This Is Not A Peasant's Revolt
High Carbon, High Chemical Farming Is Up In Arms - But Is Misdirecting Us
Anyone who doubts that system change will be political should be paying a little more attention to what’s going on in the EU with energetic protests against some aspects of the region’s Green Deal. As the Financial Times reports this morning, “a road map on how to cut emissions by 90 per cent by 2040, due to be published by the European Commission on Tuesday, no longer includes a reference to a 30 per cent reduction target in methane, nitrogen and other gases linked to farming...”
This is a bitter reverse for anyone wanting to see farming play a sensible role in the coming transition to more sustainable economies. But it should not surprise us. As the FT explains, “the move follows widespread demonstrations by farmers in France, Germany, Belgium and, most recently, Italy involving roadblocks, statues being torn down and riot police being deployed. Resistance to Brussels’ environmental rules has been fuelled by a perception that urban policymakers are ignoring rural areas — a sentiment on which the far right has sought to capitalise in the run-up to elections for the European parliament in June.”
These are volatile times, no question, with some commentators characterising this as another of the peasants’ revolts that periodically rocked medieval societies. But that’s a bit of a stretch, shading into downright misleading.
Instead, many of these farmers have enjoyed levels of subsidy support that their harried, put-upon ancestors would have been unable to even dream about—and are perhaps best seen as the agents of an unsustainable form of high-carbon, high-chemical industrial agriculture that has damaged and compacted the region’s soils, unravelled its biodiversity, and polluted its waterways.
Take that as our starting point and the political calculus might look rather different. Many farmers are now trapped within a system that has to fail for something better to emerge. Resistance is understandable, but simply postpones the evil day.
The bureaucrats trying to steer them in a more sustainable direction need to be more sensitive to the adverse impacts of their policies, clearly, but it remains true that you can’t easily make omelettes without …
A lot of policy is driven by theory that often ignores context and interconnectedness. There are plenty of papers that recommend interventions that present like a food system or regenerative approach but when you dig deeper into the limitations it’s just a collection of disconnect solutions. Policy often misses the best agriculture and small scale ag so it doesn’t know what good looks like in specific contexts. So I also think it’s about limitations on scientific approach.
What’s emerging through our research is “there is no useful collective name for farmers” and “supply chains stabilise when you pay the farmer properly”
I think we can design better policies. No matter what new food production business is invented it still has to operate in degenerative supply chains.
I keep hearing the voices at our SOSE Volans farmer workshops " we want to be part of change" "let us play" "we have the agency to make changes". It makes me determined to make spaces for that change to happen here.