Greta’s green activists clash with farmers over nature law

STRASBOURG — In competing protests, climate activists and farmers’ organizations clashed Tuesday morning in Strasbourg over whether to kill or save new EU rules aimed at boosting nature restoration.

Tuesday’s demonstrations on opposite sides of the European Parliament building were a last-minute push to try to influence the outcome of a crucial — and likely very tight — vote on the legislative proposal scheduled Wednesday in plenary.

Star climate activist Greta Thunberg joined the green protest, calling on politicians to “choose nature, to choose people over profit and greed” and “pass the strongest law possible.”

“[Politicians] are given many opportunities to get their actions to match their words and they have failed us many, many times, so we hope they prove us wrong,” Thunberg said, asking MEPs to “stand on the right side of history.”

Conservative European People’s Party leader Manfred Weber countered during the farmers’ protest that “we are totally committed to taking biodiversity seriously but we have to do it together, with the farmers, with the rural areas.” He reiterated his call to the European Commission to withdraw its proposal, deemed a key pillar of the EU’s flagship Green Deal, and come up with a better one.

Norbert Lins, a German EPP member and chair of the Parliament’s agriculture committee, also argued against the legislation.

"To say that the fight against biodiversity loss and climate change always goes in the same direction ... it’s not true," he said, arguing that measures that can have a positive impact on biodiversity can sometimes clash with renewable energy projects. The renewables industry denies this.

Lins also criticized the compromise deal that the liberal Renew Europe group crafted to try to get a majority of MEPs to back the Nature Restoration Regulation. "It is not acceptable" and "not really a solution," he said.

Christiane Lambert, president of the European farmers’ association Copa-Cogeca, who attended the farmers’ protest, also said that “biodiversity is a common good” and farmers play a key role in safeguarding it. “But this law is punitive” and should come with more financial compensation for farmers, she said.

Farmers do “not want to be the hostages of a war between the EPP, the Greens and the Socialists,” Lambert added.

But, on a hot morning in Strasbourg where tensions ran high, Green MEP Anna Deparnay-Grunenberg countered that some of the conservatives’ demands — notably to increase EU funding for farmers — were met during negotiations between political groups in recent months.

"We should not be mistaking which battle is taking place now," she said, "but simply the conservatives don’t know in which direction to go" ahead of the 2024 EU election.

Thunberg also said that “farmers and the environment go hand in hand, you cannot have food without nature and by wrecking our life-supporting system it will become even more difficult to secure food safety.”

“So, we are on the same side here,” she said.