Farmers protests: where do we stand?

An online event with organized farmers and their allies across Europe

Thursday 22 February 2024, 19h-21h CET

with farmer-activists and researchers from Nos Plantamos (ES), Area de Agroecología de Ecologistas en Acción (ES), Association A4 (FR), Mondeggi Bene Commune (IT), Root and Branch Collective (IR/UK) and ABL (DE)

Farmers protests have recently been erupting across Europe, leaving us inspired as well as baffled, and in need for a translocal conversation. We’ve been following struggles for farming and peasant livelihoods as well as food sovereignty for a while, and we know that grievances and demands of organized farmers have not just emerged yesterday. But we see them instrumentalized and enacted in a very particular way these days, in a strange game of call-and-response that seems to primarily unfold between the far right and neoliberals. The far right calls for deregulation and stirs nationalist sentiment, the neoliberal EU responds promptly by delaying or dropping environmental regulations, agribusiness is pleased. In the news, we see some farmers and farming lobbies more cited than others. There’s a struggle over representation going on here, with implications well beyond the world of agriculture: upcoming European elections, the rise of far right parties, intensifying ecosocial crisis. We are organising this event to get together and map out the complexity, stakes and strategies at play, and build collective intelligence.

We bring many questions: How are the many organized farmers outside the agroindustrial mainstream relating to this? What do our comrades from food sovereignty, agri-cooperative and anti-racist farming movements say and do right now, what may we learn from&with them? How can we build common demands across movements and places? How can we, as diverse movements for socio-ecological justice and earthcare, lend support and intervene in this seemingly self-fulfilling dynamic and its narratives? How do we understand farmer protests across borders, and in solidarity not only within the EU but also globally? Neither denying the reactionary nor the progressive tendencies in the farmers protests, how do we hold complexity dear and build towards broader understanding and alliances?

With organized farmers and food systems researchers from: Spain (Elena Alter and Diego Bárcena, part of Nos Plantamos and of the Agroecology strand of Ecologistas en Acción), France (Habib and Justine, A4 anti-racist farming association as well as broader food sovereignty movements), Germany (Anne Klingenmeier of ABL), Italy (Andrea Ghelfi, farmer and activist of Mondeggi Bene Comune), Ireland and UK (Alex Heffron, farmer and researcher, and Patrick Bresnihan, both from the Root and Branch Collective).

Join us! You can register here

Analyses we found useful so far:

From France: Position and call of Soulèvements de la terre on the current agricultural movement https://lessoulevementsdelaterre.org/en-eu/blog/mouvement-agricole-communique-soulevements

Undisciplined Environments Blog: Farmers against the environment? The causes of farmer protests and problems with “greening” policies in Europe https://undisciplinedenvironments.org/2024/02/13/farmers-against-the-environment-the-causes-of-farmer-protests-and-problems-with-greening-policies-in-europe/

From Germany: German Farmers, pushed to the limits of austerity? https://www.crowdfarming.com/blog/en/german-farmers-pushed-to-the-limits-of-austerity/