Few things have the importance and symbolism of peasant lands. They talk about what’s really important. The food to live. The justice of paying for a job well done and helping when things go wrong due to a drought, a downpour or a fire. Globalization and the perfect apples that come from the other side of the world. Immigration and knowing where the hands that harvest our food come from. The pollution, the pesticides, the plastics and the disappearing bees because of the sum of it all. The growing and always poorly recognized role of women in the countryside. The territory and a country, Catalonia, increasingly forested due to the constant abandonment of agricultural farms. Few sectors have so many facets and all so close.

As a journalist, I have explained their claims many times. I have seen them pour liters of milk over EU quotas and the abuses of the big brands. Cut roads and burn tractor wheels. Giving away apples to the city, because it didn’t matter if they were sold below cost. My first live broadcast on television was interviewing representatives of the Union of Farmers at the gates of the Ministry of Agriculture, already thirty years ago. I have seen how many have wanted to make them their own, inventing pseudo-agricultural unions that had outside parties or interests behind them. And I have also echoed the long list of promises and breaches that have been made to them. To be fair, I also had to report how some of them were in breach of labor, health or environmental regulations. Or all at once.

Many of these problems continue and are now being discussed together with other new ones, such as the aging of the sector or the vulture investment funds that have seen agricultural land as a new target to suck up and then abandon. But I am surprised by a silence and an absence. The large commercial groups of supermarkets and intermediaries, who should be defending their suppliers. The ones who could explain why a kilo of potatoes is paid to the farmer at 32 cents and I, close to two euros, or the orange at 39 cents and which also climbs to two euros… cost overruns bordering on 500%. How many people make a living as a leech?