Crops tailor-made using new gene-splicing techniques should face fewer regulations than genetically modified organisms, EU negotiators agreed Thursday.  Critics are calling it a GMO rebrand; proponents say they are bringing science back in style. The late-night negotiations — dragged across the finish line with the help of the European Parliament’s far right — capped years of haggling over how to ease the path for a new generation of gene-editing technologies developed since 2001, when the EU’s notoriously strict regulations on GMOs were adopted. The deal’s backers tout NGT’s potential to breed climate-resilient plants that need less space and fertilizers to grow, and they argue the EU is already behind global competitors using the technology. But critics fear the EU is opening the door to GMOs and giving too much power to major seed corporations.   The agreement opens the door to “unlabelled — yet patented — GM crops and foods, boosting corporate market power while undermining the rights of farmers and consumers,” warned Franziska Achterberg of Save Our Seeds, an NGO opposing GMOs, calling the deal a “complete sell-out.” INNOVATION VS. CAPITULATION European lawmakers, however, were responding to fears that outdated GMO rules were holding back progress on more recent genomic tweaks with a lighter touch — and throttling innovations worth trillions of euros.  Currently, most plants edited using new precision breeding technology — which can involve reordering their DNA, or inserting genes from the same plant or species — are covered by the same strict rules governing GMOs that contain foreign DNA.  The deal struck by the EU’s co-legislators creates two classes for these more recent techniques. “NGT1” crops — plants that have only been modified using new tech to a limited extent and are thus considered equivalent to naturally occurring strains — would be eligible for less stringent regulations. In contrast, “NGT2” plants, which have had more genetic changes and traditional GMOs will continue to face the same rules that have been in place for over 20 years.  Speaking before the final round of negotiations, Danish Agriculture Minister Jacob Jensen argued that the bloc needs to have NGTs in its toolbox if it wants to compete with China and the U.S., which are already making use of the new tech.  The deal “is about giving European farmers a fair chance to keep up” echoed center-right MEP Jessica Polfjärd, the lead negotiator on the Parliament’s side of the deal. She added that the technology will allow for the bloc to “produce more yield on less land, reduce the use of pesticides, and plant crops that can resist climate change.” Polfjärd had struggled to keep MEPs on the same page even as the bill advanced into interinstitutional negotiations. Persistent objections from left-wing lawmakers, including a key Socialist, forced her to embrace support of lawmakers from the far-right Patriots for Europe, breaking the cordon sanitaire.  Martin Häusling, the Green parliamentary negotiator, called the result miserable, saying it gives a “carte blanche for the use of new genetic engineering in plants” that threatens GMO-free agriculture.  DAVID AND GOLIATH In a hard-won victory for industry, the final legislation allows for NGT crops to be patented.  For Matthias Berninger, executive vice president at the global biotech giant Bayer, it’s just good business. “When we talk about startup culture in Europe … we also need to provide reasonable intellectual property protections,” he said in an interview. Yet safeguards meant to prevent patent-holders from accumulating too much market power don’t go far enough for Arche Noah. The NGO advocating for seed diversity in Europe, warned of a “slow-motion collapse of independent breeding, seed-diversity and farmer autonomy” if the deal makes it to law as is. They have MEP Christophe Clergeau, the Parliament’s Social-Democrat negotiator who led the last-ditch resistance.  In an interview on Thursday morning, he gave it five to 10 years before small breeders have disappeared from the bloc and farmers are “totally dependent” on the likes of Bayer and other huge companies. (Berninger said Bayer doesn’t want to inhibit small breeders by enforcing patents on them.) The deal now needs to be endorsed by the Parliament and the Council of the EU before the new rules are adopted. At the end of the day, it’s up to consumers to pass judgment, DG SANTE’s food safety and innovation chief Klaus Berend said Thursday, appearing at the POLITICO Sustainable Future Summit directly before the late-night negotiations began.  “We know that in Europe, the general attitude toward genetically modified organisms and anything around it is rather negative,” he cautioned. The key question for new genomic techniques is “how will they be accepted by consumers?” Their acceptance, Berend added, “is not a given.” Rebecca Holland contributed to this report.

OPTICS EUROPE’S CLIMATE REFUGEES: THE GREEK COMMUNITIES WIPED OFF THE MAP Villages in the country’s agricultural breadbasket lie half-abandoned two years after catastrophic floods. Text by NEKTARIA STAMOULI Photos by LOUIZA VRADI in Palamas, Greece Above, a house destroyed by Cyclone Daniel two summers ago, in Keramidi. Next, 70-year-old Zoe Papaioannou. Her family left Palamas after the floods and relocated to nearby Metamorfosi. She lives in a two-bedroom apartment with her son Konstantinos Papaioannou, his wife Aglaia and their two children Panayiotis  and Zoe, aged 8 and 4. In a cramped two-bedroom apartment, Konstantinos Papaioannou lives with his wife, two children and his mother. The 51-year-old farmer’s former home in the village of Metamorfosi is an empty shell: mold in the plaster, the flood line marked by a dirty ring above the door. They are not going back. Two years after Cyclone Daniel turned Greece’s farm belt into an inland sea, Metamorfosi is one of the dozens of villages that remain half-abandoned. The families who fled say they are among Europe’s first climate refugees: displaced by extreme weather, priced out of nearby rentals and stuck in bureaucratic limbo as the government studies whether, and where, to rebuild entire communities. “Only the walls and windows remain of our house,” Papaioannou said. “It’s impossible to rebuild from scratch.” The rent for their apartment is state-subsidized, but payments arrive late and the paperwork is heavy. The subsidy is due to expire, and the family is hoping for an extension. The government promised to relocate the village to safer ground; two years on, residents say the relocation studies are still incomplete. 51-year-old farmer Konstantinos Papaioannou and his son Panayiotis. Next, a red graffiti marks a house for demolition. Below, a bar destroyed by Cyclone Daniel in Metamorfosi.  38-year-old plumber and farmer Konstantinos Goutelas, left for Palamas and is slowly doing some renovation work on his own in his house in Vlocho For Papaioannou’s 70-year-old mother, Zoe Papaioannou, leaving her home is a rupture she never wanted. “Families with small children don’t return to the villages. If my husband were alive, we would have returned. I was born there, and I want to die there. But I’ll go wherever my children go.”  The region has long been subject to flooding. The elder Papaioannou remembers being lifted into a boat during a flood when she was 2, but what happened on the night of September 5, 2023, when the water reached the roof tiles, was something different. She grabbed an icon of the Virgin Mary, a blood-pressure monitor and her health booklet before relatives got her out. She regrets not saving the family photos. Back in Metamorfosi, Konstantinos Tsioukas, 60, said he and his wife managed to save only their wedding crowns. “We don’t want to return here. We will always be afraid of flooding. Why should I go through that drama again? Why should I put my children through this?”  Advertisement He estimates that about 40 families have returned to the village, even though no government official has inspected the houses for safety. Those who came back did so because they had trouble with rent. He travels back and forth to Metamorfosi to care for his land, a 2-hour drive, but neither he nor his children want to farm.  “It’s not worth the trouble,” he said. “Do I want to starve my children? No.” At the village café, the only establishment that was undamaged enough to reopen, Fani Ntantou, 55, said business has trickled to just a few dozen people coming for coffee, tsipouro or meze. “If I were 30, we would leave. We would go to Germany and wash dishes,” she said. “This was a lively village with three or four cafés, but now we only have funerals.” A REGION UNDER WATER Cyclone Daniel dumped more than a year’s worth of rain on central Greece in just hours. According to the EU’s Copernicus monitoring service, some 750 square kilometers, roughly the area of New York City, of the Thessalian plain were inundated, much of it farmland. The plain accounts for 25 percent of Greece’s agricultural production, with much of the country’s wheat, barley, chickpeas, lentils and pistachios grown there.  “There was absolutely no planning whatsoever,” said Dimitris Kouretas, Thessaly’s regional governor. He indicated three maps in his office in the city of Larissa that showed where the government has promised to implement flood prevention projects, including modifications to riverbeds and dams in the mountains, none of which have been completed.   “The current system can only handle about 40 percent of the water volume of Cyclone Daniel,” said Kouretas. Above, Fani Ntantou, 55. She owns a local coffee shop and is one of the very few that have returned to Metamorfosi, together her 67-year old husband. Bottom, George Didagelos, seen below in a destroyed breeding unit of his now-abandoned pig farm, in Koskina. To make matters worse, climate change is bringing not just flooding — but drought. Drier summers, combined with the overuse of groundwater, have led to significant shortages. Farmers in the villages are fighting about how the water will be distributed. “In winter, we work to maintain the embankments so that we don’t flood,” said Konstantinos Tasiopoulos, a 77-year-old farmer who left the floodplains for the city of Karditsa after Cyclone Daniel. “In summer, we don’t have enough water for irrigation. Soon, we won’t even have anything to drink. It will become a desert.” The 2023 flood also killed some 100,000 animals, a problem compounded by the culling of tens of thousands of sheep and goats following an outbreak of fast-spreading illnesses.  Advertisement “This place was bustling with life, there were always thousands of pigs,” said George Didagelos, a pig farmer in the village of Koskina and the president of the Greek livestock association who lost 6,600 pigs to the cyclone. “I still get nightmares of that night.”  It was so difficult to find help to remove the carcasses that the remains of the drowned pigs can still be seen in Didagelos’ now-abandoned breeding farm. REBUILD OR RELOCATE Even as villagers remain scattered across the region, some are debating whether it’s better to rebuild or to relocate. Before the flood, the village of Vlochos had about 400 residents. Today, fewer than a third have returned. A recent referendum on whether to relocate divided the community, leaving some residents refusing to speak to one another. While 65 percent of the population said they wanted to leave, authorities have answered that this is not enough. “They tell us that if we want relocation, we all have to agree. But this is impossible,” said Vassilis Kalogiannis, the head of the village.  Konstantinos Tsioukas, a 60-year old farmer, and his wife moved from Metamorfosi to Palamas following the floods. Vassilis Kalogiannis, president of Vlochos: “We asked for reinforcement of the embankments. The pumping station was not functioning properly. The rivers had not been properly cleaned; dams should have been built up in the mountains.” “It’s like a family, they rarely agree unanimously. The parents decide. A decision should be made by the state,” Ioannis Koukas, 52, Kalogiannis’ predecessor. Vasilis Galanis, a 54-year-old craftsman and painter, now lives in Karditsa with his wife and three children. He said that if the relocation doesn’t go ahead, he is considering leaving the country. “I’m not going to spend a fortune here and lose it again. My children aren’t going to stay anyway.” Advertisement

KYIV — The drone struck just after sunrise. Oleksandr Hordiienko, a 58-year-old farmer from Ukraine’s southern Kherson region, was driving across his war-scarred fields when the Russian munition slammed into his car. At his funeral in Odesa in early September, mourners called him “the farmer with a shotgun,” a defiant hero who resisted occupation for three years. He cleared thousands of mines from the 1,000 hectares his cooperative shared with a dozen other farmers and patrolled the skies with a Turkish shotgun and jerry-rigged electronics to protect his workers from drones. For Ukraine’s farmers, his death symbolized the resilience of the men and women who continue to produce grain, milk and potatoes under fire. For Europe it was a reminder that the “Ukrainian farmer” is not just an agribusiness boss controlling vast swathes of land, but also includes men like Hordiienko, fighting to protect their land with a shotgun. Across the EU, such nuance is often lost. Hostility to Ukraine’s mega farms and their ability to drown Europe in highly competitive exports has often shifted the bloc’s politics against Kyiv, despite the war. Ukraine’s vast expanses of highly fertile “black earth” have long made it the “breadbasket of Europe” — something many in the EU see as a threat. In Poland, farmers’ border blockades over Ukrainian grain imports have soured public opinion on Kyiv’s war efforts. In Hungary, ministers have cast Ukraine’s accession to the bloc as a threat to EU farm subsidies, warning that money meant for European farmers risks being siphoned away. And in France, President Emmanuel Macron moved last year to join Poland in pushing for tighter quotas on Ukrainian cereals to appease his own restive farmers. Behind all of this looms the image of Ukrainian farm giants and oligarch-owned holdings — MHP, Kernel, UkrLandFarming — that are big enough to rival the agri powerhouses of Brazil or Argentina. These few dozen companies dominate Ukraine’s exports and have become the face of the country’s agriculture in Europe, looming as an existential threat at the border. The reality on the ground in Ukraine is more complex, and includes tens of thousands of smaller commercial farms and millions of households who have kept the country fed throughout the war. LEAVING WAS NOT AN OPTION Akhmil Alkhadzhi, whose father came from Syria, runs a family company that cultivates 3,500 hectares. In Europe that would be a mega-farm; in Ukraine, it’s considered middling. He built it from scratch, starting with just 20 hectares in the 1990s and expanding steadily with his wife. When Russia invaded, wheat prices collapsed to $70 a ton from $250 to $300 before the war, and sunflower seeds plunged to barely $110 per ton from about $600 to $650. To keep the business alive, Alkhadzhi sold his apartment abroad. “We stayed without an apartment, but with a business,” he said. He employs 60 workers — “that’s 300 or 400 lives depending on us.” Hostility to Ukraine’s mega farms and their ability to drown Europe in highly competitive exports has often shifted the bloc’s politics against Kyiv, despite the war. | Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images The war was only part of the challenge. Droughts have cut his wheat yields from 6 or 7 tons to just 2 tons per hectare, and with banks demanding interest rates of over 20 percent he has had to improvise, renting low-till machinery to conserve water before scraping together enough to upgrade. Climate change is pushing him toward sustainability choices even without EU rules.  Yet leaving was never an option. “Three days before the war, my family said if Russians come close, we will go. But when it started, no one left. We stayed. We were more needed here.” CHAMPAGNE AND COMBINE HARVESTERS A day before Hordiienko’s death, Alkhadzhi found himself among the guests at a very different kind of gathering. At an elite yacht club on the southern edge of Kyiv, prosecco sprayed from a fountain as a live band played pop classics. European diplomats mingled with Ukrainian ministry officials and the owners of some of the country’s largest farms. This was a reception hosted by UCAB, Ukraine’s biggest agribusiness lobby, providing a gilded day of meaty dishes, strong spirits and relentless networking. The spectacle was as much about politics as farming, a show of survival, clout and ambition after three years of war. Even Ukraine’s agri barons have been battered, losing swathes of leased land and infrastructure to occupation and bombardment. Yet they remain global players, with balance sheets and export volumes big enough to compete on world markets. What many farmers in Poland or France fear is the scale of these companies and the possibility that Ukrainian grain or poultry could undercut them. Anton Zhemerdeev, a brisk, fresh-faced manager at TAS Agro, shrugged when asked about those fears. His company controls 80,000 hectares across five Ukrainian regions — a number so outlandish in EU terms that it borders on science fiction. The average European farm is just 17 hectares. “Eighty thousand hectares is big, yes,” he said with a grin, “but we don’t sell everything to Europe.” Much of TAS Agro’s grain heads to Asia and the Middle East. The EU, he argued, is just one market among many. But unlike Asia, it is also a political one, with borders that can slam shut overnight and quotas that shift with the political winds.  When Poland closed its border in 2023, Ukraine’s harvest was redirected to the Romanian port of Constanța instead. “Poland missed the chance to modernize. Romania took it,” he said, referring to investments in ports and railways that captured the trade. Another producer at the yacht club, Ihor Shyliuk, whose Cygnet Agrocompany runs 30,000 hectares and a sugar factory in western Ukraine, fumed at the European Commission’s tight quotas. Serbia, he noted, enjoys bigger export allowances to the EU than does Ukraine, even though it’s a fraction of its size. “Why is our sugar quota smaller than Moldova’s?” he also asked. “Politics, not economics.” Those quotas are due to improve under a deal struck between the Commission and Kyiv over the summer, though Shyliuk remained skeptical, arguing that politics will continue to outweigh economics in the EU’s farm trade. The presence of these giants and medium-sized players is exactly what makes Ukraine’s EU bid so sensitive. In Poland, farmers’ border blockades over Ukrainian grain imports have soured public opinion on Kyiv’s war efforts. | Andriy Andriyenko/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images Kyiv formally applied for EU membership days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, and has since begun accession talks that promise to be lengthy and fraught. Agriculture looms especially large because farm products are one of Ukraine’s biggest exports and trade in them is already a contentious issue, pitting Kyiv against the EU’s powerful farm lobbies and the national governments that back them. OVERLOOKED MILLIONS Step away from the yacht club and the massive combine harvesters, however, and yet another Ukraine comes into view. Alongside Ukraine’s farm giants are tens of thousands of registered family farms, typically 50–100 hectares in size, selling into domestic markets and anchoring local rural economies. Nearly 4 million households also work the land, cultivating over 6 million hectares. Many tend only a hectare or two, but together they produce 95 percent of the country’s potatoes, 85 percent of its vegetables, 80 percent of its fruit and berries and three-quarters of its milk. Together, these farms and plots are the backbone of Ukraine’s food security, yet they are often invisible in the debate. During the war, many families have relied almost entirely on their own milk, potatoes and chickens. For some, farming is not just a business, but a lifeline. That lopsided map of Ukraine’s agriculture — comprising towering agriholdings at one end and millions of smaller farms and household plots at the other— was drawn long before the war. It’s the legacy of Soviet collectivization and the land reforms that followed, a process that left families with small parcels and allowed companies to lease and consolidate those remnants into today’s sprawling estates. The top 10 holdings each control hundreds of thousands of hectares. But without the smallholders, Ukraine’s villages would have starved long ago. The debate in Brussels often overlooks this complexity, even if the fears of European farmers about the overall size of Ukraine are not unfounded. Ukraine’s largest farms operate on a scale incomprehensible in Europe, with vertical integration and global reach. Their land runs into the hundreds of thousands of hectares. They can produce wheat cheaper than anyone in the EU. Corruption scandals have fed suspicions, from ministers accused of seizing state land to regional officials caught taking bribes for quarantine certificates. But the fixation on oligarchs obscures a more complicated reality. The debate in Brussels reduces Ukraine to a threat — vast, deregulated, and impossible to absorb without crushing EU farmers. Yet for every holding with a yacht club cocktail reception, there are thousands of family farms adapting to EU rules, millions of households growing potatoes in backyards, and many farmers like Hordiienko, fighting and dying in the fields. The war has also nudged Ukraine’s farm economy to adapt. With ports under attack and borders often restricted, producers are putting more focus on processed goods such as sunflower oil, poultry and sugar, which already make up nearly half of agri-food exports. For Zhemerdeev of TAS Agro, even 80,000 hectares is just one part of a bigger picture. What matters, he insisted, is that Ukraine’s fields are not just symbols of geopolitical competition. They are home to people — some rich, some struggling, some heroic — all bound by the same stubborn conviction: “The land is worth fighting for.”

LONDON — The U.K. government has ruled out stepping in to save two of the country’s key bioethanol producers, Vivergo Fuels and Ensus, from closure — after signing a trade deal allowing U.S. ethanol to flood the British market. The government decided not to provide direct financial support, leaving 160 workers at Vivergo’s Saltend-based plant facing redundancy, with layoffs set to begin on Monday. Ensus’ plant in Redcar is also at risk of closure. In a statement, a government spokesperson said: “We have worked closely with the companies since June to understand the financial challenges they have faced over the past decade, and have taken the difficult decision not to offer direct funding as it would not provide value for the taxpayer or solve the long-term problems the industry faces.” Vivergo’s future was thrown into doubt after the U.K.-U.S. trade deal, announced in May, opened the door to 1.4 billion liters of tariff-free American ethanol — almost equivalent to the size of the entire domestic market. The decision has wider implications for other industries and investment into Britain. Vivergo had been lined up to supply feedstock for a £1.25 billion sustainable aviation fuel facility backed by Meld Energy — a project now on hold. Over 12,000 U.K. wheat farmers supply Vivergo’s plant, which also produces high-protein animal feed. Meanwhile, Ensus, one of the U.K.’s only other bioethanol producers, supplies around 30 percent of the country’s commercial carbon dioxide — needed for soft drinks and medical use. “We recognize this is a difficult time for the workers and their families and we will work with trade unions, local partners and the companies to support them through this process,” said the government spokesperson. “We also continue to work up proposals that ensure the resilience of our CO2 supply in the long-term in consultation with the sector.” The decision will also prove unpopular with voters in Hull, with the Saltend chemical park just a 10-minute drive away. Reform UK’s Luke Campbell, who recently swept into office as Hull an East Yorkshire mayor with nearly 50,000 votes, told POLITICO: “Labour’s decision not to provide support, and not to change the clause in their U.S.-U.K. Trade deal is incredibly disappointing. It means job losses and closures for hard working people.”

CARDIFF, Wales — At the edge of a sprawling wheat field on the outskirts of Cardiff, arable farmer Richard Anthony sticks a shovel in the ground and offers up a fistful of soil for a sniff.  “The first thing [I do when] I walk into a field: I catch a handful of soil,” he says. “[The] first thing I do is smell it, to see if it smells healthy.” His mind is on climate change. The clump in his palm is indeed healthy — but it’s dry. It comes at the tail end of an unusually hot spring. Anthony and his wife, Lyn, are planting crops in increasingly short “weather windows,” dodging the wet days of the previous fall. “It does worry me,” he told POLITICO, acres of wheat plants swaying behind him. “But we, as farmers, have always had to adapt. And we’re having to adapt to climate change.” Farmers like the Anthonys are looking for guidance from the Senedd — the Labour-led devolved Welsh parliament down the road in Cardiff Bay. “Farming is seen as the biggest problem with climate change, and we’re not. We’re the only industry that can actually do something about it,” Anthony said. But Welsh ministers’ key environmental plans are in disarray, delayed for over a year after farmers angrily rejected proposals they say would hit jobs and livelihoods. Annoying farmers is bad news for Labour in Wales, a country where 90 percent of land is given over to agriculture. And it has consequences in Westminster, too, for a U.K. government that can’t afford another political bloody nose. Welsh national elections next May will be a crucial mid-term litmus test for the appeal of Keir Starmer’s embattled Labour. The 2026 Senedd vote is seen by party leaders in London “as a staging post between now and [the general election in] 2029,” said one Welsh union boss in February. Labour is going backward in Wales.  Welsh polls published Tuesday show Labour, in charge at the Senedd since 1999, dropping to third place, losing support to both populists Reform UK and nationalists Plaid Cymru. The party is being punished, experts say, for its own perceived inertia and a far too cozy relationship with Westminster. “The Welsh government are in a very difficult situation, in that both they are unpopular as incumbents and they’re also paying a price for the unpopularity of the U.K. Labour government,” said Jac Larner, a politics lecturer at Cardiff University. “So at the moment there is a general resistance, I think, to taking any tough decisions.”  THE CLIMATE MOMENT Faltering climate policy contributes to the sense that Welsh ministers are “losing perceptions of competence,” Larner argued. The challenge is substantial. Within the next decade, agriculture could become Wales’ largest source of emissions. To hit a U.K.-wide target of net zero by 2050, most emissions cuts will have to come from high-polluting sectors like farming. The Welsh government’s solution is the Sustainable Farming Scheme (SFS) — a program designed to help farmers adopt low-carbon activities like planting more trees. The thinking is that with the offer of cash, farmers will dedicate more of their land to mopping up planet-wrecking emissions, making the most of its natural potential to sequester carbon and store it deep in the soil. Wales should reap the benefits of these “natural carbon sinks,” says the U.K.’s independent climate advisers, the Climate Change Committee.  But ministers paused the SFS roll-out after initial plans, published in December 2023, provoked protests and a backlash over a draft 10 percent tree-planting target, which farmers said would cost thousands of agricultural jobs. The Welsh government says details will now be finalized this summer, with the scheme up and running in 2026. With 90 percent of its land used for farming, Wales is seeing instability over climate and agriculture policy. | Abby Wallace/POLITICO “I think we’ve come from such a bad place, it’s going to be quite hard to lift it back up,” said Abi Reader, a dairy farmer and deputy president of the National Farmers Union Cymru.  Behind Reader, on her farm in the Cardiff town of Wenvoe, a large shed groans as rows of cattle diligently shuffle into the parlour, waiting to be hooked up to clinking machines for milking. “It’s difficult to say whether we should be signing up to it [the SFS] or not, because we’ve got no details of any of the costings,” Reader said.  “We’re all business people at the end of the day and, you know, we’ve all already done our budgets for next year. And there’s nothing to go to a bank manager with and say: ‘I want to borrow this, or can you support me for that?’” ‘BANG, BANG, KICK A MAN’ The SFS has caused unrest on another politically sensitive topic: livestock. A Welsh government estimate suggested the scheme could reduce livestock numbers by as much as 120,000. If ministers in Cardiff follow separate CCC advice published in May — on how to hit climate goals by 2033 — cattle and sheep numbers in Wales need to fall by nearly a fifth. Some of this will come from wider trends toward lower meat and dairy consumption — but it will also be driven by policies like the SFS, which incentivize farmers to rely less on livestock. The Welsh government must “engage with farmers and their communities, and support them to diversify their incomes,” the CCC said. This advice has spooked farmers, who see a threat to years of family-owned businesses. “Would that mean I’d have to move away from here?” asked third-generation beef farmer Tom Rees in his kitchen in Cowbridge, gesturing to the fields beyond the window where his father and grandfather also farmed. His farm slopes downhill toward a patch of land that often floods when a neighboring river overflows. It’s sliced up into rectangular fields by colorful hedgerows that act as corridors for local wildlife and as shelter for his cows on sunny days — but planting hedges isn’t how Rees wants to earn a living. “I went to college to study agriculture, to come on the farm because I wanted to produce food,” he said. “I don’t want to plant a woodland.” Rees hopes to pass the farm on to his 15-month-old son Henry — but is worried about uncertainty over the SFS, as well as issues around bovine tuberculosis and inheritance tax changes. He said: “Dad’s left the farm in a better place than when he took it on. We want to take it on a bit further, so we could leave it for Henry. … [But] with the government in Westminster and the government in the Senedd — you just really feel, Why are we bothering? “It’s bang, bang, kick a man while you’re down. That’s what it feels like, and that’s what a lot of farmers feel like in Wales.” The Welsh government refused to comment on the SFS, confirming only that details will be published this month. A spokesperson said the government is “reviewing” the CCC’s advice, which will inform decisions on a new climate goal for Wales before the end of the year. “We’re trying to take forward a future for agriculture in Wales, which is to do with thriving, living businesses and communities within Wales,” Huw Irranca-Davies, Wales’ cabinet secretary for climate change and rural affairs, told POLITICO in an interview last year. ANNOYING VOTERS Labour’s support has traditionally been low in rural Wales, where votes flow instead to the Conservatives or Plaid Cymru. But the mess over agricultural policies is deepening Labour’s woes, argued Cardiff University’s Larner. “By annoying these people, you kind of block off the possibility that any of these people at all will vote Labour,” he said, “So it’s just a kind of narrowing of the vote pool in which you can fish for extra voters come other elections.” Meantime, Plaid Cymru and Reform are making their pitches to rural voters. “You have to take the farmers with you on this journey. And that’s one lesson, I think, that the Welsh government has learned the hard way,” said Llyr Gruffydd, Senedd member for North Wales and Plaid’s agriculture and rural affairs spokesperson. Plaid will “reassess” the SFS when more details are published, Gruffydd said. His party is not about to announce plans to “plow a different furrow,” he said, but he didn’t rule out ditching the unpopular scheme either. When Plaid sees the plans, Gruffydd argued, it can decide “whether this is something that we can pursue, whether we feel we need to amend it — or, God forbid, whether we have to say, let’s get back to the drawing board.” Nigel Farage’s Reform, riding high in the polls and fresh from smashing Labour in local elections in May, wants to scrap net-zero targets altogether. “Farmers want lower costs to stay afloat. Net stupid zero adds costs for no benefit,” said Deputy Leader Richard Tice. Reform is set to benefit, too, from anger over the fate of Welsh steelmaking. Thousands of job losses loom at the Port Talbot plant as it shifts to a lower-emitting electric arc furnace, a political gift to Farage when he argues that climate-friendly policies wreck traditional industries. “That’s the one big example we’ve seen of net-zero related policy, and is one of loss of jobs with not very much put in place to support workers to do anything different,” said Joe Rossiter, co-director at the Institute of Welsh Affairs. “When it all shakes out, I do think the fight will be Labour vs. Reform for the top spot,” said one Labour insider who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. The U.K. government “has been completely focused on making sure the transition to green steelmaking is as good as it can be.” Asked about the example of Port Talbot, Reader, the dairy farmer, was nervous about the precedent it set for other climate policies. “If they damage Welsh agriculture in the same way [as steel], I think that’s really letting down Wales,” she said.  ALL IN IT TOGETHER The Welsh government’s other big problem? It has cuddled up so tightly to Westminster that Labour’s performance in Cardiff will rebound in London and vice-versa. “There’s no ‘other’ for them to blame, because they’ve tied themselves very closely, rhetorically as well, to the U.K. government,” Larner said. Some Welsh Labour MPs defend the U.K. government’s record. “If you look at the amount of money that the Labour Party is investing in the agricultural sector, that shows a huge commitment to the industry,” said Henry Tufnell, Labour MP for Pembrokeshire. After months spent arguing the benefits of having Labour governments in both Cardiff and London, Senedd First Minister Eluned Morgan in May pivoted to emphasize the divide between them. Expect more attempts to put “clear red water” between the two camps, Larner said. Yet when Starmer addressed the Welsh Labour conference in north Wales last month, the old closeness was back. “Next year it’s a clear choice. Two Labour governments working together for the people of Wales … or risk rolling back all the progress we are making,” the prime minister said. As Starmer spoke, a clutch of farmers protested outside. ‘Starmer: farmer harmer,’ read one placard. Voters will say soon enough what they make of that bond between Labour in Wales and Westminster.