Rural unrest has erupted this winter in Germany. The country has been turned upside down for a week by farmers' protests against the cut of 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, up in arms against the arrival of tariff-free agri-food products from Ukraine. And always, for one reason or another, there are the French, who in December dumped tons of manure in front of official buildings in protest of the Elysée policies in the face of challenges such as rising production costs, pressure to lower prices and the new regulations.
The triggers vary, but the protests that have shaken Europe over the last year and a half testify to a general and deep unrest in the rural world derived mainly from climate policies, the energy transition and geopolitical changes, but also, although less visible, some experts maintain, 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 attempts by far-right parties and groups to infiltrate and capitalize on these movements are a cause for concern.
“The growing growth gap between rural and urban areas is becoming a growing threat to trust in politics and social cohesion. Far-right movements are taking advantage of rural discontent to gain seats in parliament. With the European elections in 2024, this shift to the right could condition the EU for many years," warns economist Mary Hyland, a researcher at Eurofound, who in a recent analysis warns of the problem of the "lack of recognition" for the morality of rural populations.
Juan Corbalán, delegate in Brussels of Cooperativas 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 Germany, but it starts to grow and there is no way to stop it because there is a very deep malaise behind it,” says Corbalán, who cites the lack of support measures and incentives to carry out the climate agenda. European Union in a context of rising production costs and reduced margins for many farmers. “The sector feels that it is paying for the EU's foreign policy, with the war in Ukraine, tariff retaliations from China and before Donald Trump, or international trade agreements. When cuts have to be made or foreign policy decisions made, the sector is the first to suffer," concludes Corbalán, who demands protection measures like those applied to other economic activities considered strategic in the face of the arrival of foreign investments, from China, For example.
The EU's decision, at the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, to lift tariffs on its agricultural products has had strong consequences for its Eastern partners, 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 prices of products such as cereals, sugar, eggs and poultry have sunk. The European Commission accepted the veto and mediated with Kyiv to alleviate the situation. It has now promised to adopt safeguard measures to, while continuing to support 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 years old and three out of four are owned by people over 65 years old, 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 factors underlying these trends and rural unrest.
“Many farmers feel that the way agriculture works in Europe today is wrong, that large agribusiness 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 Wageningen University (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 large corporations, businessmen with large-scale operations, highly indebted, who fight for their right to continue working as before, with a high use of pesticides and fossil fuels.”
Compared to 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,” he highlights. Van der Ploeg. In line with these reflections, Marco Contiero, Greenpeace agriculture specialist, highlights that “it cannot be said that everywhere they have problems making ends meet. In some countries they are not doing so badly, and German farmers themselves have had record profits in recent years.” But overall, “the market system and the food industry are pushing farmers to choose between growing and specializing, investing in larger machinery and farms, or dying. No one can deny that the current system is a slaughterhouse,” but “this reality tends to be ignored.”
Attentive to this unrest, and to the pull of the far-right parties in these territories, the congress of the European People's Party (EPP) approved a resolution last year in which it postulates itself as the “defender of farmers” and “the party of rural world”. “It's in our DNA,” says its president, Manfred Weber. For Greenpeace, however, the EPP “what it wants is to maintain 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 beef farms from a new emissions directive. “It only affected 1% of the total, seven in the entire EU, in France specifically.”
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 did before with the pandemic or the war in Ukraine and was already seen, for example, in the Netherlands. According to the polls, in June, these trends will translate into a new European Parliament much more leaning 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 trust that the direction is set, the world is also moving in that direction and there is no turning back possible, the agricultural sector demands that at least the foot be taken off the accelerator.
