The EU gives in to farmer protests and an unsustainable and failing agri-food system

“The original proposal to halve pesticides in the European Union by the end of the decade has become a symbol of polarization.”The words of the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, summarize the climate/food blackmail in which the European Union finds itself entangled and manifests, unconsciously, the surrender and all the ineptitude of a ruling class incapable of implementing a model of development and sustenance different from that on which the planet has been based so far.

“No farm, no food”, “Our end will mean your hunger”, we read on the banners carried by breeders and farmers practically all over Europe.Not only in Germany, in France, in the Netherlands.The protests spread to Spain, Greece, Romania, Lithuania, Poland and even Italy, with tractors wanting to go up to the Sanremo stage to take part, too, in the total social event that enchants our world every February. country and our discussions.

For now, after the meeting with Minister Lollobrigida and the reassurances of the Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, 150 tractors in a caravan traveled along Rome's ring road.In the morning, four tractors they crossed the center of Rome.

Farmers' protests, the fight against the climate crisis and food security

The farmers they protest for different reasons:for the percentage of land to be removed from production and allocated to forest (the ones we need - it has been talked about many, too many times - to restore the green lungs of our regions), for the subsidies removed for diesel and pesticides ( and lower emissions), due to the excessive bureaucracy of European Union regulations, the poor protection with respect to the importation of products from third countries and the rising costs of energy, fertilizers and transport.Many also feel they have too little control over the prices of their products, which are influenced by how much the large companies that sell or process them are willing to pay.

“After our provinces and regions, we will extend the protests to all of Spain and then we will go to Brussels,” declared Donanciano Dujo, vice-president of Asaja, the most representative organization of Spanish farmers.And the declarations are of the same tone almost everywhere.

A good part, especially the large agricultural organizations in Europe, have identified European bureaucracy and climate policies as the cause of their problems, despite the fact that agriculture is responsible for 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions and receives a third of the budget of the European Union, especially in the form of subsidies, despite representing just over 1% of the European economy and employing 4% of the total population, they write Somini Sengupta and Monika Pronczuk on New York Times. 

According to the positions of large agricultural organizations, climate policies are unsustainable:the extra money the EU provides for “eco-systems” doesn't cover their costs, and the bureaucracy required to obtain these subsidies is so onerous that it's barely worth it.And so the European Green Deal, the Farm to Fork strategy (which aims to reduce pesticides and fertilizers and to reshape agricultural practices), are the objectives towards which the protests of recent days point the finger, following a shortcut that places an alternative the climate to food:or climate policies or food security, one of the two.A scheme that we have already seen in other circumstances contrasting health and work, ecological transition and industrial development, climate and security, sometimes energy, sometimes food.

Instead of dismantling this scheme, European leaders ended up putting it into practice and giving it substance.Some for electoral calculations, others to exploit yet another opportunity (first the pandemic, then the war in Ukraine and the gas crisis, now the farmers' protests and the risk of a food crisis) to instill the idea that "mitigation climate change is so useless, that the change will be irreversible in any case, that there is no use in decarbonisation", as writes Ferdinando Cotugno in a post on LinkedIn, and sabotage climate policies, others still because they would like to be transported on tractors to go and command.

“Many [farmers] feel cornered, they deserve to be listened to.But European agriculture must move to a more sustainable and environmentally friendly production model,” said Ursula von der Leyen.In words, therefore, the President of the European Commission has recognized the unavoidability of climate policies, but in practice she has weakened, expanded and sacrificed them.By once again postponing the introduction of an important regulation for the protection of biodiversity and the protection of soil health, resizing the role of agriculture in the new document which aims to reduce EU greenhouse gas emissions by 90% (compared to the 1990s) by 2040 (there is no longer any mention of reduction percentages of methane and nitrous oxide), proposing to set aside the reduction in the use of pesticides.

The measures taken by individual member states also go in the same direction:Germany has attenuated plans to cut diesel subsidies, France has renounced the planned increase in diesel tax and promised targeted aid for over 400 million euros, Italy has proposed maintaining the exemption from personal income tax agricultural sector for incomes up to 10 thousand euros and promised greater controls to avoid selling farm products below cost.

All short-term buffer solutions that do not get to the root of the issues and actually end up exacerbating them.And in doing so we continue to drag on problems, which are promptly detected, but which remain unresolved.

Recent history is full of occasions in which it was possible to intervene on the causes and instead it was decided to treat only the symptoms and leave everything as it was.“In recent years, farmers have had to deal with climate change, pandemics, economic crises, the excessive power of large-scale retail trade, increasingly less fair prices, war for European contributions, inflation, hopes and fears for an ecological transition that still needs to be implemented.With policies, national and community, right and left, friends and enemies depending on the perspective, of the piece of the agricultural world to be told.Each with different needs and interests.These were the years of the Green Deal and, in particular, of the Farm to Fork and Biodiversity 2030 strategies, but also the years of preparation for the new CAP (Common Agricultural Policy) in force today, which should have accompanied these strategies and, in general, the transition", they rebuild on Il Fatto Quotidiano Luisiana Gaita and Gianni Rosini.

Europe, the Common Agricultural Policy does not combat climate change, does not preserve biodiversity, does not support small farmers

The CAP should have conjugated the sustenance of the planet with the mitigation of climate change and lead to a radical transformation of community policies on agriculture, on mechanisms for supporting farmers and rural areas and for providing financing.And instead, continuing to give 80% of subsidies to 20% of large agricultural companies and to support monocultures and intensive farming, making timid steps forward in terms of combating the exploitation of workers, has brought us to the point where we are .

“It is often easier to reduce or delay what appear to be burdensome environmental policies than to transform the power dynamics of the current food system,” comments Sophia Murphy, executive director of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a nonprofit research organization of Minnesota.

“The challenge is rethink a food production system that feeds people and at the same time is not harmful to the environment and the climate", adds the journalist from New York Times Monika Pronczuk.

The requests of other sectors of the agricultural world go in this direction, such as small farmers and all those organizations fighting for a new agriculture.The French of Confédération paysanne ask for example "the introduction of guaranteed prices for our agricultural products, the definition of minimum entry prices into the national territory, economic support for the agro-ecological transition commensurate with the problems at stake, the priority creation and not the expansion of agricultural holdings, the blocking of the artificialisation of agricultural land", reports Luca Martinelli on Other economics.The European coordination of Via Campesina he spread a “Manifesto for agricultural transition to face the crisis”:

“We ask for an adequate budget so that the subsidies of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) are redistributed to support the transition towards agriculture capable of addressing the challenges of the climate crisis and biodiversity.All farmers already involved and who want to engage in transition processes towards an agroecological model must be supported and accompanied in the long term.It is unacceptable that in the current CAP the minority of larger agricultural companies monopolize hundreds of thousands of euros of public aid, while the majority of European farmers receive no aid, or only crumbs."

Only a reorientation of European and national agricultural policy will be able to provide lasting responses to the crisis, he states in an article about Le Monde a collective of representatives of associations and unions, including Cécile Duflot, from Oxfam France, and Laurence Marandola, from the Farmers' Confederation.Instead, Europe is deciding once again to take its time.Who knows how much there is left.

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