crisis and the whole land in Holland consists of dense urban housing bordered by farm land. It would be tempting for farmers to just cash out on real estate if they didn't had an economic upside.
You would do better if you educated yourself on a topic before commenting on it.
Do you think food production has national security implications or do you think "the market" will be happy to sell you food during another global conflict while their own citizens are starving?
Farming subsidies are a national security tool, not a handout.
Anyway, it's clear that your position is political in nature otherwise you'd be just as outraged by green subsidies.
Denmark set aside DKK 53.5 billion for green subsidies in 2022. But this isn't market distortion to the same degree as farming subsidies, is it? That's the flaw in your argument. It's inconsistently applied based on politics, isn't it?
We pay farmers not to plant fields in the US. Here in the Eastern half, much of this farm land setting idle receives adequate rain and sunshine. Farmers have to mow (brush hog) the fields every year or two to prevent trees and brush from naturally taking over. Economically it makes little sense.
Where this might actually make sense is around waterways to prevent erosion. And farmers have taken down a large percentage of the tree rows between fields that were planted in the dust bowl days in an effort to use every inch of their field.
Although, I am personally in favor of simple regulations instead cash handouts.
I'm of the opinion food security - even at great expense - is the primary thing a nation should be concerned with as a society. At the level where producing enough calories to feed your total population if things truly hit the fan as a hard requirement for every nation on the planet. This is not something you leave to "free trade" or whatnot. Obviously that doesn't mean every calorie need be provided in the most luxurious form - but in the end, there should be enough food produced to feed your people in the worst of times. Even at great expense and waste during the good times.
That all said - farming has gotten vastly more productive both per man hour and per acre over the past 100 years. Logically we simply do not need the same amount of land devoted to agriculture as we did before - at least in most cases.
So long as your food security is not being impacted - and I do mean under the worst possible stress model you can come up with - I don't see a problem with plans like this. Land use changes over time, and it should be expected.
Plus, it looks like a large portion of this will be simply a different form of agriculture - forestry. This will probably be more in-demand in 50-100 years with current trends, but that's a wild guess.
The argument about security comes up a lot and makes intuitive sense. Although it seems far more complex than just protecting farmland and a simple yearly statistic. Developed countries can be ridiculously dependent on centralised supply chains to process and deliver food. And many of the inputs and equipment require a complex industrial base to support. We don't just need the space to grow food. We need to feed it, protect it from pests, harvest it, process it, deliver it to people. In most countries Iit is very dependent on electricity, heavy industry and global trade for equipment.
> That all said - farming has gotten vastly more productive both per man hour and per acre over the past 100 years
We also have way more people to feed and house than 100 years ago, you cannot look at productivity increase in isolation, demand for both food and land has also risen significantly.
Denmark is not even close to jeopardizing its food supply, even less its food security. It produces way more food than is needed to feed its own population.
Nitrogen emissions from farming are a big topic in the Netherlands. We have a right wing populist governments that wants to raise maximum speeds back to 130km/h but they can't because of nitrogen emissions that caused the previous government (also right leaning, pro car, etc.) to lower the limits. Intense cattle farming is a big environmental challenge in both countries and it comes at a price. Lots of farting cows in both countries.
Simple: Germany has a huge export surplus that China and the USA is unwilling to accept anymore.
Also, German economy is stagnate, based on a cheap russian gas and cooperation with china. So now, the idea is to target South America for exports while balancing it with import of South American foodstuff(EU-Mercosur agreement, that we know will not be ratified by individual countries in a democratic process, but by the Commission).
The problem Germany has to fix is the Common Agricultural Policy, that's one of the pillars of the EU.
They are using the Green Agenda to force countries to reforest their fields. Of course the whole reforestation program is designed in a way that benefits states (Germany) that have got rid of their forests long time ago, and is unfavorable for countries that developed their agriculture after the WW2 - like Denmark and Finland.
Expect a heated discussion between Germany and France, rise of right wing parties in smaller countries, and a push for stricter integration.
Denmark did get rid of its forests a long time ago, after World War I. Germany has vast forests, a magnitude larger than those in Denmark, a country which is almost entirely farmland outside the cities. You have no idea what you're talking about.
Germany has been leaching off the EU for so long through the weak Euro, they now think it will always work. They are clearly putting France on a fast track to an exit via a far right government with the whole Mercosur agreement debacle.
There is no way it's cost effective to produce food in Denmark. If people were rational about this Denmark would be 0-5% farmland. But racism/nationalism and irrational fears and entrenched political power exists so these sane changes only happen slowly. This is a country whose largest imports are (fish, animal feed, wine and cheese) and mostly from other European countries. If they were really worried about min-maxing they would be trading with other countries. They seem to be more preoccupied with keeping cash inside Europe and confusing old world status symbols with wealth.
It's as if your economic planning is based own how good it appears to a potential time traveler from 100 years ago
"The people work 30 hours a week and eat wine and cheese whenever they want! Everybody is rich!"
Indeed. A few years ago I ran across a comparison of old photographs of rural villages (early 20th century) in central Europe vs their present day appearance, taken from similar points of view.
Two things were immediately apparent from the old photographs
- less forest
- tons of fruit trees
Fitting is also this anecdote I heard when visiting a historical mill. They had a huge linden tree in their yard, and they told us that in the olden days this was a symbol of prosperity, because the original owner showed off that they could afford to plant a useless, non-fruit-bearing - a status symbol.
Coming full circle - the best thing would be if we could plant tons of trees that also produce food - something like the baobabs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adansonia_digitata . E.g. pigs were fed oak's acorns in fall.
In comparison, Denmark is currently at only 15% forest.
This is up from about 2% in the early 1800s, back when ships were built from wood, and firewood was used for heating. Funnily, the slow and steady build-up during those 200 years was partially motivated by the fact that when the British destroyed the fleet in 1807, there was simply not enough wood to build a new one.
It’s the same in America, there’s actually more trees now than at the time of European settlement. A combo of the large buffalo herds that used to roam and native land management that often involved burning entire forests.
We have to be careful here. While that's good news locally, the news is less promising globally. Deforestation is still rampant in the global south - specifically to make agricultural products for the global north. So Europe and America are still net-deforesters if you take into account their imported products.
Incidentally this is one of the approaches described in Kim Robinson's The Ministry for the Future, a novel on climate change (more about the political ramifications of it than the ecological impacts). Interesting read.
Before anyone jumps into this book I would caution against it. This book had many very cool ideas and moments. The way it played out felt very "real". However, in the end there was very little actual story and was very boring at times. I actively dislike Neal Stephenson but if you want a near-future climate story I would recommend Termination Shock over Ministry For The Future. Just a random internet person's two cents.
I also read KSR's book. It was interesting at times. However, the research on the financial topics, including the central banks and "global financiers" was quite bad.
I don't recall the glaring errors right now, however, given this is an area where I (at least once upon a time) was an expert, it was quite bad to read this and realize there are likely other serious errors in topics with which I am not at all familiar.
While this is of course a work of fiction, getting verifiable facts wrong, intentionally or not, ruins it for me.
Since we’re here.. These are probably everyone’s top 2 eco-punk novels but the rest of an appropriate top 10 list is way more contentious, and imho sources like goodreads or whatever will always have many items that aren’t really even in the genre.
So I’ll offer the “metatropolis” anthology, which as a bonus has an audiobook version read by the Star Trek cast. Anyone got anything else?
I agree it doesn't have much of a story. It reads much more like a non-fictional recounting of events, but provides a lot of food for thought about how things might unfold. Just don't approach it like your typical novel.
I had trouble with the Mars series and never got through it.
I kind of wonder if it is easier for me to enjoy fiction that requires more "suspension of disbelief" with ftl or time travel, alien races and magic.
In comparison when I don't have to suspend any disbelief, we haven't met aliens, other worlds are actually too far to get to, and physics and science is unyielding... it is harder to enjoy myself.
It was 50% in places like Canada where they are already close to that figure, plus some parts in the Western US where to set up Migration corridors without mass relocations (mostly nearly abandoned rural hamlets where the young people had moved away anyway).
That will be interesting experiment. 1) A growing population require food. 2) Their agricultural sector is a major contributor to their economy, not only farmers but everything around it involves a lot of people and businesses. 3) Many countries rely on Danish agricultural exports (it's massive) to ensure people have food.
The Danish agricultural industry accounts for 1% of GDP and almost 70% of land use, the highest in the world. The Wikipedia page on Denmark doesn't even bother to list it as a major industry (unlike Lego) and the only figures I could find put it at around 8B DKK. Lego does 66B DKK on its own.
(Dane here) - this is a major reversal on the food-security policy that drove not just innovation in intensive farming technologies in Denmark in the late nineteenth century, but also the formation of what is now the EU, post WWII, on a european scale.
Let's hope butter and bacon from Poland is going to cover our needs.
Our issues in The Netherlands are probably similar to Denmark's and the biggest issue is not all agriculture. Meat and milk production has an outweighed impact on destroying the environment. You need far more land to grow crops to feed livestock and keeping cows leads to a lot of nitrogen deposition.
We can reduce land use and have food security if people were not so intend on eating/drinking animal products every day (and there are perfectly fine vegetarian alternatives).
Sure, but Europe's not growing. It is purely in "shrink forever" mode. This is easily measured, any time fertility drops below 2.1 that's what happens. But ignore that a moment, what if you wanted to depopulate Europe? This might be a good policy for that. Get the timing just right, and it's not even a genocide... food shortages that don't starve anyone just encourages the last few breeders to put a lid on it, and voila! The fantasy of more than a few out there.
Readit News
Regarding global warming and CO2, the area conversion of peatlands will help, but the major change here is the introduction of a carbon tax for the entire agricultural industry. And to end confusion regarding other emissions than CO2, it's actually a CO2-equivalent (CO2e) tax, which includes a range of other gasses. E.g., 1kg of methane is 25kg CO2e.
If you'd like to read more, see the two PDF documents below, which are the main official documents. They're in Danish, but upload them to Claude or ChatGPT, and you'll have a much better source of information if you'd like to know more about the specifics and how the actual implementation is planned.
[1] https://www.regeringen.dk/media/13261/aftale-om-et-groent-da...
[2] https://mgtp.dk/media/iinpdy3w/aftale_om_implementering_af_e...
There need to be changes, but I am not convinced that this will have the desired effects. Its quite possible this leads to a net conversion of farmland to residential or commercial property rather than nature.
The industry might be accustomed to profiting from the subsidy, but that doesn't make them entitled to it! And certainly the industry has had plenty of time to anticipate and adjust to the problems of carbon emissions.
Otherwise, you’re right. We’re upsetting the balance of a very complex, very important system and causing a regressive tax in the form of price increases.
But I'm doubtful that implementing them only for one industry in one small country is very helpful.
Will it or will farmland value take a dump but remain unchanged in use?
I always thought of farmland these days as a use of last resort and if it could be marketable for buildings, it’s already not economically worth it as a farm except speculatively
Many farmers will receive a one-time payment on land sales and some will use this windfall to subsidise their transition from growing livestock to more environmentally-friendly food.
Your pig farmers must be thrilled.
All that being said, you're right, they're not exactly thrilled with the government adding taxes and monitoring them more.
https://agricultureandfood.dk/danish-agriculture/agriculture....
Polish farmers are going to eat you alive for this.
Eh, people don't know that Google Translate can translate documents (PDF, Doc etc.) as well?!
Deleted Comment
You should read the introduction.
And the farmers alao get shafted in the process, farmers are always totalitarian's first target. Venezuela, Rwanda, Zimbawe, Cuba.
Dead Comment
"Danish Crown, one of Denmark’s largest Danish meat producer, is facing significant financial challenges as pig deliveries to its processing plants have dropped in the 2023/24 financial year."
Danish Crowns problems aren't entirely due to external factors, part of it is also that Danish Crowns is struggling to run its business properly.
Both Denmark and Netherland are big in agriculture export and they are very good at it. I am not against planting trees but it on top of farm land doesn't make any sense to me.
Planting trees on farms is incredibly important for maintaining and protecting the soil. The Americans learned that the hard way in the 1930s. [2]]
[1] https://www.climatechangenews.com/2022/08/05/us-funded-trees...
[2] https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/dust-bowl
Grasses, not trees, maintained and protected the soil for what became the US Dust Bowl.
The "Great American Desert" was essentially treeless. As your [2] links points out, European agricultural methods "[exposed] the bare, over-plowed farmland. Without deep-rooted prairie grasses to hold the soil in place, it began to blow away."
Agriculture in the EU is renowned for not being financially unjustified. For decades it's been a finantial no-brainer to import the bulk of agricultural products from south America and Africa. This is not new or the result of some major epiphany, it's the natura consequence of having an advanced economy and a huge population with high population density. The EU already imports 40% of the agricultural products it consumes.
EU subsidies were created specifically to mitigate the strategic and geopolitical risk of seeing Europe blockaded. Agricultural subsidies exist to create a finantial incentive to preserve current production capacity when it makes no finantial sense, and thus mitigate a strategic vulnerability.
https://agricultureandfood.dk/media/m1qfuuju/lf-facts-and-fi...
In the UK we pay farmers to raise lamb on marginal land yet they still aren't competitive with lamb shipped from the other side of the world. I'm not sure why we should be subsidising that, especially when there is a lot of environmental damaged associated with it.
Deleted Comment
Edit: add planting trees
One thing I have wondered was the relative benefits of a concentrated wilderness versus distributed habitat.
The common agricultural policy set-aside distributes payments for the wilderness across many farms (for equity, one supposes), whereas a concentrated wilderness would benefit few (and probably only the landowners).
I think it's the same for Denmark, though the mostly hold pigs in stead of cattle.
In all western countries, far right groups are crawling to grab more and more power gradually. Those groups feed basically on farmer followers, ruthlessly brainwashed with fake news, antiscience and outrage, and the system has proven to work well (See US).
Until now traditional parties believed that could control the situation and appease the farmers with more money, and maybe even benefit of some votes of grateful people on return. The wake up has being brutal. Each euro given to farmers is just a victory reclaimed by this groups, that nurture a higher discontent.
So now that they are coming for they political heads and the time is running out, traditional politicians feel the pressure to take some delayed unpleasant decisions before is too late, and getting rid of the fake farmers to build a market from there is a first step. If fake farmers can sell subsidized meat for a lower price, the real farmers suffer for it.
Nature is an abstraction, not a weird angry god. We need to capture GHG and stop emitting more but that’s pretty much it. That will most likely involve reforestation as it’s a good carbon sink but using the expression “returning thing to nature” is not a correct way to frame it.
Because trees don't grow well in the ocean? :)
There is developed areas (cities/towns/industry) and farm land.
Most of the land not suitable for farming was turned into farm land. Through extremely hard work over the past 150 years. Like straightening rivers, draining marshes, and planting up the heath.
There’s a natural way of doing that, which is to cut subsidies and let the market handle it. But the farmers have political power because they have a lot of money because of the policies they’ve set up back when they had political power because they had a lot of money… Anyways, so what is actually happening is that the farmers have decided that if their land is unprofitable then the government needs to pay a hefty price to them for it.
The government could just cut the subsidies which means we would use less money, then buy the land in bankruptcies, likely just with the money we spend less. Instead we’ll see a lot of additional spending to buy the land, and then down the line subsidies will increase to “make up” for all the land they “lost”.
This is a particularly ignorant and clueless opinion to have.
The whole point of Europe's common agricultural policy is to preserve the potential of agricultural production as a strategic asset. Europe's strong economy and huge population density, coupled with cheap access to agricultural production from south America and Africa, renders most agricultural activity economically unfeasible. The problem is that this means Europe is particularly vulnerable to a blockade, and in case of all out war the whole continent risks being starved in a few months.
The whole point of EU's common agricultural policy is to minimize this risk.
Owners of farmland are provided a incentive to keep their farms on standby even if they don't produce anything exactly to mitigate this risk. It would be more profitable to invest in some domains such as, say, real estate. Look at the Netherlands: they are experiencing a huge housing crisis and the whole land in Holland consists of dense urban housing bordered by farm land. It would be tempting for farmers to just cash out on real estate if they didn't had an economic upside.
You would do better if you educated yourself on a topic before commenting on it.
Farming subsidies are a national security tool, not a handout.
Anyway, it's clear that your position is political in nature otherwise you'd be just as outraged by green subsidies.
Denmark set aside DKK 53.5 billion for green subsidies in 2022. But this isn't market distortion to the same degree as farming subsidies, is it? That's the flaw in your argument. It's inconsistently applied based on politics, isn't it?
> Both Denmark and Netherland are big in agriculture export and they are very good at it.
And both are tiny and being swarmed by sustainability issues.
Where this might actually make sense is around waterways to prevent erosion. And farmers have taken down a large percentage of the tree rows between fields that were planted in the dust bowl days in an effort to use every inch of their field.
Although, I am personally in favor of simple regulations instead cash handouts.
That all said - farming has gotten vastly more productive both per man hour and per acre over the past 100 years. Logically we simply do not need the same amount of land devoted to agriculture as we did before - at least in most cases.
So long as your food security is not being impacted - and I do mean under the worst possible stress model you can come up with - I don't see a problem with plans like this. Land use changes over time, and it should be expected.
Plus, it looks like a large portion of this will be simply a different form of agriculture - forestry. This will probably be more in-demand in 50-100 years with current trends, but that's a wild guess.
Groundwater in Denmark is drinkable and most people wanna keep it that way. But unfortunately, fertilizer has killed of huge areas of sealife.
We also have way more people to feed and house than 100 years ago, you cannot look at productivity increase in isolation, demand for both food and land has also risen significantly.
There’s already a housing crisis…
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Also, German economy is stagnate, based on a cheap russian gas and cooperation with china. So now, the idea is to target South America for exports while balancing it with import of South American foodstuff(EU-Mercosur agreement, that we know will not be ratified by individual countries in a democratic process, but by the Commission).
The problem Germany has to fix is the Common Agricultural Policy, that's one of the pillars of the EU. They are using the Green Agenda to force countries to reforest their fields. Of course the whole reforestation program is designed in a way that benefits states (Germany) that have got rid of their forests long time ago, and is unfavorable for countries that developed their agriculture after the WW2 - like Denmark and Finland.
Expect a heated discussion between Germany and France, rise of right wing parties in smaller countries, and a push for stricter integration.
https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/11/19/eu-mercosur-tra...
https://forest.fi/article/whos-to-pay-the-cost-of-eus-nature...
https://hir.harvard.edu/germanys-energy-crisis-europes-leadi...
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It's as if your economic planning is based own how good it appears to a potential time traveler from 100 years ago
"The people work 30 hours a week and eat wine and cheese whenever they want! Everybody is rich!"
And having people living healthy, well-fed, lives of leisure seems like a pretty good definition of rich to me. What’s the better one?
People no longer use wood as a fuel, or in very small amounts compared to the past, and some former pastures have been re-colonized by trees.
Czechia is currently 34 per cent forest. Used to be less than 20 per cent in the Theresian cadastre (mid 18-th century).
Two things were immediately apparent from the old photographs - less forest - tons of fruit trees
Fitting is also this anecdote I heard when visiting a historical mill. They had a huge linden tree in their yard, and they told us that in the olden days this was a symbol of prosperity, because the original owner showed off that they could afford to plant a useless, non-fruit-bearing - a status symbol.
Coming full circle - the best thing would be if we could plant tons of trees that also produce food - something like the baobabs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adansonia_digitata . E.g. pigs were fed oak's acorns in fall.
This is up from about 2% in the early 1800s, back when ships were built from wood, and firewood was used for heating. Funnily, the slow and steady build-up during those 200 years was partially motivated by the fact that when the British destroyed the fleet in 1807, there was simply not enough wood to build a new one.
[1]: https://www.forskning.no/norges-forskningsrad-partner-miljoo...
I don't recall the glaring errors right now, however, given this is an area where I (at least once upon a time) was an expert, it was quite bad to read this and realize there are likely other serious errors in topics with which I am not at all familiar.
While this is of course a work of fiction, getting verifiable facts wrong, intentionally or not, ruins it for me.
So I’ll offer the “metatropolis” anthology, which as a bonus has an audiobook version read by the Star Trek cast. Anyone got anything else?
I kind of wonder if it is easier for me to enjoy fiction that requires more "suspension of disbelief" with ftl or time travel, alien races and magic.
In comparison when I don't have to suspend any disbelief, we haven't met aliens, other worlds are actually too far to get to, and physics and science is unyielding... it is harder to enjoy myself.
Why is that?
I really liked Snow Crash and Anathem. Reamde was okay. I don't remember much about Diamond Age or Cryptonomicon.
What criteria are you using?
Let's hope butter and bacon from Poland is going to cover our needs.
Pole here - Poland switched form being a pork exporter to an importer over the course of the last few decades.
Top external suppliers are...
Denmark (53kt)
Belgium (50kt)
Germany (44kt)
The Netherlands (24.5kt)
Spain (24.5kt)
We can reduce land use and have food security if people were not so intend on eating/drinking animal products every day (and there are perfectly fine vegetarian alternatives).
That's really hilarious: Poland imports it's pork from Denmark.
(ASF and almost no piglets breeding)
It's not like this will happen overnight anyways.
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Sure, but Europe's not growing. It is purely in "shrink forever" mode. This is easily measured, any time fertility drops below 2.1 that's what happens. But ignore that a moment, what if you wanted to depopulate Europe? This might be a good policy for that. Get the timing just right, and it's not even a genocide... food shortages that don't starve anyone just encourages the last few breeders to put a lid on it, and voila! The fantasy of more than a few out there.