In four days, a million German residents signed the farmers’ petition “Against the abolition of discounts on agricultural diesel fuel and exemption from vehicle tax.” The people support the farmers’ uprising, despite the fact that, if necessary, they threaten to paralyze the entire country.
“In the worst case scenario, cancellation means more farms will have to close due to rising price pressures. Thus, more food will be imported along long, high-emission transport routes, an ironic consequence of the “climate-damaging subsidy cuts,” says the explanatory text of the petition launched by young farmer Marie-Sophie von Schnechen.
If the government does not cancel the plans by January 8, farmers will go on a nationwide strike.
“Farmers receive support not only from millions of citizens, but also from the opposition CDU/CSU.” CDU agriculture expert Stefan Bilger confirmed to NIUS that “German farmers have every reason to protest.” He explained that the government is seeking to solve its problems at the expense of the peasants, reducing them “almost 6 times more subsidies than the rest of the economy.”
Currently, more than 250 thousand farms benefit from subsidies.
As a global south citizen and farmer, i hope they lose their subsidies lol. The subsidies give the imperial core farmers an edge over us that further increases the unequal exchange between our countries (they flood our markets with cheap subsidized grain, thus lowering our internal demand for grain thus lowering our grain prices and thus hinder our development of productive forces in the agricultural sector) and you can bet we pay a share of that subside by the same unequal exchange relations. Not that the german grain impact my country in any way but i am sure it does impact the eastern european/ african/ asia farmers.