Farm protests highlight challenges in Spain’s countryside – Irish Times

Spain’s national film awards, the Goya Awards, held in Valladolid on Saturday, are not the obvious place to discuss the state of agriculture in the country. But still the problem managed to surface.

While presenting the award, the film director Pedro Almodovar, who received the award, made a sarcastic comment, calling himself “a stuck-up gentleman who takes subsidies just to make really bad movies that no one is interested in.” He said he was one of the.

This was a response to Juan García Gallardo, vice president of the Castilla and León municipality, of the far-right party Vox. Ahead of the ceremony, the politician used derogatory terms to describe the country’s filmmakers, calling on them to use their fame to talk about the plight of farmers rather than political issues associated with the left, such as historical memory. Ta.

There were fears that the ceremony would be disrupted by farmers’ protests, who threatened to rally in Valladolid with tractors. They were planning something similar in Madrid. However, there were no major disruptions in either Valladolid or the Spanish capital, as a heavy police presence deterred protesters in both cases.

But this appears to be a temporary glitch in a wave of protests in which angry farmers mobilized across the country’s agricultural heartland last week and are mirroring those in many parts of Europe. They drove tractors into towns and cities, including central Barcelona, ​​blocking major roads and in some cases clashing with police, with about 20 people arrested.

Much has been said about the involvement of the far right in these protests and how Vox sought to exploit them. Some of the key figures in the so-called 6F Platform, which called for Saturday’s failed protests, have strong ties to the party, and García-Gallardo’s deliberately provocative comments about the film industry support that idea. It seems to be.

However, major farm organizations have distanced themselves from the 6F platform, emphasizing how farm workers are not a single, homogeneous political entity. Many of them feel represented by Vox’s nostalgic, rustic nationalism, but many are associated with left-wing trade unions or, in the case of Catalonia, with trade unions with many pro-independence members. .

[ Irish farmers encouraged to show solidarity with EU protests ]

“into [recent] “Tractor protests in Germany and Eastern Europe carried flags from when those countries were communist republics,” says Spanish rural commentator and himself from the agricultural region of Castilla-La Mancha. Anna Iris Simone wrote. She said: “What farmers definitely crave is not fascism or communism, but rather certainty, stability and the possibility of making a living.”

What unites the Spanish peasants and aligns them with other peasants in most of Europe is their main grievance. They say EU agricultural regulations are suffocating them, creating bureaucracy and driving up costs. Relatively high fertilizer and fuel costs make profit margins very tight.

[ Video: Police use hoses as protesting farmers throw stones outside of EU Parliament ]

In contrast, Spanish farmers argue that producers outside the EU face less stringent controls, especially when it comes to meeting environmental standards, which can undermine them. Last week, farmers in Spain’s northern region of La Rioja bought Moroccan fruits and vegetables at a supermarket, threw them on the ground outside, and then drove over them with a tractor to protest.

For Pedro Sánchez’s coalition government, the issue is a tightrope walk. Despite their precarious position at home, socialists have emerged as prominent pro-EU spokespeople on the international stage. But he knows it is wrong to be considered “anti-peasant”.

The country’s agriculture minister, Luis Planas, said he would actively engage with farmers and understand their grievances, while censoring attempts to “manipulate or exploit them in violent ways.”

But the farmers are part of a long-standing and widespread discontent in the Spanish countryside. Due to a wave of migration from these regions to metropolitan centers, 90 percent of the country’s population now lives in just 30 percent of its territory. The rest of the region has become known as España vciada, or “Empty Spain,” with sparsely populated areas complaining of a lack of funding, transportation, good internet, schools and young families.

Drought has exacerbated the feeling of abandonment in some regions, particularly in the south and northeast of Catalonia, and yields have plummeted.

Protesters may feel like they have made a profit if a future agreement on agricultural promotion measures is reached in Brussels, but solving Spain’s rural challenges will take more time. Dew.

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