The field in flames, let's eat stones

It is not going to be easy to reconcile so many interests at stake, to respect multiple balances and not to give up the major objectives, in order to find a solution to the very serious disease that has taken over the countryside and is attacking European farmers to a greater or lesser extent. 

This time it is not one of the many occasional outbreaks that occur at different times of the year, when certain growers or farmers are affected by the successive competition of seasonal products. 

The current explosion is much more profound, triggered by the latest reform of the CAP, the Common Agricultural Policy, that invention of the Dutchman Sicco Mansholt, with the aim of guaranteeing food self-sufficiency and at the same time allowing farmers to have a sufficiently attractive and dignified income so that they would not abandon the countryside to join the industrial work in the cities. 

The whole of European agriculture has benefited to varying degrees from that invention and its successive reforms, although it is obvious that some have benefited much more than others. So important has it been that the lion's share of the European Union's budgets has always been taken by the complex mechanisms of the CAP, whether through very attractive incentives or substantial subsidies, with which priorities, population movements and the changing attention to other sectors that are more promising in the medium and long term than the primary sector have been modulated. 

If one of the defining features of the EU's identity is its attachment to free trade, this has led not only to the free movement of goods within the Community market but also to its openness to the products of third parties, embodied in multiple preferential agreements. And it is at this point that protectionist impulses have often erupted with varying degrees of virulence. 

The assaults by French farmers on Spanish trucks and the smashing and looting of their cargo is not a recent occurrence; they have been practicing it almost from the very moment Spain joined the then European Economic Community, at the cost, among other things, of Spain's total dismantling of industrial tariffs. And just now, the French President, Emmamuel Macron, has come to promise that we will have to step over their corpse in order to implement the long-awaited EU-Mercosur Agreement, under the pretext that Brazilian and Argentinean meats will compete advantageously with the livestock farmers of Gaul. 

Many voices are also raised in France and in Spain itself against the "invasion" of agricultural products from Morocco, most of which are produced by exporting companies that are subsidiaries of other French and Spanish companies. The prosperity of the Alaouite kingdom, like the potential prosperity of many other African countries, is largely based on this agricultural production and on its capacity to export it to Europe. 

If such possibilities are cut off from Europe, how can we complain after millions of human beings want to emigrate and reach Europe at any cost?
Of course, the regulatory vocation is also a characteristic of the European Union. After all, it is its main weapon; others wield raw military muscle. But it would nevertheless be advisable to make it a little more flexible. 

The famous Green Pact and Agenda 2030, however laudable their goals may be, cannot end up with the ill-fated expression "emptied Spain" becoming an emptied Europe, but populated by immense wind farms, very green, very sustainable, but with little or no human and social life around them. 

It is true that the continuous transformation of humanity has accelerated at a dizzying pace, and if we do not want to miss the train of the industrial and technological vanguard, we must promote the necessary changes that are imposed, although graduating the rhythms. The true art of governing lies in the conjugation of all this. 

However, for all this to happen, the main need of human beings is to feed themselves. And the farmer, a term that has completely supplanted the, in my opinion, broader term of peasant, must be granted the dignity of being able to do so, to supply us with the product of his effort and to be able to live from it.

It is obvious that, thanks to technological advances, we do not need as many arms as in the past to extract the fruits of the earth, but it will be difficult to fix the population without the help of those who want to live and develop in the countryside. 

Above all, to do it as farmers, whose main task is to take care of it instead of dealing with the enormous amount of paperwork, even if it is electronic, imposed by the army of civil servants of so many administrations, whose enormous weight on the same individual-taxpayer is capable of crushing the best intentions. 

And, finally, as in every conflict that breaks out, there are frequent fights among those who suffer its consequences. It is therefore regrettable to see French farmers blaming their Spanish and Italian counterparts for their problems, Poles and Hungarians confronting their Ukrainian colleagues, or Spaniards doing the same to Moroccan farmers. 

Perhaps true solidarity lies in helping to consider that the countryside, the land, is everyone's business, and not confined to our mere local, regional or national portion.