Green Ambitions Rollback and Farmers' Climate Partnership | 4min snip from The Europeans

Speaker 4
A lot of green ambitions have been rollback, right? So efforts to reduce the use of toxic pesticides had been shelved. There were efforts to improve animal welfare that they have been dramatically paid down. There were plans to set aside land to improve biodiversity, that's also been scrapped, which means we are now back to business as usual and this tend to benefit big large-scale farms and agro-businesses that engage in monoculture and that kind of practice is that is actually really bad for the environment can continue.
Speaker 1
Following the huge tractor protests in Brussels, the spokespeople of the farmers' protests were very quickly given a direct audience with Usof on the lion and the Dutch and Belgian prime ministers. We had a
Speaker 6
very constructive, a very good meeting. We listened to the main complaints and worries and concerns of the farmers.
Speaker 5
What we see is they want to be a partner in the climate transition. They've done a lot of efforts up to now, but obviously they are confronted with what you could call a lasagna of measures that all come at the same time.
Speaker 2
A lasagna of measures? What the hell does that mean?
Speaker 3
Lasagna of measures is my new favourite expression. I have
Speaker 2
to say I'm kind of impressed on one level from a democratic perspective that the leaders actually so quickly talked to the protesters that were banging outside their door. The thing is, I cannot think of other protesters getting
Speaker 1
anywhere close to that kind of audience. And a lot of environmental groups have been enormously critical of Usof on the lion and the commission for so quickly incorporating so many of the farmers' demands. Or shall we say the big powerful farming unions that dominated the protests? Here's Silvia Spudak, the former MEP, again.
Speaker 5
We can see the discrepancy between how many times Usof on the lion, the commission president, met with Copa Códjeka, and how many times she met with organizations fighting climate disaster, advocating for animal rights, ensuring a change in the system for the protection of the natural environment. This
Speaker 1
might
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sound crazy, but in front
Speaker 1
of the lion's official schedule, which you can view online, there wasn't a single meeting with environmental activists listed at any time in the past year.
Speaker 2
What? Not one. Come on, she's
Speaker 3
the president of the European Commission. She must have met with environmental activists at some point. Well,
Speaker 6
it's not like
Speaker 1
Usof on the lion has never been faced with a climate campaigner.
Speaker 6
Like she spoke at the Cop Climate Conference in December, for example,
Speaker 1
but we found no record in her agenda of any private meeting behind closed doors with an environmental group since these farmers' protests. What we did find in the past four months alone were three separate meetings with farming groups, two of them linked to Copa Códjeka. When we reached out to from the lion's office about this, her spokeswoman told us, quote, the president regularly exchanges in dialogues in which environmental NGOs are present, and she insisted that the European Green Deal remains the number one priority of the lion's commission.

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