Food and farming weaponized during EU elections

Last month’s EU elections produced hundreds of local, national and transnational stories. No doubt you know the biggest one - the far-right made net gains mostly at the expense of the Green and Renew blocs. The newly formed Patriots for Europe bloc is now the third largest, with 84 MEPs - 35 more than in 2019.

This bloc is also majorly responsible for a mass of false food and farming narratives spread ahead of the EU elections. Investigative journalists at Desmog found a diverse range of misinformation narratives on social media, in speeches and at protest rallies that dominated election campaigning across the continent, as well as familiar tactics taken straight out of the climate disinformation playbook. 

Our summary of Desmog’s investigative series is below, alongside commentary from Desmog’s agri-reporter Clare Carlile. As always, you’ll find other news from the world of climate disinformation at the end of the newsletter, including an historic call for a fossil fuel advertising ban by UN Secretary General, António Guterres.

THE FINDINGS

Migration was the main campaigning ground for the far right during the EU elections. However, food and farming was also a frequent talking point by right-wing, far-right and populist figures. This is especially true when accounting for the whole of the first half of 2024, due to attention on the wave of farmers’ protests that swept Europe (see more on that in the next section). 

Desmog found that food security was the topic most frequently leveraged to attack climate policy. Some false narratives suggest that green laws make people go hungry, or that foreign imports (for example from Ukraine) are poisonous.

Other narratives commonly attack EU institutions or policy, using conspiratorial framing that pits the ordinary person or farmer against bureaucratic elites. These include the EU forcing you to eat bugs, elites will eat meat while you won’t be allowed to, or that the Green Deal is deliberately “draining your wallet”.

Clare Carlile, agri-reporter at Desmog, said “These narratives borrow well known tropes from the climate denial and the fossil fuel playbook: fear-mongering on costs of transition, pitching normal people against elites, and downplaying the urgent need for change. They have been used by vested interests in recent years to delay or water down EU legislation, but it was worrying to see how in the EU elections they were deployed to win eurosceptic votes from disenfranchised groups.”

Desmog also found potential astroturfing activity by the far-right in Poland. The Orka farmers group insists it is an apolitical group of “common farmers”. It managed to meet with the Polish president and was allegedly offered a role on his agriculture council. However, the group was not registered, most had never heard of it, and Desmog uncovered links from key members to the far-right.

“While many farmers have been expressing important concerns, protests can also create a general image of chaos in Europe and be used to suggest that the general population opposes the EU and its climate goals (even where this is not the case).” says Clare. “Vested interests have their own agenda for amplifying those protests organised by radical right factions, and it is telling to see groups with links to autocratic regimes and fossil fuel financing jumping on the opportunity.”

PART OF A WORRYING TREND

This activity is part of an overall trend, where far-right parties in Europe have increasingly used climate change policies as a wedge issue since 2021. In fact, climate change was the second most fact checked topic during the European elections (after the Ukraine war), according to the Elections24 database.

Meanwhile, farmers’ protests have been ongoing in Europe for a number of years, with a particularly big wave of protests in the first half of 2024. As Clare says, motivations for protests are diverse and nuanced, ranging from worries about economic pressure, to concerns over specific agricultural policies, oftentimes to campaigns for better (not less) environmental regulations. As Desmog and Carbon Brief reported at the time, many farmers were not protesting on environmental grounds at all.

Protesting farmers blocked the A10 motorway with tractors during a protest near Longvilliers, south of Paris, France on 29 January 2024. Credit: Abaca Press / Alamy Stock Photo

But the far-right has usually had a hand in protests, either directly, or through shaping or amplifying particular narratives. Ripple Research found that during the Dutch protests in 2022 it was a trans-national far-right movement that formed the backbone of online activity influencing conversations on farmers’ protests. The same has happened in 2024 in the UK with the astroturf group No Farmers No Food. This phenomenon of legitimate, local concerns co-opted and redirected to larger, often more conspiratorial targets like governments and institutions is known as the globalisation effect. 

Earlier this year, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue also found that far-right influences in organising German farmers’ protests risked creating a breeding ground for the ideology. Meanwhile, looking at posts between December 2023 and May 2024, Newtral and Science Feedback found that far-right politicians are “not only active participants but often leading voices in the discourse related to farmers’ protests against climate action”.

It worked, says Clare. Farmers’ protests in Europe did result in a weakening of green rules for farmers, and the roadmap for food in the EU appears to be shifting from sustainability to food security, despite the former being essential for the latter in the long-term.

“Farmers are voicing very real concerns. But we found that far-right groups and big agribusiness lobbies distorted the picture to ensure that a sometimes quite niche subset of concerns were being heard. 

“Far-right organisations, particularly online, amplified anti-EU and anti-climate sentiments, while leaders of agricultural unions that claim to speak for the sector are often from large-scale, export-driven farms, and therefore largely represent this big agriculture interests.  This means that small scale farmers and those that are concerned about the climate are drowned out in public debate.”

WHAT NOW?

This issue underscores direct consequences resulting from poorly equipped information ecosystems, especially during big current events and election periods. 

What can we do?

First, online platforms must broaden their definitions of climate misinformation. Many platforms only consider the first paragraph of the universal definition, meaning the narratives in this data monitor freely spread. This often overlooked content subtly erodes consensus on climate change’s severity, impacting free and fair democracy. Better resourcing for fact-checking services, especially during election periods, would also go a long way. 

Second, institutions and politicians should consider whether negative online attention reflects public opinion, or if it is a vocal minority being magnified or weaponized. Policy and communications responses should be scaled accordingly. 

Finally, policymakers should recognise support for climate initiatives is often quite passive. With a small amount of misinformation targeted to the right groups, policies can quickly become unpopular. Aside from ensuring fair policymaking, the climate sector, journalists and public institutions should invest heavily into prebunking messaging demonstrating the benefits of climate policies. This is crucial in “climate information deserts”, where accurate climate information is hard to find. In the case of farming, many Eurosceptics in rural areas were the target of misleading food and farming narratives during this election. These individuals may have seen very little content on climate change or green policies for years, making them particularly vulnerable. Prebunking to this group would reduce the impact of misinformation messages in the future.

IN OTHER NEWS

“I urge every country to ban advertising from fossil fuel companies”. On World Environment Day, the UN Secretary General delivered this historic speech. As more and more research comes to light on the fossil fuel industry’s decades long campaign to delay climate action, the industry’s continued spending of millions on greenwashing activity looks worse and worse. At CAAD, we’ve been campaigning for this for a while now, and will keep you up to date

Meta’s Content Library still not up to scratch. With under a month until Crowdtangle switches off for good, researchers are struggling to transition to Meta’s replacement, the Content Library, which still looks like a significant downgrade. Meta says the move is for Digital Service Act compliance, but others have been quick to point out that the Content Library is, itself, not compliant.

Canadian climate disinformation networks form during wildfire season. Claims on X that arsonists were responsible for Canada’s spring 2023 wildfires developed into full blown conspiracies with the help of networks that previously seeded disinformation around Covid-19. This backs up what CAAD has seen in other areas, where extreme weather events are met by misinformation and conspiracy, eroding concern about the worst impacts of climate change.

Misinformation poses a bigger threat to democracy than you might think. After misinformation and climate change were named the top two global risks by the WEF in 2024, we’ve seen numerous ‘hot take’ opinions to the contrary. However, we strongly recommend reading this article from some of the world’s leading climate misinformation researchers, published in Nature, on why we must push back hard against this complacency.

If you have any investigative leads CAAD should explore, want to find out more about our research and intel, or interview one of our members, please email contact@caad.info.

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