At least 1,300 farmers from across Europe lined the streets of Brussels with their tractors at the annual summit of European Union (EU) leaders on Feb. 1 to protest policies they claim threaten to put them out of business, according to Bloomberg and other news sources.

The latest demonstration against restrictive “net zero” and other government policies gained traction over the past week as owners of small and family-owned farms from France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Great Britain and other EU countries made their way to Belgium to surround the EU Parliament headquarters building.

The mostly peaceful protest was punctuated by police deploying water cannons and shooting rubber bullets, and by farmers breaking through barricades to throw eggs and set off fireworks, small fires and smoke bombs, according to Zerohedge. The farmers also toppled a statue, France24 reported.

Jose Maria Castilla, representing a Spanish union, said, “We want to stop these crazy laws that come every single day from the European Commission.”

Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo, who met with the protesters, said it was important to listen to the farmers and promised to add their concerns to the summit agenda, according to PBS. “They face gigantic challenges,” De Croo said.

The protests came as EU leaders discussed — and passed by a vote of 27-0 — the latest $50 billion aid package for Ukraine.

Jean-Francois Deflandre, a farmer in Halle, a town near Brussels, lashed out at European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen for having “the audacity to go to Kyiv” but not having “the courage to come and see us,” The Associated Press reported.

“If you see … how many people … are here today, and if you see it’s all over Europe, … you must have hope,” said Belgian farmer Kevin Bertens, adding, “You need us. Help us!”

‘It’s an all-out war on farmers’

Farmer protests have been brewing across Europe for the past several months, with France currently the epicenter of the revolt.

Farmers last week blocked roads around Paris, burned tires and spread manure and straw in the foyers of administrative buildings. They later won some concessions from the government, including tax breaks, financial support and a crackdown on unfair competition.

Farmers in Germany and Italy likewise blocked traffic to gain the attention of political leaders and the public, as did Polish farmers on their border with Ukraine. Farmers from Ireland, Scotland, Greece, Romania and Lithuania have also joined the protests.

The government of the Netherlands first lit the fuse for current tensions by attempting to impose “voluntary” buyouts or seize farms outright under a climate policy to cut carbon and nitrogen emissions.

The Dutch farmer revolt against such policies — including plans to cut the country’s livestock production in half — goes back to at least 2019.

Lorcan Roche Kelly, editor at Irish Farmers Journal and a former cattle farmer from Ireland — where the government wants to cull 200,000 cattle — said on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast that a combination of factors has made many EU farmers furious. Those factors include climate obligations, economic conditions, government regulation and free trade deals.

Zerohedge said farmers were protesting against having to “finance a so-called ‘green agenda.’”

Seamus Bruner, author of “Controligarchs: Exposing the Billionaire Class, their Secret Deals, and the Globalist Plot to Dominate Your Life,” said the uprisings are a direct result of efforts to control the global food system by elites working through institutions like the EU Parliament, the United Nations (U.N.) and the World Economic Forum (WEF).

“It’s an all-out war on farmers by multinational agricultural conglomerates under the guise of saving the planet,” Bruner told The Defender. The war is primarily targeting “the small-scale, smallholder, family-owned farm industry,” he said.

Farmers are rising up against “net zero and Agenda 2030,” Bruner said, citing policies ranging from fertilizer restrictions to methane reductions that are causing small farmers to run their businesses at a loss.

Companies that have the most to gain by shutting down small farmers include Yara, Royal Dutch Shell, Bayer and Dow Chemical, according to Bruner. All are partners with the WEF and claim to have climate-change solutions like climate-friendly fertilizers and cow flatulence vaccines while being among “the biggest earth polluters,” he said.

“These are not political issues” for farmers or for the people of the world, Bruner said. “These are existential issues.”

‘You control the food, you control the people’

Bruner conceded that the globalists are pushing precision fermentation and insect and fake meat proteins. But he said their No. 1 goal is to “transfer power and control away from countries, away from individuals towards international institutions and corporations they control.”

“You control the food, you control the people,” he said. “And when they put your local farmer out of business and replace it with a factory farm owned by a multinational corporation, you don’t have control over your food system anymore.”

The prime strategy of the “controligarchs” is to buy up or create patentable products and turn them into requirements for participating in global food production, according to Bruner.

“A patent is like a monopoly,” Bruner said. “So they want to force us into a controlled food system with patented proteins, patented GMO [genetically modified organism] seeds and patented fertilizers, where they own all the patents and they get all the profits.”

Companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have dozens, if not hundreds, of patented proteins, he said.

Controlling agricultural production standards is another way globalists are working to take over the food system. Bruner cited the “Leading Harvest Farmland Management Standard certification,” calling it “a signal that you’re going to comply with the World Economic Forum and Agenda 2030 climate goals.”

“And that’s very expensive, so local farmers will not be able to compete and will go out of business,” Bruner said.

Bill Gates, who has bought thousands of acres of farmland in the U.S. and is investing in agrochemical companies, is sure to adhere to the standard, Bruner said.

This is part of Gates’ and the globalists’ “embrace, extend and extinguish (or exterminate) strategy” — the same approach he used to put competitors out of business when he ran Microsoft, said Bruner, who called Gates “at core a cutthroat capitalist and monopolist.”

Bruner called the recent headline claiming the carbon footprint of homegrown food to be 5 times greater than conventionally grown food “absurd” and just another salvo in the war on small-time food production.

“The people who are talking about carbon footprints and telling you that your carbon footprint is too high, rest assured, theirs is higher than yours,” he said.

‘How will people feed themselves?’

Writing about the Brussels farmer protests on Feb. 1, Substack author and The HighWire reporter Jefferey Jaxen compared green agenda policies to Mao Zedong’s disastrous Great Leap Forward that sought to collectivize Chinese farming beginning in 1958.

That effort resulted in a reported 30 million deaths from malnutrition and starvation before it was scrapped in 1961.

Jaxen cited an article by Alex Newman exploring the roots of current globalist “sustainability” ideology and the war on farmers. Newman, who found a section of the U.N.’s 1976 Vancouver Declaration to be particularly enlightening, wrote:

“The agreement stated that ‘land cannot be treated as an ordinary asset controlled by individuals’ and that private land ownership is ‘a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth, therefore contributes to social injustice.’

“‘Public control of land use is therefore indispensable,’ the U.N. declaration said, a prelude to the World Economic Forum’s now infamous ‘prediction’ that by 2030, ‘you’ll own nothing.’”

A more recent paper, “The Future of Urban Consumption in a 1.5°C World,” published in 2019 by the University of Leeds, ARUP and C40 Cities, contains “progressive and ambitious targets for ‘food consumption interventions’ which involve a strict 2,500 calorie limit per day for each citizen and zero meat and dairy,” Jaxen wrote.

With the implications of shutting down local farmers and controlling food systems globally, Jaxen asked, “How will people feed themselves?”

He predicted that innovations in the “creeping” synthetic food industry would be insufficient “to easily replace the mass, global reduction of farms at the speed being attempted.”

“Few explanations make sense unless viewed through the lens of depopulation, control, and societal consolidation using food as a weapon,” Jaxen said.

According to Bruner, the globalist elites are very open about their fears about “catastrophic overpopulation.” He cited Gates’ goal to reduce global population by 10 or 15%, saying, “That’s more than a billion people.”

“And it is certainly true that you are the carbon that these globalist elites want to reduce,” Bruner said.

“We know that profit is not their only motivation — there’s certainly an ideological component to it,” Bruner said. “You look at whether it’s Bud Light or Target — they can take a financial hit and still just be fine.”

The globalists do not have a drastic reduction target in mind, as Bruner sees it. “They’re hoping to find a balance where they’re still making enormous windfall profits and at the same time achieving their goals to reduce global population,” he said.

Forced food shortages, combined with inflation and neverending wars will likely lead to an economic crash, according to Bruner, after which the vulture capitalists can swoop in to buy whatever’s left — including farms and food companies — for pennies on the dollar, leaving just a few corporations in control.

“That’s the name of the game — causing booms and busts via Federal Reserve monetary and fiscal policies,” Bruner said. “They’ve been doing it for over a century.”

“They only want a handful of players,” he said, noting how consolidation has been happening in every industry from airlines and banks to food and telecommunications.

“Fewer choices means less freedom. And it means that these multinational corporations can push you around,” he said.

For humanity to regain its power, Bruner said the “problems caused by global forces must be combated at the local level.”

He said:

“You have to get involved in your community. You need to be supporting your local businesses and voting with your dollars, making sure that you’re not spending your money and funding your opposition.

“Share news from independent sources to help wake people up to the lies of the mainstream media.

“Get involved in your local school board meetings. Education is possibly the biggest area where we need to fight back.

“It’s going to be a long-term battle. But I’m optimistic, and the farmer uprising is giving me hope for the future.”