Prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Europeans claimed they were successfully moving away from modern agriculture and conventional energy thanks to the organic™ manufacturing process and solar power. 

What they left out was that the "organic" food they were buying was from Russia, where either Russia invented magic or they simply swapped fields to being called organic, or it was a lie.(1) The biggest hypocrisy of European culture is pretending that buying food through a European company that buys it from Russia is not giving money to Russia. They use the same trick to continue to be reliant on Russian energy

As they have become more reliant on domestic production of food, their food safety has become sloppy, and now foot and mouth disease, caused by spread of Aphthovirus, has caused countries worried about introducing it into their borders to create Epidemiological Tariffs. In the case of England, that tariff is a 100% ban on meat or dairy products from the EU unless it has gone through rigorous disease testing at a government port.



Europeans won't starve, it affects common food animals, not produce, but England is also preventing people from bringing back dairy, so Brits who believe holistic, unaged, raw milk cheese has supernatural health powers will have to wait a week or two until it is contained again.

The timing is not great in any case. The dollar is falling - President George Bush also did that, probably to penalize Europe for not helping take down Baathist dictator in Iraq - and that means Europe must spend a lot more to sell its subsidized food elsewhere. With less food allowed to be sold, their economic malaise could get even worse.

It gives Europeans some idea what their world would be like if they ever did what Sri Lanka did and listen to European environmentalists about food, and marketing claims that organic farming can feed people. The rich will be fine, it is everyone else that would suffer.

(1) It's impossible to tell the difference unless shoppers buy $100,000 in test equipment. There is no way for someone in a store to distinguish a modern pesticide from an old one used in organic food, or a GMO from an organic-certified strain created in a lab using mutagenesis. They just believe.