Why are farmers protesting in Europe? | Explained

The story so far: Agriculture has become a site of revolt in Europe over the last month. Farmers have taken out hour-long tractor protests and held a multi-day ‘siege’ of Parisian streets. Manure was sprayed on French buildings, eggs hurled at the European Parliament, a statue of a 19th-century British industrialist in Brussels was toppled in anger. Resentment against governments has spread from Spain to Poland, Germany to Greece, as farmers struggle to keep pace with weather changes and war-related supply-chain disruptions. European Union’s green policies have further stoked their anger, as governments face the task of balancing livelihoods while mitigating agriculture’s contribution to climate change.

Claudiu Crăciun, a political science lecturer in Bucharest, explains the common threads of grievance binding European farmers, the role of far-right populist parties and what bearing the protests have on the upcoming European Union polls. “We cannot understand what the farmers are protesting about today if we don’t understand their history,” Dr. Crăciun says. The ‘agrarian question’ of today, he suggests, has as much to do with green policies, land use, access to markets and falling income as it has to do with the cultural value afforded to Europe’s farming sector.

Mapping the protests

Farmers from at least nine countries have joined protests, including those from Greece, Poland, Spain, Germany, France, Romania, Italy, Belgium, Portugal and Lithuania. Early signs of strain appeared in 2019 when Dutch farmers blocked roads to protest new limitations on farms’ nitrogen emissions. Four years later, in late 2023, Polish food producers blocked the crossing with Ukraine to demand that the government revive policies previously lifted following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Almost 10,000 farmers rallied in Germany against fuel subsidy cuts in mid-January — which played a role in inspiring protests by food producers in other regions, Dr. Crăciun notes.

Reasons vary regionally but also overlap. Seen as threats are cheap imports from neighbouring Ukraine, delayed subsidy payments, taxation on vehicles, and EU green regulations on how much land is used or how much nitrogen is emitted in the air. Governments are reducing food prices due to inflation, even as the cost of producing food is increasing, stoking fears about how to sustain a livelihood.

Why protest now, and why in large numbers? “It’s a better moment for protest,” says Dr. Crăciun. There is a seasonal aspect to it — agricultural work is scarce during winters — and the end of the year is also a time when food producers balance their sheets and take stock of economic shortfalls. Policy and politics add another layer. Several European countries passed green transition-focused regulations towards the end of 2023, and in six months, the European Parliament will see roughly 400 million voters participate in 27 national elections, where green transition and its impacts remain critical electoral planks.

Data shows agriculture contributed around 1.4% to the European Union’s GDP. In Germany, it generates just 0.7% of economic activity and 1.6% in France. If farmers made up 44% of total employment in India in 2021, for France and Germany this number was 2% and 1% respectively. Despite their small numbers, farmers wield considerable influence; a third of the EU’s budget goes as subsidies to farmers.

What are the reasons?

The current revolt represents a ‘buildup of resentment,’ Dr. Crăciun suggests.War, weather and green regulations are the immediate triggers. Russia’s invasion disrupted supply chains, increased energy costs and transportation levies; cheaper imports trickled from neighbouring Ukraine as the bloc eased rules. The ongoing trade negotiations with the South American MERCOSUR block would also see them competing with imports from Chile, Argentina and Australia. A Politico analysis showed between 2022 and 2023, prices paid to farmers sunk by more than 10% across 11 EU countries. Farmers are also grappling with climate change — regular water shortages, erratic weather, droughts and soil erosion are laying waste to crops. In Greece, wildfires have burnt through 20% of the annual farm revenue.

Enter the European Green Deal, “an agreement to transition away from fossil fuels and to reduce global emissions by 43% by 2030.” Agriculture accounts for 11% of collective greenhouse gas emissions, above the OECD average of 10%, with recent trends showing “slow progress.” The European Union, in keeping with pledges of becoming climate-neutral by 2050, proposed the Green Deal and introduced revisions to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), a subsidy system that eased economic activity for farmers. Together, they require farmers to reduce fertiliser use by at least 20% or keep at least 4% of their land fallow if they wish to keep receiving EU aid.

These policies have sparked rallies in different regions. German farmers are protesting the government’s plan to delay tax breaks on diesel in a bid to balance the budget, which would eventually add to food production costs. In France, concerns range from the glut of cheap imports and pesticide bans to unfeasible bureaucratic measures. Romania, the EU nation with the highest number of farmers, submitted 47 demands.

“On the one hand, we are being asked to farm more sustainably, which is fair enough because we know that the climate crisis exists because it’s affecting us,” French farmer Morgan Ody told Time. “But at the same time, we are asked to keep producing as cheap as possible, which puts us in an impossible situation.” Ms. Ody added that the EU’s free trade agreements “will create competition that is impossible to overcome.

Farmers are “not necessarily ‘anti-climate,’ but they want a slower pace of this transition,” Dr. Crăciun suggests. Their problem is not with land-use restrictions or use of fertilisers but “with the whole package.”

“In the end, when you balance the books, it’s difficult to say whether you are in trouble because of the climate policies or the fuel costs or other actors [that cause market fluctuations],” he said.

Are there structural grievances too?

Joachim Rukwied, head of the German Farmer’s Association, said in a press release the latest measures were “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” Experts trace farmers’ present grievances back to structural factors — the state’s regulation of agriculture and the degree of political influence some farmers wield, despite their small numbers.

It goes back to how agriculture came to be seen in Europe. In Romania, for instance, agriculture troubles played out in a scarcity of land, where production was managed by the noble elite primarily for export purposes, which created chronic poverty among the peasantry. In other regions, World War II raised the spectre of food insecurity and hunger, post which leaders decided to promote and heavily subsidise agriculture to prevent future famines, culminating in the Common Agriculture Policy. The subsequent CAP regime was envisioned as a common marketplace: standard rules across borders, offering subsidies to farmers. The subsidy system has created an “entitlement effect,” as policy expert Pranay Kotasthane wrote. “Any move to reduce these subsidies or to align them with climate transition goals causes backlash.”

Moreover, the agricultural turmoil is fuelled by a ‘romanticism’ which connects agriculture to nationhood, and farmers to nation-building., Mr. Kotasthane noted. “The falling fortunes of agriculture in the EU were a primary justification for protectionist policies… People like the idea of farming and see it not just as an ordinary economic activity but as a way of life that needs to be preserved.” France’s new Prime Minister Gabriel Attal echoed this sentiment: Agriculture embodies the “values of work, freedom and entrepreneurship”, he said, adding: “It is one of the foundations of our identity and our traditions.”

Then there is the matter of how farmers’ grievances are represented, and by whom. It’s a “structured economic field,” a very “strong agriculture lobby which resembles more an actor of a tripartite negotiation between the trade unions, employers and the governments”, Dr. Crăciun explains. This is also why the government and large agriculture associations “were caught unprepared”, because “they were used to more lobbying and negotiations rather than the spectacle of farmers taking to the streets.”

Europe’s farming and cooperative movements, Copa and Cogeca, which claim to speak for “over 22 million European farmers and their family members,” have held sway over policymaking, sometimes eclipsing consumer and environmental interests. Among other factors, agriculture’s prominent role was due to “…the solidarity of the agricultural organisations; the inter-institutional relationship between agricultural organisations and the ministry of agriculture, the importance government attaches to agriculture and the status of the ministry of agriculture in national government,” argued a 2012 paper.

A recent investigation, however, found that smaller-scale farmers do not feel represented by “big countries, big farmers, big unions.” Jean Mathieu Thevenot, from the French Basque country, said most young farmers “are in complete disagreement with the vision of Copa-Cogeca, which has a lot of power in the EU but advocates in favour of the status quo and industrial agriculture.”

While some farm unions insist on returning the status quo to CAP, others have critiqued the system for its disproportionate distribution of subsidies based on land size. A report found about 80% of the EU’s farming budget goes to roughly 20% of farmers, who have the biggest land holdings.

The subsidy system then exists as a sort of double-edged sword, Dr. Crăciun suggests. EU farmers are among the “luckiest” from a global perspective, in comparison to farmers in Africa or Asia, for the economic support they receive from national governments and the EU, allowing them to produce at cheaper rates. However, the EU policy and the larger economic model are such that they favour “ever-larger actors” — agribusiness corporations and tenants with more land, resources and equipment, thus making small and medium farmers “redundant” and exacerbating the challenges posed by wars or climate disruptions. “This, unfortunately, is the way of capitalism,” he says.

Do far-right parties have a role to play?

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, while announcing policies to ease farmers’ anger, recently said their “rage is being stoked deliberately” by far-right parties. Europe will see nine parliamentary elections in 2024, the world’s biggest cross-border vote. Far right parties are rising quickly up the polls and a “major shift to the right” is projected, according to a recent European Council on Foreign Relations survey.

Political observers fear agricultural grievances might become a site for the resurgence of far-right sentiments across Europe, as anti-climate and anti-EU sentiments intertwine to win favour among increasingly alienated farmers. “It’s surprising how similar the script is,” says Dr. Crăciun. Germany’s AfD, France’s National Democratic Front, the Sweden Democrats, Fidesz in Hungary, Romania’s Alliance for the Union of Romanians, Brothers of Italy, among others, have expressed support for farmers’ causes, often with an “emotionally charged take on their issues.”

According to Dr. Crăciun, far-right groups and far-right accounts were increasingly present in the farmers’ protests in Germany and Holland for months, spreading a narrative of revolt and revolution, a form of ‘agrarian populism.’ In a tractor blockade at Berlin, some supporters displayed the flag of the Landvolkbewegung, an antisemitic agrarian movement from the 1920s.

However, not all protestors subscribe to this political ideology: Romanian farmers asked far-right leaders to leave when they joined their protests.

“The farmer’s protests have their own economic and social roots…But this kind of age-old problem of too much workforce, or not having the possibility to earn a fair livelihood because of policies or size or market access, it is used in a very political and electoral way by far-right parties,” Dr. Crăciun suggests. The far-right’s involvement, at the higher echelons, plays into a “civilizational conflict between the EU and in Russia,” he says. Green transition decreases the influence of fossil fuels on the economy; those who export and rely on fossil fuels for their economic prosperity, countries such as Russia, would inevitably lose. The EU Green Deal, government regulations and farmers’ concerns become part of a larger ‘geopolitical game,’ he notes.

What have governments done so far?

On January 31, the European Commission proposed to limit the flow of cheap Ukrainian imports and eased some environmental measures, such as exempting farmers from keeping their land fallow. Portugal announced aid worth €500 million, including a 55% reduction in tax on diesel fuel and funds to support organic farming. French President Emmanuel Macron has offered to halt the South American trade deal if grievances persist, in addition to offering emergency cash aid. “Everywhere in Europe, the same question arises: how do we continue to produce more but better? How can we continue to tackle climate change? How can we avoid unfair competition from foreign countries?” Mr. Attal said, while announcing tax breaks and a promise to halt the ban on pesticides.

Environmental activists, however, argue lowering green measures is not the solution. “It’s putting all of us at risk, especially farmers themselves, whose yields are already affected by the ever-increasing droughts, fires, and floods ravaging our continent,” wrote Caroline Herman, a sustainability activist with Birdlife International.

The government has not given in completely, says Dr. Crăciun, but has given some concessions to avoid the protests flaring up. “It doesn’t look good, especially because this is an electoral year.” Yet, he thinks the protests “will not go away” any time soon, as far-right actors interject their ideologies, focusing “on small groups of farmers from specific regions, trying to kind of encourage them to protest more.”

He notes, “This is not the first time, unfortunately, when the far right takes the losers of capitalism and uses them as anti-liberal, anti-democratic instruments.”