The government should've pushed innovations in precision farming like they push solar (e.g. 50% subsidy). But they chose to do a full ban. Some startups in the sector were affected even though they reduce the amount of fertilizer and pesticides by an order of magnitude. Was the government so blind and stupid, or were they malicious?
The bar to ban things has dropped so low because of that handwavey line of reasoning, despite real economic effects to people whose livelihoods are at stake (i.e. farmers).
With the farm laws repeal, it has essentially been proven that you can now stifle the population and infrastructure and get your way. So I won't be surprised if this ends up working, unless the government grows a spine.
Overhauling exsiting regulation that promotes small scale family farming to one that promotes larger scale, modernized farming methods with improved outputs would strengthen and bolster the domestic ag economy vs its international counterparts, not weaken them.
The current handout to family farmers (many of whom produce paltry crops and own tiny parcels) and their collective lobbying efforts to continue the country's protectionist farming policies is a handout to these rent seekers and stifles the actual long term agricultural output of the country.
"Forced through sanctions" sounds pretty harsh when all the government would have to do to seriously change factory farming practices is reduce the subsidies on their inputs.
Trouble is the yield farming stuff is all distributed and outside the ability of any given legal system to ban. Education may be better. Of course you can ban say US based entities from promoting them.
One thing that's worth talking about is the approach that the government took. The sudden ban on a vital component of their agriculture (non-organic chemical fertilizer) had some bad non-obvious impacts.
A better strategy towards the shift to organic (regardless of how you feel about the move itself) would have been to impose an ever increasing tax to understand the long-term impacts of moving away from something their economy heavily relied on.
What I found interesting about the article was that the government intervention it’s describing is fairly lightweight: e.g., instead of nationalizing farms, the government is making it easier for farmers to sell directly to urban residents.
No, farmers have very little power. Agri-corps, big business which collects the majority of those subsidies, have power. These laws keep little guys down.
It's not quite the same to lift the ban entirely (UK) than to give individual, temporary exemptions to farmers that have difficulties for whatever reason.
edit:Welp, I can't read. Seems it's also temporary emergency use.
The ability to grow food in the country has pretty high strategic value. If you let your farmers go out of business your country loses domain knowledge in farming.
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