An online event reflecting on the wave of farmers’ protests washing over Europe to map out the complexity, stakes at play, the strategies involved, and to build collective intelligence.
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 baffled and inspired in equal measure, and in need of a translocal conversation. We’ve been following struggles for farming and peasant livelihoods as well as food sovereignty for a while. 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, and 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 toward broader understanding and alliances?
With organized farmers and food systems researchers from Spain (Elena Alter and Diego Bárcena, part of Nos Plantamos and 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 (This is a past event and registration is no longer possible. You can watch the recording of the event instead.)
Analyses we found useful so far:
From France: Position and call of Soulèvements de la Terre on the current agricultural movement
Undisciplined Environments blog: 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?
