The farmers have every right to protest as anyone else. May as well do it in the city where it will attract attention.
They are adding nitrogen and phosphates etc, but they send the production to cities. We need food.
I generally prefer soft authoritarianism, but Their actions make sense in their minds.
Oh definitely... I don't argue with the right to protest... however, having the right and exercising it doesn't neccessarily make for a productive stance for your cause! Due to the fact that I live in a city that is both the Dutch government seat and home to a few international courts... I do get to see slightly more than a normal share of protests. There are a few where I do question the effectiveness of such an action... I'm curious and generally hard to put out... so, the protests don't really bother me too much and sometimes I will go a learn about what it is... but I would argue that most people would be really annoyed and would have a negative reaction to the cause instead. Thus, is it really a good way to publicise your cause? After all... not all publicity is good publicity!
Yes... I answered the problem of food/pollution in a previous comment. So, I'll be a touch on the brief side here... for better or worse, our global food production is balanced towards volume and profit... no moral judgement, that is where we are. It has good things (feeding masses) and bad things (pollution and lack of sustainability)... however, it is possible that we have reached a point in time where we need to re-balance this.(across all sectors, to properly price pollution...). I think this will require adjustments from both industry and consumers... however, there appears to be a lack of will to realise that any re-balancing is going to cause pain all around... and thus, we get stuck and pass the problem to the future... That said, we all do this... I am as guilty as anyone else... I do what I think I can and am willing to do... but I'm sure it is possible (perhaps even necessary) to do more.
I can see how it would get annoying living in political capital.
Downtown Seoul is pretty much a constant protest and it gets annoying. I guess I'm more sympathetic to the causes I support. However, some of them (in Korea it's the nationalistic ones) are absolutely ridiculous. They have massive demonstrations over actions from their neighbors all the time, but it's not quite clear what this will accomplish since foreign nations are not accountable and the government can't really do much other than ignore or escalate.
Generally, people in agriculture are at complete odds with the city and it's a tough part of the modern world because they still make up a huge part of the actual land area and their incomes are really insecure compared to salaried workers.
Food is definitely polluting a lot and cash crops reign supreme. The meat industry and some of these tropical fruits and nuts travel very far and have a huge ecological footprint. The oil inputs alone are quiet large, never mind the water use and absolute dependancy on a stable climate.
Our diets are hardly natural in any sense of the word.
Part of the problem is the huge hostility towards GM foods (it's like nuclear - a lot of anti-scientific info out there) and those are literally the only ticket out of industrialized farming other than a drastic change in diet. If we aren't going to embrace GM, we have to wait for cheap and abundant energy (and a ton of money) to do it hydroponically in verticle farms.
Weird, I wouldn't have pictured Koreans to be the protest and demonstrating sort of culture! How little I know!
I just read the people who live nearby are so fed up, they want to have one weekday per week and one weekend day per month when protests are banned from certain public spaces. I imagine it would be on a rotating basis...but I also imagine fierce protests against such a decision.