Farmers on the march

Welcome back. Some see the farmers who’ve been demonstrating across Europe since January as noble, suffering representatives of a precious, time-honoured way of life.

Others see them as a privileged minority, an interest group whose discontent is derailing climate change policies and contributing, deliberately or not, to the rise of hard-right political parties. Where does the truth lie? I’m at tony.barber@ft.com.

‘Inedible’ Spanish tomatoes

No doubt about it, tensions in European agriculture are running high. Consider the startling outburst on French television in early February of Ségolène Royal, a former Socialist presidential candidate.

“Have you eaten so-called bio [organic] Spanish tomatoes? They’re inedible . . . Spanish bio is a false bio. Spanish fruit and vegetables don’t respect French norms,” she complained (here in French).

The Spanish response was predictably indignant.

Worldwide protests

As that episode illustrates, some European politicians rarely miss a chance to play the national protectionist card when agricultural unrest hits the headlines. But we should keep in mind that it’s not just in Europe that farmers are on the march.

In India, police fired tear gas this week to disperse farmers demanding higher prices for their crops.

Over the past year, there have been similar protests in Mexico, Kenya and other countries. In Japan, one farmer has spent 50 years trying to block the expansion of Narita airport into rural areas outside Tokyo.

The factors fuelling the farmers’ anger vary from country to country, but there are some common themes. These include rising costs of living, unstable prices for agricultural produce and a way of life under pressure from economic modernisation.

To make sense of the protests in Europe, we need to look at several features that make the continent distinctive: the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the 27-nation bloc’s efforts to combat climate change, and the impact — especially in central and eastern Europe — of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The CAP and rural decline

According to this European Commission background paper, there are about 10mn farms in the EU, 17mn people work regularly in agriculture, and the farming and food sectors combined provide almost 40mn jobs (the EU’s total population is about 450mn).

Small wonder that commission president Ursula von der Leyen, speaking in September, lavished praise on the sons and daughters of Europe’s soil:

European farmers are the custodians of the countryside, protectors of ancient customs and traditions. Yet many are also pioneers of a new kind of agriculture. You are adopting new technologies from satellites to drones, to increase yields and bring costs down.

However, von der Leyen also put her finger on a serious structural problem in European agriculture: “The number of young people who choose a career in farming is getting smaller and smaller.”

As we see in the chart below, Europe faces a wave of retirements among older farmers. In her accompanying article, Leila Abboud, the FT’s Paris bureau chief, writes that some 43 per cent of French farmers are set to retire in the next decade. EU efforts to reverse this trend by allocating more of its €60bn-a-year CAP subsidies to young farmers are so far not having much impact.

An endangered species

Could it be that the CAP is in some ways to blame? Giles Merritt, founder of the Friends of Europe think-tank, writes:

Farmers have become an endangered species. The extinction of all but major landowners threatens widespread rural unemployment and the near-death of countless villages and small towns. Two-thirds of Europe’s . . . farms are family smallholdings of less than five hectares, and these are being bankrupted at an alarming pace . . . The financial support they receive through the CAP pales beside the more generous subsidies gobbled up by more efficient big landowners. Four-fifths of all CAP income support goes to the larger farms.

Besides this, the interests of larger farms are more closely aligned with those of the commodity conglomerates that dominate the global food trade, as set out in this report by Vincent Kiezebrink for the Amsterdam-based Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations.

Climate change frictions

The EU’s efforts to make farmers play a part in reducing greenhouse gas emissions also lie behind the recent protests.

Wolfgang Münchau, writing for the New Statesman, says that one reason for the unrest is a controversial EU law, passed last year, that sets demanding targets for the restoration of natural habitats:

They [the farmers] see it as a landscaping project forced upon them by people who live in cities.

The political consequences of rural hostility to such plans can be far-reaching, as we have seen in the Netherlands over the past two years.

It was a farmers’ revolt against government plans to cut nitrous oxide emissions that paved the way for the collapse of the ruling coalition, leading to snap elections in November that were won by Geert Wilders and his far-right Party of Freedom.

Yet Dutch rural protests date to an era long before we had heard of the CAP or used the term “climate change”. In this illuminating essay, Kristian Mennen explains that the militant rhetoric of today’s Dutch farmers is remarkably similar to that used by their predecessors from the 1930s to the 1950s, when they complained about the impact of government-designed nature conservation policies.

Plus ça change

The same is true for France. Digging into the New York Times archives, I found this news report from the edition of June 28 1961:

Paris, June 27 — Thousands of farmers blocked highways and isolated villages with their tractors and denounced the Government today for not having done more to improve farm conditions. The peasant agitation affected seventeen departments, extending from the Belgian frontier in the north to the Mediterranean.

Word for word, this report could have been written in 2024.

The latest French farmers’ protests have served as a baptism of fire for Gabriel Attal, 34, whom President Emmanuel Macron appointed in January as the nation’s youngest ever prime minister. Attal scarcely had time to try out his new offices at the Hôtel Matignon in Paris before he was off to the countryside, standing behind a haystack in an improvised display of concern for rural issues — in which he has no background.

Arthur Goldhammer, an American scholar of France and its language, observed in his Tocqueville21 blog: “The farmers have stolen his thunder with their diesel-powered jacquerie.”

As the FT’s Pilita Clark wrote this week, there is considerable evidence to suggest that populations around the world want to mitigate climate change and, up to a point, are willing to pay for it.

But at a political level the wind in Europe is starting to blow in the other direction. Months before the latest farmers’ protests, Macron was calling for a “regulatory pause” in EU environmental policy.

And since the unrest erupted, the EU has rapidly made concessions to the farmers by vowing to ease the burden of environmental rules. In my view, hard-right gains in the European parliament elections set for June would make it harder for the EU to press on with the next steps needed to meet its net zero goals.

Backlash against Ukraine

In the EU’s central and eastern European member states, there is growing discontent among farmers over the decision of Brussels in 2022 to suspend import duties and quotas on Ukrainian exports. This was an important, even essential measure aimed at sustaining the Ukrainian economy after Russia’s full-scale invasion.

But farmers in the region complain that it has led to the flooding of their domestic markets with Ukrainian produce. The issues are set out lucidly in this report by Rikard Jozwiak for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Representatives of agricultural groups from across central and eastern Europe met this week to plan more protests. The prospects for calming the dispute don’t look promising — even Donald Tusk’s liberal, pro-Ukrainian government in Poland is not inclined to give way on the farm issue.

Across Europe, farmers feel at the mercy of forces beyond their control — global economic forces, but political forces in the form of a Brussels consensus, too. It’s far from clear that even the EU’s latest concessions will be enough to turn the mood around.

More on this topic

Climate policies carry political costs but they can be mitigated — an analysis by Davide Furceri, Michael Ganslmeier and Jonathan Ostry for the Brussels-based Bruegel think-tank

Tony’s picks of the week