On an international scale, gathered around what it is tempting to call an “agricultural spring”, farmers are letting it be known that they are at the end of their rope. Leave their fields and enter town with their tractor. From France to India, via Quebec, all the anger that has exploded in recent months has its own and complicated national roots, at the same time as it expresses, through a spontaneous coalition, a great sense of fed up. with obvious common denominators. It is a convergence of social responses which echoes the international wave of demonstrations, which occurred at the end of 2019, when the populations of Algeria, Sudan, Chile and Haiti, to mention just a few , took to the streets each on their own to protest against the deafness of their government to the issues of inequality and the cost of living.
In the agricultural world, grievances accumulated for a long time against hard-line decision-makers combine with anxiety about the future, which is becoming more complicated with climate change. What will the agricultural summer be like in Quebec after a winter without snow?
If, in Europe, the French seemed to lead the charge, unease was in fact expressed across the continent — in Germany, Italy, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Poland, in Romania… Everywhere the conditions of a “perfect storm” are met where over-indebtedness has taken on catastrophic proportions with inflation and rising interest rates. In Europe, dismay is heightened by the advantages granted to exports from war-torn Ukraine. In France, where 18% of farmers live below the poverty line, the straw that broke the camel’s back was a tax increase on diesel, finally canceled last month by Prime Minister Gabriel Attal at the same time as he promised to relax the application of the new agroecological standards voted in Brussels to fight against global warming. Standards that are certainly essential, but deemed economically impossible to apply by small and medium-sized operators in a context where more and more of them are struggling to keep their heads above water.
We will not exhaust all the complexities of the problem here, except to add that, according to environmental defenders, the changes made by Attal to calm anger are found ultimately to benefit large industrial monocultures and, ultimately, to accelerate the disappearance of family farms. It remains to be done, doesn’t it, to demonstrate that ecological lucidity and capitalist globalization are reconcilable?
Western frustration overlaps with that of Indian farmers, who marched on Delhi in February at the call of 200 farmers’ unions. Common denominator: the demand for a basic income. In India, two-thirds of the population of 1.4 billion still depend, directly or indirectly, on agricultural income for their livelihood. Farmers, who are mostly poor, have been demanding guaranteed minimum prices for their crops for years, something opposed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, an obtuse disciple of market deregulation — and a man for whom the “ecological transition” is the least of your worries.
Its model is obviously that of the United States, where the Farm Bill passed by President Bill Clinton in 1996 finished deregulating the agricultural market, canceling the income protection policies that had existed since the New Deal. The case of Wisconsin, a major cheese producer, is eloquent and representative: half of the 14,000 family dairy farms have disappeared over the past ten years. Some of its farmers would like a supply management mechanism like in Canada, but that will not happen. The distress is such that, a little known reality, the suicide rate is, as in India, alarming among American and French farmers.
All this resonates in Quebec, where farmers’ frustration is at its peak. “Mr. Legault, our agriculture is on the brink of collapse! » were alarmed this week in The duty, rightly, representatives of the agricultural world, deploring the indolence of the government – and by extension that of the urban world – in the face of the serious crisis in farmers’ income. However, the urgent implementation of aid measures and, beyond that, a deep reflection on the agriculture that we collectively want. The anger manifested on an international scale poses a fundamental question: do we want a rural world as a living environment in its own right, where plural and sustainable agriculture can develop, or land as a simple instrument of commodification? food — read about an economy where, moreover, waste is trivialized? The agricultural world is like a machine that stalls: here as elsewhere, politicians are burying their heads in the sand.