Farmers across the globe face an existential crisis: markets are denying them an assured and just price

Tractor-driving farmers who caused traffic jams around the Port of Dover said there could be more demonstrations. Road traffic in and out of the Kent town was disrupted by the go-slow demonstration on 9th February (BBC).

Jeffrey Gibson, from Yew Tree Farm in Wingham, Kent, said supermarkets were selling British produce at prices “cheaper than the cost of production”.

UK farm­ers have had their Com­mon Agri­cul­tural Policy basic pay­ment sub­sidies halved since Brexit and are told that the only endur­ing “pub­lic” pay­ments they will receive are for the sup­ply of pub­lic, mostly envir­on­mental, goods.

Brits also face a flood of cheap imports. Mr Gibson (left) added: “if farming continues in this country as it is with the new SFI (government’s sustainable farming incentive) scheme actively encouraging us not to grow food and rely more on cheap imports none of us will exist once the government changes tack leaving us unequipped to grow anything.”

Agricultural analyst, Devinder Sharma, refers to the “unprecedented surge in farm protests witnessed in Europe. From France, the protests fanned out to Germany, where enraged farmers brought Berlin City to a near stand-still. And then again back to France where irate farmers have threatened to bring Paris ‘under siege’ with tractors, the farm protest movement has spread to Romania, the Netherlands, Sicily, Poland and now to Belgium.

French MPs are proposing that their expenses be increased by 300 Euros per month, but, as it has been pointed out that a third of their farmers have to live on that amount, the hike has been temporarily withdrawn.

Spanish farmers have now joined the protests

Sharma reports that farmers from Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan are getting ready for a renewed farmers protest around New Delhi beginning on February 13^th.

Initiating a discussion in European Parliament in Brussels, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, began: “We all agree that the challenges are, without any question, mounting. Be it competition from abroad, be it overregulation at home, be it climate change, or the loss of biodiversity, or be a demographic decline, just to name a few of the challenges” (Euractive)

Sharma points out that what she failed to mention was that the outrage is primarily against the denial of an assured and rightful price to farmers – farm incomes have steadily declined. None of the European leaders has been able to point to the cause of the growing agrarian despondency: the failure of markets to provide an assured income to farmers.

“We don’t want incentives. What we want is for our products to be valued and sold at good prices,” said an enraged Belgian farmer, summing up the desperation that drives European farmers to roll out thousands of tractors in protest. “We’re being left to die,” another angry Belgian farmer told the media.

DS sees the global relevance of the demand by farmer groups in India

They are seeking a legal framework for Minimum Support Price (MSP) which would make farming a viable enterprise, guaranteeing farm prices by ensuring that no purchases are allowed below the benchmark price, like farming groups in Northern Ireland, whose Farm Welfare Bill, which may be read here,  is before the reconvened Stormont Parliament.

FFA(NI) meeting MLA Claire Sugden at Stormont

Though mainline economists and media will try to browbeat decision-makers, saying assured farm prices will distort markets, Sharma says the markets will adjust and farmers cannot be denied a living income, adding that it’s time for a historic correction in price policies to ensure no more farmers are driven to commit suicide.

He adds that European farmers must understand that left to markets, the remaining farming population will become extinct, sooner rather than later.  Small farmers in the US are already saying “They’re trying to wipe us off the map.”

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(Ed) Why would anyone wish to do that? See the following post.  

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