Farmers have become like religious figures in the developed world. Nobody dares to criticize them, out of some kind of misplaced guilt for living in cities and shopping in supermarkets. Well, we need to get over this cultural cringe towards farmers because it’s killing us. The subsidies they receive should be going to their poor compatriots. The tariffs that protect them should be abolished so that their competitors from Africa and elsewhere can get a leg up at last. And their disastrous industrial techniques need to be regulated to oblivion: pesticides, nitrate pollution, over-irrigation, and obviously the moral catastrophe that is factory farming. Farmers have too much power just about everywhere, partly because they’re over-represented in politics yes, but we only tolerate that because so many people still think that agriculture is special in some mythological way. Well it’s not. It’s a sector like any other and farmers are just ordinary citizens with too much power. They need to be brought down to size.