The difference is very obvious and my Carrefour supermarket even reduced the shelf space where these foods are displayed. Certain types of meat that used to be regularly available are no longer are (at all, ever), and I can only find them from specialty butcher shops which thankfully still exist in France (although they are noticeably fewer now than they used to be).

This is not an accident but, as the British farmer and activist Mark Byford (a.k.a. the Bowler Hat Farmer) lays out in this (highly recommended) interview, it is part of the global war on farming, comprising a barrage of administrative and regulatory measures designed to make farming unprofitable, incentivizing farmers not to produce food and encouraging them to sell their farms: it's war on carbon, war on nitrogen, war on bird flu and other viruses, war on Russian fertilizers, inheritance taxes, rewilding schemes, "get out of farming" payouts and burgeoning compliance rules and bureaucracies to oversee it all.

Raise weeds and grow rich!

For example, Byford explained that if you grow wheat in Britain, you can earn about £160 per acre. It's hard work and it involves considerable expense. At the same time, the government is promoting the so-called "set-aside" or rewilding schemes and will pay farmers £300-£400 per acre to let weeds grow on their land. For farmers, it's more income, less expense and less work. Another line of attack has been directed at milk production: farmers are locked into exclusive supply contracts with corporate buyers who often fail to collect the milk.

As a consequence, tens of thousands of liters a day are being simply dumped, causing farmers massive financial losses. Apparently, given the nature of their supply contracts, they have no way of recovering these losses. As a result, milk shortages appear at the same time as the farmers are forced to dump about half of their production. Egg shortage has been orchestrated under "bird flu" emergencies, justifying the culling of millions of birds.

72% less food

Food production is also being suffocated through regulatory measures. Active farmers are buried under the burgeoning regulatory requirements, forcing them to spend long hours filing endless forms to be compliant with burgeoning rules and regulations. Many of the new rules, including the "get out of farming payments scheme," effectively punish or discourage food production while incentivizing the farmers to sell their farms. Farmland is then often bought by global investment behemoths like BlackRock and Vanguard. The result is that livestock is gradually disappearing and food production is shrinking, which is by now obvious to see in our supermarkets. Now there are reports that the UK government is planning a mass culling of livestock towards the end of 2025.