The European camp rose. Recent weeks saw thousands of tractors blockade cities French, Belgian, German, North Sea ports, Distribution centers.
The countryside lives with structural problems (such as the increasingly higher average age of those who work in it or the depopulation of rural areas), problems of recent years (high cost of inputs and fuel prices) and new powers, such as that of the agricultural superpower that is Ukraine and to whom, to help it economically, the European Union opened its markets as if it were a member of the community bloc. Some of these problems are usually solved with money.
The Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union has a package of more than 400,000 million euros that are distributed in subsidies to farmers and farmers in seven years. This has been the case since the 70s and is expected to continue in the coming decades. That amount of money is equivalent to more than a third of all European Union spending and serves to guarantee minimum payments to millions of farmers but also subsidies to large landowners who control thousands of hectares.
For years now, this Common Agricultural Policy has included more and more environmental regulations, which the countryside has increasingly accepted with a worse face. The ecological transition began earlier in sectors such as road transport or building construction regulations, but the countryside is already beginning to be affected and that also adds to the protests.
French farmers block part of the A6 motorway in Chilly-Mazarin, south of Paris.
The inflation derived from the energy crisis due to Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine was the straw that broke the camel's back because in addition to increasing fuel prices, it also skyrocketed those of other inputs such as fertilizers (of which Ukraine is one of the first. world producers and the first in Europe), complicated some transport routes and generated increases in the price of basic grains by removing Ukrainian production, the largest in Europe in cereals such as wheat or corn, from world markets.
The European Commission, which has a good part of the agricultural policy powers in Europe, began to take steps to contain the unrest in the countryside. Firstly, he announced the suspension for one year of the rule that requires 4% of agricultural holdings to be left fallow. He also launched a mechanism that will block certain Ukrainian imports without tariffs when it is proven that they alter (downward) the sales prices of agricultural and livestock products.
But the measures that the European Commission can take are useless against the other great reason that moves the protests and which is essentially political. Europeans go to the polls on June 9 in continental elections for which polls show strong growth in far-right parties. For the first time, the tripartite coalition of the traditional right and the two extreme right groups could add more than 50% of the European Parliament, so the large coalitions in the center (traditional right, socialists and liberals) would no longer be necessary.
That's where the field comes into play. Traditionally his vote was conservative, but not extreme right. Parties along this extremist line now believe that they may have found a new fishing ground and are spreading hoaxes about climate and ecological transition policies to encourage these protests. In Brussels, for example, personnel from the Spanish VOX party encouraged and coordinated part of the protests. Associations such as Asaja also appear, which poses as a rural union when in reality it represents companies, mainly large landowner farms that control thousands or tens of thousands of hectares.
Farmers in France participate in a protest called by unions.
The extreme right tries to convince Europeans who depend on the countryside to make a living that the European Union is their enemy, that their policies actually seek, despite this massive aid that prevents what is eaten in Europe from being essentially imported, to end food production in the 'old continent'. Stimulating these fears, and with the help of hoaxes that spread especially on social networks, the ultra parties launch themselves to encourage these protests.
EU agriculture ministers met last week to seek answers. The European Commission then launched a “strategic dialogue” with the sector, which seeks above all to calm down, and stop, the debates on the ecological transition, which are causing panic in the countryside. So that it does not happen like in Italy, Sweden and the Netherlands, where the extreme right won the elections by stoking fear among the rural population.
The Spanish Minister of Agriculture, Luis Planas, summed up the situation perfectly: “The extreme right is trying to use farmers as political leverage. We must defend them without political manipulation. This dialogue should have started when the proposals of the European Green Deal were presented, but it is never too late if it is done well, because the voice of farmers must be heard.”
The risk is also to slow down the ecological transition. The big loser of votes from this rise of the extreme right is the European People's Party, the traditional conservative family. So before continuing to lose votes to their right, they decided to join the extreme right and present themselves as the farmers' party, the one that wants to stop the fight against the climate crisis. To the point of backtracking on agreements that seemed closed, such as the use of pesticides, which must be reduced. There are no major changes in the current regulations that affect the countryside as they do other economic sectors, especially transportation or electricity generation, but everyone hopes that they will arrive.
Farmers protests in front of the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium.
The biggest casualty in the short term may be the trade agreement that the European Union and Mercosur have been negotiating for two decades and that never arrives, in part because the Europeans only know how to close trade pacts with countries that accept important concessions in exchange for access to the European market. , the largest on the planet with its 448 million inhabitants. Not with larger blocks that also require important transfers. That is why the agreement with Mercosur always slips when it seems ready and why the European Union does not have trade agreements with China or the United States. The European camp sees the Mercosur camp as its main threat worldwide. Governments know this and very few continue to openly defend that agreement.
France leads the opposition to the trade pact with the Mercosur countries and its government demands that the European Commission permanently suspend the negotiations. European trade agreements are approved by a qualified majority and France alone could not veto it, but no one thinks of putting it to a vote against French opinion, in the European Parliament there is not a sufficient majority to approve it either and Paris is not alone . Behind French diplomacy, which is more vocal on this matter, hide other countries such as Belgium, Ireland, Austria, Poland, Luxembourg or the Netherlands.
IDAFE MARTIN PÉREZ
FOR THE TIME
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