Few things have the importance and symbolism of farmland. Food to live. The justice of paying for a job well done and helping when things are bad due to a drought, flood or fire. Globalization and perfect apples on the other side of the world. Immigration and knowing where the hands that collect our food come from. Pollution, pesticides, plastics and bees that disappear for the sum of it all. The growing and always poorly recognized role of women in the field. The territory and a country, Catalonia, increasingly wooded due to the constant abandonment of agricultural operations. Few sectors have so many facets and all so close.
As a journalist, I have recounted their demands many times. I have seen them dump liters of milk because of EU quotas and the abuses of big brands. Cut roads and burn tractor wheels. Give away apples in the city, because it didn't matter if they were sold at a low cost. My first live broadcast on television was interviewing representatives of Unió de Pagesos at the doors of the Department of Agriculture, thirty years ago. I have seen how many have wanted to make them their own, inventing pseudo-agrarian unions that had spurious parties or interests behind them. And I have also collected the long list of promises and breaches that have been made to them. To be fair, I have also had to report how some of them failed to comply with labor, health, or environmental regulations. Or all together.
Many of these problems continue and now there is talk about them and other new ones, such as the aging of the sector or the vulture investment funds that have seen agricultural lands as a new target to suck and abandon later. But I am surprised by a silence and an absence. The large supermarket trade groups and intermediaries, who should be defending their suppliers. Those who could explain why a kilo of potatoes is paid to the farmer at 32 cents and I, at around two euros, or the orange at 39 cents and which also increases to two euros... extra costs that are close to 500%. How many people make a living from being a leech?
