Farmers’ Strikes, Big Ag’s Demise, and Small Foody Bits
Food and farming provide a great illustration of a key fact about our splintering social and economic system: National and multi-national governments like the EU have become more a part of the problem than the solution to the climate and other life-threatening crises of our time. The best we can hope for from the likes of Washington, Brussels and Beijing is that they get out of the way and let individuals and communities get on with the hard work of fixing the world’s people- and Earth-destroying agricultural model.
“Great Simplification” podcaster Nate Hagens late last year asked a panel of small, organic farming and permaculture activists — including India’s legendary Vandana Shiva — what step governments should take first to support sustainable, fossil-free farming capable of feeding the world’s 8 billion people. Their answer: End agricultural subsidies. Not a call for Big Government to fix things, only a call for Big Government to quit tipping the scale in favor of Big Ag, and let small farmers and farming communities get on with it.
Who in this age of agribusiness would have imagined farmers as a vanguard of revolution?
Yet that’s what they’re becoming. From India, where farmers protested and blocked roads around Delhi and beyond for over a year in 2020–21, stopping only when Narendra Modi’s hard-right national government caved in and agreed to repeal legislation that the farmers saw as promoting corporations at their expense. The government’s aim was to move people out of villages and into Chinese-style factories, as many saw it. The farmers’ victory was unprecedented — and as yet unrepeated — in Modi’s India.
To Europe, where farmers from Poland to Spain this winter are blocking highways and burning dirty hay in front of government buildings, including the EU headquarters in Brussels. They too have won major concessions, from the EU and also from French, German and other national governments. But their struggle continues.
It’s a tale that has been, and will be, told again and again all over the world as we come to grips with the failure of the agribusiness model, the necessity for a new approach to growing food to feed the 8 billion, and the huge role food and farms must play in humanity’s search for a saner world.
War and More in Europe
The European farmers’ strikes are often portrayed as part of a broader European drift towards right-wing nationalism. Far-right voters doubtless figure among the strikers, as do those who are afraid of change or just like fertilizer- and pesticide-heavy farming. But many of the farmers are anything but right-wing. For example, the right’s favorite topic, migration, is scarcely mentioned in most of the ag protests.
One of the things that is worrying farmers across the continent, though, is imported food, especially food from Ukraine but also potentially from Latin America under a pending trade treaty — food that is raised under less stringent environmental and climate rules than the EU’s and that can potentially sell for less than it costs Europe’s own farmers to raise the same crops.
The seemingly forever war in Ukraine has exacerbated long-standing tensions in Europe’s farm sector in several ways. On the cost side for farmers, Russia’s invasion and the EU response drove up prices both for the oil and natural gas on which they heavily depend and for the fertilizer that Russia had supplied to Europe in copious quantities. Even domestic European fertilizer became scarce, as German factories that had made fertilizer with Russian gas were shuttered.
Also, when the war prevented Ukraine from getting grain and other crops out by ship, the EU removed restrictions on overland food shipments from this agriculturally bountiful country. Previous importers in Africa and Asia lost out, and European farmers faced tough new competition that undercut prices. Being closest to Ukraine, Polish and Romanian farmers started the current wave of protests, in spring 2023.
European farmers’ complaints extend beyond the mayhem resulting from war, however. They differ some from country to country. But after more than half a century of Brussels’ Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), many complaints are widely shared. Targets include moves by Brussels to reduce pesticide use by half and require more land to lie fallow as natural habitat. Moves by member-state governments to end or reduce farm exemptions from road-diesel taxes fueled the anger too.
Common Threads Everywhere
A common denominator beneath these specific complaints is the contention that farmers are not being paid enough to cover the cost of growing food and still make even a minimally decent living. The EU’s increasingly stringent climate and other environmental regulations are seen as making the situation worse in a world where most other places don’t impose such steep costs.
The farmers aren’t saying you can’t grow food under tightening EU rules. They’re saying you can’t grow it cheaply enough, amid rising costs, to compete with food from places that don’t have those rules.
However, similar complaints about costly and intrusive environmental and climate-related regulations have been heard from farmers virtually worldwide. And that goes in spades for small organic and near-organic farmers growing food for local markets. Even though the climate crisis itself adds more to many farmers costs and workloads than regulations aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
What‘s more, the EU’s intentions are good as far as they go. Pesticide use does need to fall, even from what are relatively low levels in Europe by world standards. More natural habitat is desperately needed for plants and animals, notably including bees and other pollinators crucial to many of the farmers’ own crops.
But the European Commission drew up the new regulations it issued this winter with little knowledge of — or concern for — local conditions, as farmers tell it. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen conceded as much in saying, as she withdrew the objectionable regs, that the Commission would consult with farmers in trying to find other ways to do the same things.
Those consultations aren’t likely to bring the one-size-fits-all fixes so beloved of the EU bureaucracy. What works in France may not work in Greece, or Poland, or regulation-resistant Italy. If anything, rules need to be custom designed at a level below, not above, that of the European nation state in order to match the needs of smaller regions and communities.
Communities should constitute the many and varied blocks on which smaller, less fossil fuel-dependent, and more diversified farming is rebuilt after decades of land devastation and rural depopulation. And the rebuilding should be done in part by younger people fleeing cities in search of better life balances and work that can’t be done better by AI. This goes for the rest of the agribusiness-dominated world as much as it does for Europe.
What the centralized superstate in Brussels could usefully do is help find a way to halt the war in Ukraine and fit both Ukraine and Russia back into separate slots in a regularized European agricultural trading system — one that is hopefully shrinking as local food flourishes. The EU could also quit financially favoring big farms over small. And it could develop less burdensome regulations for small diversified farms, instead of subjecting them to the draconian rules needed to keep agribusiness giants in line.
Again, this applies as much to the US, Brazil, China, and elsewhere as it does to the EU.
Resistance to Reality
Another layer beneath all this is a reality that Brussels, Washington, and other centers of Big Government have yet to accept: The agribusiness model is failing, financially as well as ecologically. Just as Big Everything is failing. At base, that failure is a result of its assumption that food can and should be endlessly made inexpensive by using and abusing soil, water, and air without paying the very real costs.
Capitalist agriculture treats these costs as “externalities” for which no one has to pay, or as Binghamton University history and ecology professor Jason Moore describes the phenomenon in Capitalism in the Web of Life, “appropriation via non-economic means” of work, energy, and other resources. The dead soil, species extinction, and climate crisis we are witnessing mark the arrival of the bill humanity must pay for that long-ignored exploitation.
A common assumption is that the 8 billion cannot be fed without the copious petrochemical fertilizers, pesticides, and giant machinery associated with Big Ag. There’s plenty of evidence to the contrary, some of which I’ll provide on another day soon. What is absolutely clear is that food prices have to go up to cover food’s true cost. It can still be affordable, but only if the capacity to pay — money, if you prefer — is more equitably distributed.
Likewise, Big Ag must come down, a collapse that is already evident in what has arguably become a negative stock-market valuation of Monsanto due to lawsuits and product failures that have drifted in since the US company was purchased by German chemical and pharmaceutical (former) giant Bayer five years ago for $66 billion. Bayer’s total value on the stock exchange — its “market cap” with chemicals and pharmaceuticals included alongside Monsanto’s “biotech” business — has pummeted from $80 billion in 2019 to less than $30 billion.
In contrast, small, sustainable and regenerative agriculture is gaining acclaim way beyond the back-to-the-Earth corners in which it has been lovingly fostered for decades. But that, too, is a story for another day.
