The demands of the farmers, linked to the European mobilizations, which were born “spontaneously” are traveling through Spain these days on the back of their tractors. “The countryside wakes up” is one of the slogans they have 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 stripes have not been able to solve.
The protest, which has not been called by the majority associations, has channeled a malaise that has been brewing for years. There are many complaints that the sector focuses on the continued reduction in prices and the increase in production costs, the absence of generational change, competition from products that come from outside or the excess of regulations and laws that must be complied 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 abandon. Change your job or look for work in the big city.
But beyond these legitimate complaints, in the “countryside revolt” we see in the background an opportunism of the political parties to take advantage of the problems of farmers and ranchers. It is not only the competition that Vox and PP face in some communities where the popular ones ceded the agricultural ministries to those of Santiago Abascal. These days, photographs proliferate of political leaders dressed in boots, visiting farms and farms, posing next to cows or demanding extraordinary plenary sessions to address the precarious situation of the primary sector.
Which makes many wonder where these political formations were yesterday. Because the regulations, decrees and laws that grip and suffocate them come precisely from these parties that have sat in the European Commission, governments, regional executives or city councils. Today politicians get on the tractor, but they have been legislating the rural environment for years from their offices with an urban vision of what agroforestry management should be, pitting the countryside and the city, farmers against urbanites.
Catalonia is not immune to these protests and, after yesterday’s mobilization, today they plan to take their tractors on a slow march to Barcelona. Added to this is the drought and the criticism of the excessive bureaucratization of the Generalitat, which forces them to spend more time working as managers than to tilling the fields or taking care of their animals. They say that there are fewer and fewer of them and that they have become the bad guys in the movie, accused of climate change and ending biodiversity. We will see how the mobilization evolves and if the protests entail any changes that will serve to oxygenate the sector.
Today everyone is in solidarity with the farmers, but tons of products that are not exactly kilometer zero will continue to arrive at supermarkets and at cheaper prices.
