argia.eus
INPRIMATU
Ecology kills farmhouse
  • The flooding of farmers has flooded European roads. They protest. In addition to the economic question, which is the eternal expression of sectoral precariousness, two unions of the French State, FNSEA and Young Farmers, have other demands.
Josebe Blanco Alvarez 2024ko otsailaren 19a
Argazkia: Vincent Michel / Ouest-France

They question the rules laid down by the European Union and the French State for the protection of health and the environment. The media report on the extension of the authorisation to use pesticides and the need not to limit water consumption.

The article that gathers the collection of views of the protests in the Paris area has been titled by the journalist: “Ecology kills agriculture.” That is what one of the fruit manufacturers says.

Because if agriculture – therefore, the certainty of food – is at the end, it will not be because of the climate change and pollution that this development model has brought us, nor because of the added difficulties that it imposes on work with land and animals – droughts, biodiversity loss, floods, fires, crop loss by pests.

If the farmhouse is in ruins, it is not because the meat and dairy industries have a disproportionate consumption of water and land, or because this industrial system is characteristic of water and soil pollution. Neither.

Agriculture and livestock farming are not in red numbers because they depend on fossil fuels, either by direct consumption of diesel, by the use of fertilizers and pesticides.

If the rural world is in a deep crisis, this has nothing to do with the forms of work established by the market system. Nor is it the exploitation of soil, animals and people. Nor do they have the mechanisms that some have organized to do business and speculate with food. Nor is it profitable above the planet and people's health.

Agriculture and livestock are not on the brink of seeds, land, water, food production and distribution. Nor is it because public policies promote this globalized and oligarchy model. Even less so, because in the distribution of subsidies from public institutions industrial and intensive models are supported, or latifundism is encouraged. That is why it is not.

The baserritars are not about to die because they choke us from the administration with extraordinary bureaucracy, obligations and difficulties. Nor is it because public policies encourage large farms. Speculation on Earth has not long affected the impossibility of setting up young people in the farmhouse or the level of indebtedness.

The disappearance of villages has nothing to do with the industrial or tourist occupation of agricultural land. Occupation of agricultural land by other infrastructures such as roads, wind and/or photovoltaic plants, mines, TAV, etc. Do not harm. With all kinds of advantages for shopping malls and hypermarkets, no problems.

Well, in the end, the rural world will disappear because of the environmentalists. And for those little baserritars that have no ambition. Without forgetting the contribution of local markets and small businesses to destruction. And citizens and peasants who defend the agroecological model.

It is clear that the farmhouse has been killed by ecology.