Countryside unrest has erupted this winter in Germany. The country has been in turmoil for a week due to protests by its farmers against cuts in subsidies to the sector, but the first to block roads recently were Dutch farmers, outraged by the Government’s plans to close farms to reduce nitrate levels . Then the Poles, Hungarians and Slovaks took action, on a war footing against the arrival of tariff-free agricultural products from Ukraine. And always, for one reason or another, there are also the French, who in December dumped tons of manure in front of official buildings in protest of the Elysée’s policies in the face of challenges such as rising production costs, pressure to lower prices and new regulations.
Triggers vary, but the protests that have rocked Europe over the past year and a half are testimony to a general and deep unrest in the rural world stemming mainly from climate policies, the energy transition and geopolitical changes, but also, even if it is less visible, say some experts, due to the effects of business concentration in which the sector has been immersed for a quarter of a century.
There are European elections in June and the attempts of far-right parties and groups to infiltrate and capitalize on these movements are cause for concern.
“The widening growth gap between rural and urban areas is becoming a threat to trust in politics and social cohesion. Far-right movements are taking advantage of rural discontent to win seats in parliaments. With the European elections of 2024, this turn to the right can condition the EU for many years”, warns economist Mary Hyland, researcher at Eurofound, who in a recent analysis warns of the problem of “lack of recognition” for the morale of rural populations.
Juan Corbalán, delegate in Brussels of Cooperatives Agroalimentarias de España, an organization associated with the European agricultural lobby, Copa-Cogeca, sees a clear “butterfly effect”. “It starts with a question of taxes, like in Germany, but it starts to grow and there is no way to stop it, because there is a very deep discomfort behind it”, says Corbalán, who cites the lack of support measures and incentives to deliver on the European climate agenda in a context of rising production costs and shrinking margins for many farmers. “The sector feels that it is paying for the EU’s foreign policy, with the war in Ukraine, China’s tariff retaliation and before Donald Trump, or international trade agreements. When it is necessary to make cuts or make foreign policy decisions, the sector is the first to suffer”, concludes Corbalán, who calls for protection measures such as those applied to other economic activities considered strategic, in view of the arrival of ‘foreign investments, from China, for example.
The decision of the EU, at the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, to raise tariffs on its agricultural products, has had strong consequences for the partners of the East, paradoxically its biggest defenders in the community club. In September their governments unilaterally blocked Ukrainian imports, which instead of flowing to international markets tend to accumulate in these countries, where the prices of products such as cereals, sugar, eggs and poultry have sunk The European Commission accepted the veto and mediated with Kyiv to ease the situation. Now he has promised to adopt safeguard measures to, while supporting Ukraine, protect farmers in the East.
Some figures are repeated to explain the complicated situation facing the sector. Only 11% of farm owners in the EU are under 40, and three out of four are held by over 65s, according to the European Commission. In 15 years, between 2005 and 2020, the number of agricultural holdings in Europe has gone from 14 to 9 million, a reduction of 37%, according to Eurostat. Beyond the impact of new European environmental legislation and changes in the global geopolitical situation, some specialists appreciate other underlying factors in these trends and rural unrest.
“Many farmers feel that the way agriculture works in Europe today is wrong, that the big agro-industrial corporations take too much profit, and they feel trapped in the process of economies of scale”, says Jan Douwe van der Ploegel , former professor of agrarian sociology at the University of Wageningen (Netherlands), who warns of “a general confusion” about the nature of the protest movement. “In the Netherlands especially it is clear that there is no united front. The core behind the protests are the large corporations, entrepreneurs with large-scale operations, highly indebted, who are fighting for their right to continue working as they have until now, with a high use of pesticides and fossil fuels.
In front of groups that practice intensive agriculture and entrepreneurial owners of large farms, “there is a growing segment of farmers who are dedicated to agroecology and demonstrate that it is possible to adapt and respond to the needs of nature and society”, emphasizes Van Der Ploeg. In line with these reflections, Marco Contiero, Greenpeace agriculture specialist, emphasizes that “it cannot be said that everywhere they have problems to make it to the end of the month. In some countries they are not doing so badly, and German farmers themselves have had record profits in recent years”. But in general, “the market system and the food industry are pushing farmers to choose between growing and specializing, investing in machinery and larger farms, or dying. No one can deny that the current system is a slaughterhouse”, but “this reality tends to be ignored”.
Aware of this discomfort, and the strength of the far-right parties in these territories, the congress of the European People’s Party (EPP) last year approved a resolution in which it is postulated as the “defender of farmers” and “the party of rural world”. “It’s in our DNA”, says its president, Manfred Weber. For Green Peace, however, the PPE “wants to keep the system as it is. If they really wanted to defend farmers, they would fight to change it and stop the bleeding,” says Contiero, who gives as an example his campaign to exclude large cattle farms from a new directive on emissions. “It only affected 1% of the total, seven in the whole EU, in France in particular”.
In recent days, the German Government has denounced the attempt by far-right groups to take advantage of the agricultural protests to advance their agenda, as they previously did with the pandemic or the war in Ukraine and it was already seen, for example , what happens in the Netherlands.
According to the polls, in June, these trends will translate into a new European Parliament that leans much more to the right than the current one, and will lead to a lower weight of the Green Pact in the next legislature. Although its promoters are confident that the direction is marked, the world is also moving in this direction and there is no turning back possible, the agricultural sector demands that, at the very least, the foot of the accelerator is lifted.
