Farmers’ discontent as a stress test for the EU single market

Last week, Spanish lorries full of fruit, vegetables, wine and ham were dumped by French farmers during blockades in south-east France and Brittany. 

The row continued this Tuesday (30 January) when the former French environment minister Ségolène Royal said Spanish “fake bio” tomatoes were “uneatable” – to which Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez replied that they were actually “unbeatable”. 

“Mrs Royal has not been lucky enough to taste Spanish tomatoes,” Sánchez said.

French farmers have been rallying since the start of the year. Their demands have revolved around low wages and the administrative burden of EU regulation, but international trade and the state of the bloc’s single market have not been without controversy.

“We opened the trucks and emptied out everything that was foreign” Sylvie Meynier, regional representative of French farmers’ union FNSEA, told Euractiv’s Spanish partner EFE, referring to products from other EU member states. 

“What annoys us is that we have to import the food we have here,” she added. 

In a bid to ease farmers’ discontent, French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal promised to take action “to deal with unfair competition” during a visit to a farm in western France on Sunday (28 January), pointing to “Italy and others”. 

On 1 February, some national farmers’ organisations (Belgian, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish) called for a demonstration in Place Luxembourg, in front of the European Parliament, not far from where the EU leaders were meeting for an extraordinary European Council on the revision of the Multiannual Financial Framework, aka the EU budget. 

The protest was a strange one. We got a multimedia story and a comment.

On the margins of the EU leaders’ meeting, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Belgium’s Prime Minister Alexander de Croo, and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte met the European farmers organisations. 

“The European Council discussed the challenges in the agricultural sector and concerns raised by farmers”, read the European Council conclusions, which acknowledged “the essential role of the Common Agricultural Policy” and called on the EU Council and the Commission “to take work forward as necessary”. 

Besides political statements, the European Commission tried to meet at least some of the farmers’ demands with a package including safeguard clauses to cap Ukrainian food imports and a partial derogation from the Common Agricultural Policy fallow-land obligations. 

We asked two experts and received original albeit diverging opinions.

Food security and the choice of consumers. According to the director of the agricultural group Club Demeter and research fellow at thinktank IRIS in France Sebastien Abis, farmers’ anger stems from the fact that they are being asked for a lot by society, without necessarily having the support needed to meet the extent of our expectations. “For too long, Europeans have given food supply for granted, they have become amnesiac. Without farmers, there can be no food security.”

“EU consumers must be logical: supporting European agriculture also means consuming European products and accepting to pay a fair price for them.” 

Grassroots movements have the answer. For the rural sociologist Natalia Mamonova, the issue is “systemic”. Farmers are entrapped in a model of economic development, the Ukrainian-Dutch researcher argues, that pushed them “to become capitalist entrepreneurs, stimulating them to constantly expand and produce more than they need in order to be able to respond to the needs of the market, to invest more and, finally, to depend on loans”. 

Food sovereignty and agroecological grassroots movements, Mamonova concluded, “might represent a solution [to the farmers’ lock in] as they try not to implement green transition in this green capitalist logic but to enact a totally different system”.

Agriculture “core area” for 2040 climate targets.  The EU’s agricultural sector should be able to cut non-CO2 emissions by at least 30% by 2040 compared to 2015 levels, according to a leaked draft communication on the 2040 EU climate target to be presented next Tuesday (6 February). 

In the document, seen by Euractiv, livestock and fertiliser use are targeted as key areas for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. To achieve this, the text calls for scaling up the implementation on the ground of agricultural practices available at “relatively low cost”, such as producing “biomethane from manure, or optimising fertilisers application through precision farming”.

EU agrees on new rules on ‘breakfast foods’. A deal on the so-called “breakfast directive” was reached on Tuesday (30 January) as the European Parliament and member states agreed to improve transparency on the origin of honey.

Under the current EU rules, honey pots must show the exact origin if the product comes from one country, but things become confusing for blends of honey from different countries – labels either state, “blend of honey from EU and non-EU countries”, “blend of honey originating from the EU”, or “blend of honey not originating from the EU”.

The agreement, to be soon rubber-stamped by the Parliament and the Council, establishes that the countries of origin must be indicated in the label, as well as the percentage for each of them. 

The directive also tackles sugar in fruit juices and jams. New categories of product have been created to raise the consumer’s awareness of the sugar content in juices, and the minimum fruit content required to market jams and marmalades has been increased.

US support traditional African crops. The U.S. Special Envoy for food security Cary Fowler landed in Brussels to meet Belgian and EU officials and involve them in the Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils (VACS) initiative, involving the U.S. Department of State, FAO and African Union. The main mission is boosting the production of African traditional crops, such as fonio, sorghum, cassava and African locust bean.

“We are highlighting the importance of traditional and indigenous crops in Africa and more than 300 indigenous crops in Africa,” Fowler said in a meeting with Brussels based journalists, adding they had “identified the crops that we think have the most potential for adding nutrition to the diet in Africa”.

In the past, he added, “we have called them orphan crops, neglected crops, minor crops, under-utilised crops, we’ve had a lot of names for them, most of which have sort of negative covenant connotations. So we’re [now] calling them opportunity crops”.

Asked if the U.S. would push for specific technologies to improve the traditional varieties, Fowler replied:

“We [will not be] the gatekeeper and the dictator of what other countries and organisations are going to do. But I would have to say that looking at these crops, I just don’t see the likelihood of going to GMO route”.

“I think, Fowler concluded, that many of these crops will be improved varieties, probably through traditional plant breeding methods and would be distributed through a variety of ways seed systems” that “in Africa are diverse”.

[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic]

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The Agrifood Brief is created by Angelo (@angelodimambro) & Maria (@msimonarboleas).