Greenpeace’s Excellent Pro-Brexit And Anti-Organic Farming Argument

That Greenpeace doesn’t think through the implications of its arguments is obvious enough for they praise organic farming while also insisting that more land must be available for nature. The two ideals are in direct contradiction with each other which is, umm, unfortunate. However, they do provide us with an excellent pro-Brexit argument here.

Consider what the European Union actually does. No, not what it claims nor the lofty rhetoric. It hasn’t produced peace, that’s Nato, and it doesn’t produce economic growth either. Instead, let us go all Tom Cruise and insist show me the money.

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Nearly a fifth of the EU’s total budget – more than £24bn of taxpayer money – goes to support livestock farming across Europe, according to new research by Greenpeace.[/perfectpullquote]

If people want to eat animals then the people eating animals should pay the costs of raising animals to eat. It isn’t true that everyone should get taxed to pay for these pleasures. Good, so, we can do with one fifth less European Union at minimum. Except, of course, given that they never will do that we should leave. Excellent, we are doing so, we’re copacetic.

It’s much more amusing to note this though:

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]“Adopting diets lower in meat and dairy would not only tackle health problems but would also reduce the pressure on land, freeing up more space for nature,” said the Greenpeace EU agriculture policy director Marco Contiero.[/perfectpullquote]

Well, yes. And so also would making the most efficient use of the land we do use for farming mean we used less of it therefore left more for nature. Which means that we want to get rid of organic farming and use only industrial. For whatever else we might say about the two forms of farming organic very definitely requires more land for any given level of output.

This is true whatever diet we adopt. Even if we’re all vegans it’s still true that industrial farming needs less land than organic. This is before we get to the other little difficulty, if we’re not farming animals then where do we get the animal s**t to fertilise the crops from, organic insisting that we don’t use chemicals instead?