Germany’s farmers have no reason to complain

FP has published an article saying that German farmers’ nationwide protest against a move to repeal agricultural subsidies has earned public sympathy—but doesn’t deserve it. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

German farmers’ irate marathon protests that reached a high point last week has evoked comparisons to the 1524-1525 German Peasants’ War, the largest uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution. Across the country, well-ordered columns of tractors, many-hundred-strong, thundered along autobahns en route to urban centers, occupying main squares in almost every major city and hundreds of towns. In some places, the farmers clashed with police; in others, effigies symbolizing the current center-left German government—composed of the Social Democrats, Greens, and liberal Free Democrats—hung from a yardarm.

On January 15, the caravans descended from all directions on Berlin, Germany’s capital city. An estimated 10,000 farmers, agriculture sector workers, and sympathetic citizens marched through the city as snow and freezing winds coursed down its wide avenues. The protesters’ sirens, horns, and cowbells created a din that could be heard many blocks away. Despite the fact that the demonstration shut down the city center and disrupted traffic all around Berlin, the ruddy-faced farmers, thickly bundled atop their imposing machinery got thumbs-ups, approving waves, and words of encouragement from passersby.

The signs fastened to their machinery expressed their dire messages: “If the farmer dies, so does the country,” “Better death than slavery,” “The death of farming = starvation,” and “If German farmers are ruined, you’ll be importing your food.”

The immediate object of the agricultural sector’s ire was the Jan. 4 government announcement that it will cancel a longtime subsidy for diesel fuel. Farmers rely on diesel for many types of machinery and are reimbursed about 21 euro cents (23 US cents) per liter (about a quarter of a gallon) of fuel. That’s about 12 percent of a liter’s total price. This is worth about 1,700 euros ($1,850) a month to the average farm and runs German taxpayers around 440 million euros ($482 million) annually.

Environmentalists and market-minded liberals had long had the diesel subsidy in their sights, but it was pushed onto the front burner late last year, when Germany’s highest court ruled unconstitutional the government’s appropriation of 60 billion euros ($65 billion) left over from COVID-19 pandemic emergency aid for climate measures. The ruling left a gaping 17-billion-euro ($18.5-billion) hole in the 2024 budget that the government has been racing to plug ever since.

The traditionally arch-conservative farmers’ lobby—never a friend of any of the government’s coalition partners—protested vehemently as if the scratched benefit would bankrupt every hard-working, salt-of-the-earth homestead in Germany. But neither this nor other dark prophecies will transpire—and not because the government backed down on January 4 and agreed to reduce the subsidy in phases over three years. In fact, the diesel subsidy has very little impact on most farms’ well-being.

Experts say that the average German farmer isn’t facing existential threat and that the nullified diesel rebate alone would pinch only those small farms already teetering.

“Most farmers aren’t poor,” said Stephan Cramon-Taubadel, an agricultural economist from the University of Göttingen. He pointed to the farmers’ lobby’s own recent study, which show the average income of a full-time farmer is 82,000 euros a year—and that’s just agricultural income, usually only one part of many farms’ total income.

In fact, an astounding half of this income, roughly, hails from subsidies. And that’s just for being farmers—not for specifically being small, family-run farms, or farms hit hard by drought, or farms that are cleaner or less-emissions-intensive or more decent to livestock.

On the contrary, most of the subsidies are distributed per hectare, meaning that the largest agribusinesses are reaping the lion’s share. The condition of the German farmer today is dramatically different than that of their 16th-century predecessors involved in the peasants’ war, who bore heavy taxation and suffered egregious injustice under the yoke of the nobility.

Germany’s nearly 270,000 farmers are recipients of a vast number of direct and indirect subsidies, most of which dwarf the diesel rebate—and even increased in total last year by 200 million euros ($217.5 million) compared to 2022.

The largest chunk of this pie hails from the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy, which allocated German farmers about 7 billion euros in 2023, some of which was calculated per hectare (2.5 acres) of farmland, other parts of which went toward specific funding programs for sustainable and environmentally sound farming and rural development. The German government—in other words, German taxpayers—kicks in another roughly 6 billion euros. (In return, Germans pay some of the lowest food prices compared to household income in Europe, which are lower only in Luxembourg and Ireland.)

Moreover, German farmers are coming off banner seasons: In 2022 and 2023, profits rocketed upward by more than 30 percent each year, despite high inflation and, in 2022, the lingering COVID-19 pandemic.

“German farmers had a record year,” said German agriculture expert Alfons Balmann of the Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development.

What, then, are Germany’s farmers griping about? Why does one farmer after another interviewed on German television insist that the political class is not listening to them? That they won’t be taken for granted? That they won’t allow change to happen over their heads?

The ham-fisted defense of agriculture’s status quo is not new, but rather the decades-long mission of the Deutscher Bauernverband (DBV), the agricultural sector’s powerful political lobby. Germany’s Christian Democrats above all have loyally served the DBV since the early postwar years—and today is no different. Conservatives such as Bavaria’s governor, Markus Söder, took to the farmers’ stage in Munich, expressing his undiluted support for their demands. “Without our farmers, there’s no Germany,” he said.

But this rigidity comes at the expense of making changes in our modern food production system in line with the changing times and sensibilities. For years now, there has been pressure on German farmers to reform their existing business model: from the EU, from Germany’s environmental agencies, from animal rights and biodiversity advocates, and from the climate movement.

The angry farmers, argued Jost Maurin of the newspaper Die Tageszeitung, partly have “themselves to blame for the fact that their sector is currently losing the energy tax rebate completely. They have ignored all justified demands for a reform of climate-damaging subsidies for decades. For years, the authorities have recommended to employ financing to promote more environmentally friendly agriculture. But climate arguments simply bounce off Germany’s subsidy champions.” One of the options left to the government, Maurin said, was to simply lop off the diesel rebate, killing two birds with one stone.

There’s no better example of this attitude and the close cooperation between the agricultural lobby and European conservatives than the EU reform measures that were ambushed last year by the European People’s Party, the alliance of the continent’s conservatives in the European Parliament. With the agricultural lobby at its back, the European People’s Party led the charge to water down a nature restoration measure and vehicle emissions regulation, as well as to kill off completely a bill that would have reduced the use of toxic pesticides.

Balmann, of the Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development, said that the writing is on the wall for the farmers, and pointed to an extensive study sponsored by the DBV, green nongovernmental organization, and German agencies that charts a path toward sustainable farming.

What do Germany’s farmers say they need to make it happen? Another 10 billion euros each year in government aid. But farmers shouldn’t expect to be given something more from government without giving something up in return.