The demands of farmers, linked to the European mobilizations, which are born in a “spontaneous” way, are these days touring Spain on horseback on their tractors. “The countryside has woken up” is one of the slogans coined to protest the situation in which the primary sector is immersed. Their complaints are not new. It is a structural problem that administrations of all political colors have not been able to solve.
The protest, which has not been called by the majority associations, has channeled an unease accumulated for years. There are many complaints that the sector focuses on the continued reduction of prices and the rise of production costs, the absence of generational relief, the competition of products that come from outside or the excess of regulations and laws that they must comply with. One decree, then another, later one more will arrive and so they add up, until they say that the future of their farms becomes unviable and they have to leave. Change jobs or look for work in the big city.
But beyond these legitimate complaints, in the “revolt of the countryside” an opportunism of the political parties to profit from the problems of farmers and ranchers can be glimpsed. It is not only the competition between Vox and the PP in some communities where the popular ones ceded the Ministries of Agriculture to Santiago Abascal. These days the photographs of political leaders dressed in boots, visiting farms and exploitations, photographed next to cows demanding extraordinary meetings to address the precarious situation of the primary sector proliferate.
And this makes many wonder where these political formations were yesterday. Because the regulations, decrees and laws that hold them back and suffocate them come precisely from these parties that have sat in the European Commission, governments, regional executives or town councils. Today the politicians get on the tractor, but for years they have been legislating the rural environment from offices with an urban vision of what agroforestry management should be, pitting the countryside against the city, farmers against urbanites.
Catalonia is no stranger to these protests and after yesterday’s mobilization today they plan to take the tractors on a slow march to Barcelona. Add to this the drought and the criticism of the excessive bureaucratization of the Generalitat which forces them to devote more time to exercising as managers than to plowing the field or taking care of the animals. They say that there are fewer and fewer of them and that they have become the villains of the film, that they are accused of climate change and of ending biodiversity. It will be seen how the mobilization evolves and if the protests lead to any changes that serve to oxygenate the sector.
Today, everyone is in solidarity with the farmers, but tons of products that are not exactly zero kilometer and at cheaper prices will continue to arrive in the supermarkets.