Columns of tractors drive through Europe. Why farmers everywhere are taking to the streets

She wants to talk to the farmers. Overcoming polarization. That was the message from EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Thursday at the kick-off of her long-awaited ‘strategic dialogue’ with representatives of the agricultural sector. The almost thirty participating organizations must share their ideas about the future of Europe with Von der Leyen before the summer.

Does this dialogue come too late? After German farmers started the year with massive protests, this week columns of tractors also crossed the winter landscape in Italy, Lithuania, Romania and Poland, blocking towns and villages. In France, two people died after a collision at a roadblock and radical wine growers set off a bomb at a government building in southern Carcassonne. In Brussels, a blue cow with the stars of the European flag on its body dangled from a noose under an excavator. The farmers are angry.

At first glance, the protests appear to have a variety of reasons. In France and Germany, farmers are upset about a canceled discount on diesel taxes. In Spain they are angry because they are no longer allowed to use river water to irrigate the dried-out fields. In Ireland, farmers marched through the streets with cows in protest against restrictions on livestock farming. Polish, Hungarian and Slovak farmers blocked the border with Ukraine for weeks in the freezing cold to prevent the import of cheap grain.

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While the nitrogen protests in the Netherlands caused quite a stir in 2019, the entire European countryside now seems to be in turmoil. And the apparently separate frustrations are indeed connected.

Toy ball

“It is certainly not a coincidence that farmers are now taking to the streets everywhere in Europe,” says Niels Debonne, geographer at the Institute for Environmental Affairs at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Despite the local differences, according to Debonne, farmers all suffer from the same system: “The independent farmer, alone on his property, does not exist in Europe. All farmers are involved in a web of regulations and they are heavily dependent on subsidies.”

Agricultural subsidies are the largest expenditure item in the European Union. Almost a third of the total budget goes to the common agricultural policy. And for good reason: after the Second World War, food security was a top priority. As the European market opened up and competition increased, agricultural subsidies assured farmers of a good standard of living. They pushed down prices, guaranteed food supplies and gave farmers security and the opportunity to invest. But the subsidies were also a curse for farmers.

“The farmers have been made dependent on a system that focused on efficiency and modernization,” says Debonne, “a system in which growth and industrialization were central.” That system ultimately plunged many farmers deeply into debt to banks in order to continue investing and growing. Debonne: “Farmers have become a plaything for the government and agro-industry.”

Climate neutral

It is costing many farmers their lives. Over the past decade, the number of full-time farmers in the EU has fallen by a third, which amounts to… five million jobs. The decline was particularly sharp in Romania (983,000 jobs lost), Poland (616,000), Bulgaria (387,000) and Greece (189,000). But 100,000 agricultural jobs also disappeared in France during the same period.

The European Union’s green ambitions are now putting increasing pressure on the remaining farmers. The EU wants to become climate neutral by 2050. To achieve that goal, enormous changes are needed in agriculture and livestock farming, because these sectors contribute a lot to greenhouse gas emissions and declining biodiversity. That has to be different. Is there still room for farmers on the road to a green EU? The fear of the answer to that question is driving the current wave of protests.

Debonne: “As a farmer, I would also find it exciting. You see that every year fewer people have survived. You are heavily in debt. You see the uncertainty around you, the social misery. The environmental legislation then feels like the last straw.”

Inequality

Researcher Natalia Mamonova also sees a common thread in the farmers’ protests, but at the same time she believes that the differences between European countries should not be lost sight of. Mamonova works at the Norwegian Ruralis Institute and specializes in political relations in the Eastern European countryside. “The farmers in Poland do mention environmental legislation as one of their agenda items, but for them the emphasis is less on climate and more on economic inequality.”

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While Western European farmers have mainly had to deal with mandatory economies of scale in recent decades, Eastern Europe is struggling with great inequality between small and large companies. Although post-socialist countries receive many EU subsidies, a large part of them ends up in the hands of local oligarchs or large (agro) conglomerates. So you get in Poland 20 percent of the agricultural companies no less than 74 percent of the money.

Romanian farmer Emilian Iordache waves the national flag during a protest on public roads near the village of Afumati, twenty kilometers northeast of Bucharest.

Eastern European farmers are also angry about their position in relation to Western Europe. The common agricultural policy was intended to be an equalizer in Europe, but in practice a small Polish arable farmer cannot compete with his Dutch colleague. While Western European farmers mainly complain about the multitude of rules that would restrict them, Eastern Europe feels disadvantaged by the more powerful West.

Explosive cocktail

All that dissatisfaction forms an explosive cocktail. The big winners of the commotion could well be right-wing populist parties. Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, emeritus professor of agricultural sociology at Wageningen University, also sees this: “The farmers are an extremely powerful cultural symbol and they are now resisting curtailment, globalization and the government. These are exactly the themes that radical right-wing groups need to focus on.”

In various countries, radical right-wing political parties are doing their best to present themselves as advocates of concerned farmers. The Netherlands, where the BoerCurgerMovement (BBB) ​​emerged as a result of the farmers’ protests, serves as an example. For example, members of the conservative Polish PiS party previously appeared at demonstrations at the border with Ukraine. In France, Jordan Bardella, the president of Rassemblement National, appeared at demonstrations. In Germany, the AfD tried to hijack the protests and the demonstration in Brussels this week was organized by MCC Brussels, a think tank backed by Eurosceptic Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

Several farmers’ organizations have distanced themselves from the radical right parties, but there is a good chance that they will continue to try to exploit the discontent and anti-European sentiment, especially in view of the European elections in June, where an electoral breakthrough seems possible for the radical right. An opinion poll by the European Council on Foreign Relations think tank showed this week that the ultra-right Identity and Democracy Group, which includes the French Rassemblement National party and the German AfD, could become the third party in the European Parliament. France and Poland are among the nine countries where radical right parties will come first according to this poll.

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