The images of a ravaged Place de Luxembourg, the elegant esplanade in front of the European Parliament building in Brussels, are already the symbol of the new wave of protests by the European farmers. More than a thousand tractors from Belgium, Germany, France, Holland and Italy paraded in front of the EU institutions. Few months before the European elections, the issues of agriculture and sustainability are back at the centre of the debate.

Tractors of All Europe, Unite!

The march on Brussels is the latest event of a movement that has been sweeping through European countries for weeks. It all started in Germany at the beginning of the year. Scholz’s government has been grappling with a 17-billion-euros budget hole for months, and it has been filling it with a series of cuts in several sectors. Among the victims there is also the subsidy for agricultural fuel. In the times of economic crisis and inflation, this decision sends the agri-food sector into a rage.

Thousands of smallholders organise roadblocks and rallies in all German cities. The tractors, used to march and disrupt traffic, immediately become the symbol of the protest. The executive makes a partial retreat, but the protest does not subside. On the contrary, it spreads. In the following weeks, tractor demonstrations are organised in Greece, Romania, Poland, Belgium.

The most impressive demonstrations took place in France, with the traffic blocked for days in large areas of the country. The demands are varied, but one theme prevails: the opposition to the European Green Deal, the set of climate and environmental policies adopted by the European Union.

Why do farmers protest

The demands of those protesting are many and partly contradictory. The spontaneity of the movement means that several souls coexist, and the issues at the centre of discontent vary according to geographical areas.

Underlying it all there is the widespread frustration of a sector in a long-standing crisis. The most common claim relates to the price of diesel: the energy crisis increased the costs for farms, while in many European countries there is ongoing talk on reducing environmentally harmful subsidies - including those for agricultural fuel.

Additionally, there is the major issue of environmental policies, in a narrower sense. Farm to Fork, the ecological transition plan for agriculture agreed upon by European governments, stipulates that 4% of farms-owned agricultural land should be set-aside to foster the natural regeneration of nutrients. Landowners complying with this rule will receive subsidies, but they do not consider these as an acceptable solution. “No subsidies for not farming” is one of the most frequently seen slogans in Italy.

Likewise, there is opposition towards the (already taken) decision of allocating to organic farming at least the 25% of cultivated land and to the decision (still under negotiation) to reduce the use of pesticides.

A third set of claims is connected to the competition from non-EU products. The agreements on imports of agricultural goods from Ukraine was the fuse, but at the heart of the protest there is the EU-Mercosur treaty, a free trade agreement between the EU and some Latin American countries that has been under discussion for years.

What happens in Italy

Some weeks later than in Germany, our country too witnessed the outbreak of the protests. For now, however, the Italian case seems to present some peculiarities compared to what is happening in other major European countries.

First of all, despite the significant media coverage, the scale of the protests in the peninsula is still small. Then, there is the issue of the support of intermediate bodies. While abroad the demonstrations are led by agricultural confederations, in Italy self-convocation prevails.

Newly formed acronyms such as the Coordinamento Agricoltori Traditi of Danilo Calvani - former leader of the Movimento dei Forconi in 2013 – are organising the rallies. Among the protesters there is widespread hostility towards the trade associations, considered too timid and colluded with government power. In Rome for example, flags of Coldiretti, the main organisation of agricultural entrepreneurs, were burned in a square.

For their part, the trade associations seem to share the movement's demands, but without calling for protest. “A weak and insufficient proposal”, says Cristiano Fini, national president of the Confederazione Italiana Agricoltori (CIA). The reference goes to the one-year suspension of the obligation to set-aside 4% of the land, one of the first partial victories of the tractor movement. This is not enough for the protesters, nor for Fini: 'What we are expecting is the removal of this obligation without ifs and buts”.

Coldiretti maintains a similar position: it does not participate in the rallies but supports many of their claims. “There is somebody who wants to use agriculture to get a bit of political notoriety, but our farmers will not be instrumentalised,' said Ettore Prandini, the president of Coldiretti, a few weeks ago. Nonetheless, the organisation's yellow flags were present at Place de Luxembourg.

Again in Prandini's words, Coldiretti's presence at the stronghold in Brussels is due to its all-round opposition to European policies: “From the ban on bagged salads and tomato baskets to the arrival of insects on the plate, from the nutriscore that rejects the excellences of Made in Italy to the green light for alarmist labels on wine bottles”.

The risk of instrumentalizing the protests

Pierpaolo Lanzarini is a farmer from Emilia-Romagna and a member of Genuino Clandestino, a network of farms committed to local and sustainable production. “Our organisation has not yet taken a unified position on the tractor protests,” he explains over the phone to Renewable Matter, “but it is clear that these demonstrations arise from a real unease.”

According to Lanzarini, there is a high risk of a rightward twist in the phenomenon. 'In Italy there are do-it-yourself protests, with very confused claims. Abroad, where the agenda is clearer, the European Union is correctly identified as the focal point of criticism, but the objectives are wrong. There is a problem with resources, I think about the handling of the cuts in diesel allowances, but not with environmental policies per se. Take the set-aside of the 4% of land. It is an absolute common-sense measure that is being manipulated to the point of conspiracy positions, where a normal practice of land regeneration becomes part of a plot to prevent cultivation and promote synthetic food'.

The problems with CAP, the Common Agricultural Policy

The major absentee from the discussions these days is certainly the distribution mechanism of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) funds. This is the largest expenditure chapter of the Union, taking up more than a third of the EU institutions’ budget. Funds are distributed by land extension: those who own more land receive more money. “But this encourages the concentration of fields in a few hands, helping the big ones and hurting the small ones,” Lanzarini continues.

Available data suggest the same reading: the richest 10% of farmers receives 50% of the funds, while the poorest 10% is left with just 6% of the European subsidies. Changing these rules has long been at the heart of the claims of the ecological world and of a part of the agri-food industry, but it appears neither among the desiderata of trade associations nor among the slogans of the tractors that occupy European squares.

During the last CAP redrafting, it was proposed to reverse the proportionality principle, rewarding labour - and thus the smallholder - over property. But the proposal did not pass. "Why do people now protest against ecological measures but did not protest at the time to demand a reform that would have given oxygen to small farmers?" concludes Lanzarini. "Well, it's a mystery."

This article is also available in Italian / Questo articolo è disponibile anche in italiano

Image: Mark Jones, Unsplash

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