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‘They’re drowning us in regulations’: how Europe’s furious farmers took on Brussels and won

On the outskirts of the northern Spanish city of Pamplona, a green, red and blue stream of New Holland, John Deere, Massey Ferguson, Fendt and Deutz-Fahr tractors trundled forwards, horns honking and orange lights flashing.

Under drizzly grey skies and escorted by navy blue Policía Nacional vans, few were in the mood to explain the motives for their demonstration, but a young farmer from the nearby town of Estella threw open his cab door to share his grievances. “They’re drowning us with all these regulations,” he said. “They need to ease up on all the directives and bureaucracy. We can’t compete with other countries when things are like this. We’re … drowning.”

If Europe’s farmers have called a temporary halt to their protests in France and Germany – awaiting what one French farmer called “proof of love, not just words of love” from their respective governments – they have only just got going in Spain.

In scenes now familiar from Poland to Portugal, angry farmers last week blocked roads, a port and a large wholesale market, and plan to continue through February. Italian farmers also took to their tractors last week, converging on the outskirts of Rome and staging a symbolic drive-past of the Colosseum on Friday.

In recent weeks, large conurbations including Paris and Lyon have been blockaded. City centres in Brussels and Berlin have been choked to a standstill. Farmers have closed down motorways, dumped manure, hurled eggs, trashed supermarkets, set fire to hay bales and pallets, and clashed, sometimes violently, with police.

Away from the heat of the protests, in TV interviews and parliamentary speeches, their cause has been enthusiastically adopted by a resurgent populist far right, which sees in the farmers’ revolt a promising new front in its long-running war on “out-of-touch elites”, “radical environmentalism” and “Brussels diktats”.

Months from European parliament elections in which far-right and “anti-European” parties are projected to make big gains, farming – which represents just 1.4% of EU gross domestic product – has climbed, suddenly, to the top of the political agenda.

“Everywhere in Europe, the same questions are coming up,” said France’s prime minister, Gabriel Attal. “How do we continue to produce more, but better? Continue to tackle climate change? Avoid unfair competition from foreign countries?”

They are questions to which Europe needs rapid answers.

The first stirrings came, appropriately, in the Netherlands – Europe’s most intensively farmed country, home to more than 110 million livestock, including cows, pigs and chickens, and, largely as a consequence, to nitrogen emissions four times the EU average.

Five years ago, officials said “drastic measures” were needed, including buying up and shutting down farms. The government unveiled plans to cut nitrogen emissions in half by 2030, partly by slashing livestock numbers by up to a third. Dutch farmers did not wait for the details to make their feelings known. In October 2019, more than 2,000 tractors trundled from all corners of the country to the seat of government in The Hague, causing 620 miles of motorway tailbacks. “No farmers no food,” their placards read, and “Proud of the farmer”. It was the start of a movement that has since snowballed cross the bloc, accelerating rapidly in recent months to leave – so far – only Austria, Denmark, Finland and Sweden untouched.

Many protests – as in the Netherlands – are at least partly country-specific. In Italy, demands included reinstatement of an income tax exemption that had been in force since 2017 but was due to be scrapped in the 2024 budget. In Germany, where protests have briefly paused after an estimated 30,000 farmers and 5,000 tractors paralysed Berlin in mid-January, the most explosive issue is a government plan to phase out tax breaks on agricultural diesel to balance its budget.

But uniting them all are concerns shared across mainland Europe: falling product prices, rising costs, over-powerful retailers, cheap foreign imports and – in particular – EU environmental rules that many farmers see as unfair and economically unrealistic. “There are many issues,” said Arnaud Rousseau, president of France’s biggest farmers union, the FNSEA. “But the seeds of these protests are the same: lack of understanding between the reality on the ground and the decisions taken by governments.”

Spain’s agriculture minister, Luis Planas, said last week that the causes of the protests sweeping Europe were diverse and complicated, but boiled down to longstanding dissatisfactions and farmers feeling underappreciated. “Farmers want to be listened to and respected,” said Planas. “And they often feel they aren’t respected – especially in Brussels, but also sometimes in Madrid, or in the urban or political sphere.”

Some problems are structural. The EU’s common agricultural policy (CAP), the €55bn (£47bn) annual subsidy system on which mainland Europe’s postwar food security has rested for more than 60 years, has always been based on economy of scale: bigger farms, common standards. Increasingly, that has encouraged consolidation (the number of farms in the bloc has fallen by more than a third since 2005), leaving many larger operations overburdened with debt and many smaller ones struggling to stay competitive on product price.

Others are temporal. The past two years have brought a vicious squeeze on already tight margins, triggered by the pandemic and, more significantly, Russia’s war on Ukraine. Farmers’ costs – fuel, electricity, fertilizer and transport – have soared.

At the same time, efforts by governments and retailers to limit the impact of the cost of living crisis on consumers have hit prices. Eurostat data shows the prices farmers get for their products fell on average by almost 9% between late 2022 and late 2023.

That squeeze is being further exacerbated by an avalanche of imports, often from countries and regions where farmers are not generally subject to the same strict standards and regulations as in the EU – and so can compete unfairly on price. A flood of cheap agricultural produce, especially grain from Ukraine – on which the EU initially waived quotas and duties after Russia’s full-scale invasion – prompted furious Polish farmers to begin blocking cross-border roads as early as the spring of 2023.

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