In February 2023, I wrote a blog which described the sixty-year history of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), since it was established in 1963. Farmers in the now-27 member union have benefited from CAP financial support for decades, initially in the form of higher guaranteed prices for their products and more recently in the form of direct payments to farm households. In implementing its 2017 changes to the CAP, the European Commission argued that the direct payments were necessary to “... partially fill the gap between agricultural income and income in other economic sectors and remain an essential part of the CAP in line with its EU Treaty obligations”.
In a 2021 study, the Commission found that the income of farm households was comparable to that of non-farm households in most EU member countries when the analysis takes into account the differences in characteristics between the two groups, such as education levels or health status. Another report showed that as of 2021, average EU farm income per worker had increased by 56 percent since 2013.
Despite these reported gains, recent protests on the part of farmers in several EU member countries suggest that those farmers are not happy with the policy situation they face. As in the United States, the bulk of the CAP benefits go to larger farmers, leaving owners of smaller operations still struggling in many cases. In particular, many of them appear to be complaining about changes to farming regulations associated with EU-wide efforts to reduce emissions of greenhouse gasses (GHG) to address climate change, although the EU ‘Green Deal’ is not the sole focus of their ire.
That package of policy changes was introduced by the EU in 2020 in an effort to cut net GHG emissions by 55 percent by the year 2030, compared to 1990 levels. They are seeking to make the region the first ‘climate-neutral continent’ by 2050. With respect to the EU agricultural sector, which directly accounted for 10.5 percent of the region’s GHG emissions in 2022, this approach known collectively as their ‘Farm to Fork’ strategy has the following explicit objectives:
• have a neutral or positive environmental impact
• help to mitigate climate change and adapt to its impacts
• reverse the loss of biodiversity
• ensure food security, nutrition and public health, making sure that everyone has access to sufficient, safe, nutritious, sustainable food
• preserve affordability of food while generating fairer economic returns, fostering competitiveness of the EU supply sector and promoting fair trade
In practice, this set of objectives has translated into requiring farmers to reduce their use of pesticides and fertilizers, optimize use of water for irrigation purposes, encourage adoption of organic farming techniques (to meet a goal of 25 percent organic production by 2030), and encourage more efficient energy use on-farm by promoting adoption of precision agriculture practices.
Starting in 2023, farmers in several EU member countries have staged a series of protests. Much of the protesters’ attention was focused on objections to these Green Deal provisions, but some of the farmers have also weighed in against implementing agricultural trade provisions of an EU-MERCOSUR (trade bloc of South American countries including Argentina and Brazil) as well as the increased flows of agricultural commodities into eastern EU member countries from Ukraine after the Russian invasion in February 2022 restricted exports through the country’s Black Sea ports.
In fact, the initial farmer protests occurred in the countries of Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria in the spring of 2023 against the increased flow of agricultural commodities from Ukraine into their region. Many of the farmer protests in EU member countries have taken the form of blocking roads with farm equipment such as tractors and combines, impeding regular traffic flows. The initial efforts were intended to physically block truck movement of grains and oilseeds from crossing the Ukraine border with the countries listed above. Other farmers adopted similar tactics as 2023 went on, moving their blockades from rural areas where they garnered only modest public attention to blocking traffic into and out of major European cities, such as Paris, France, Brussels, Belgium (where the EU headquarters is located), Berlin, Germany, and Cork City in Ireland.
Some farmer protests have involved strategic use of farm products to make their points, such as transporting animal manure, eggs, and milk for use as projectiles or barriers against police, or setting tires from farm equipment on fire near government buildings. In some countries, it appears that certain far right political groups, such as France’s National Rally led by Marine Le Pen have joined the fray, seeking to bolster their popular appeal for the EU parliamentary elections coming up in June.
As of 2021, there were an estimated 9.1 million farmers within the 27 countries that make up the European Union. It is likely that only a small fraction of that group has actively participated in the protests described above, but the protests have to some extent already provoked some retreats on EU policies in response. For example, the EU has now imposed caps on the amounts of some categories of duty-free agricultural imports that it will allow in from Ukraine. They will continue to allow unrestricted amounts of barley and wheat to enter from Ukraine, an exception which has not pleased the protesting farmers. In addition, the EU has already backed off on some of the Green Deal provisions, eliminating the one requiring a 50 percent reduction in the use of pesticides and eliminating accounting for reductions in the agricultural sector’s GHG emissions in their 2040 climate roadmap.
