Call to action: Fair incomes for all farmers! Stop free trade agreements immediately!
1 February @ 11:00hrs – Place de Luxembourg, Brussels
(January 29, 2024) European Coordination Via Campesina calls for a European mobilisation on 1 February 2024. Join us and our member organisations in Brussels at 11:00 at Place de Luxembourg to express our discontent and call for a paradigm change as we mobilise in parallel to the European Council meeting this week.
Europe’s neo-liberal policies are overwhelmingly responsible for farmers’ distress: free trade agreements (FTAs), market deregulation, CAP subsidies which are distributed totally unfairly, administrative overload, fake solutions such as senseless support for digitisation, GMOs and carbon markets, and a lack of overall vision for a transition to more sustainable models of agriculture, to name only some.
We have long been calling for a change of direction. Today, farmers have had enough and in several European countries are expressing their anger en masse. We are therefore taking to the streets of Brussels to demand:
- Stop EU Mercosur immediately and suspend FTAs linked to agriculture! Negotiations with MERCOSUR must stop. The EU-New Zealand agreement must not be ratified. Negotiations with Chile, Kenya, Mexico, India and Australia must stop. The CETA, which has been implemented without ever having been ratified by all the Member States, must be repealed.
- Fair prices for agricultural produce! Agricultural prices should be guaranteed to be higher than production costs, which have risen sharply in recent years. Our working time must also be taken into account when determining a fair price. The EU must re-establish intervention prices and minimum prices for all products. The directive on Unfair Trading Practices (UTP) must be strengthened, with the Spanish food chain law used as a positive example. We are calling for market regulation tools to stabilise prices and prevent speculation and unfounded margins by certain agroindustry and distribution actors.
- We need a sufficient budget and an equitable distribution of CAP aid to facilitate a fair transition towards agroecology and sustainable practices! The current CAP budget is insufficient and aid is insufficiently distributed to support small and medium-sized farmers, who practice socially and environmentally sustainable agriculture and to facilitate agroecological transition. 20% of the largest European farmers, who often do not even work on their farms, receive 80% of public aid, while most farmers on small or medium-sized farms receive little to nothing. We want subsidies per active worker, not per hectare.
- Less red tape! We are farmers, not bureaucrats. We need simple procedures and we need people to answer our questions and help us through the process, not algorithms.
ECVC has requested meetings with Ursula Von Der Leyen and Charles Michel on Thursday to obtain answers to each of these demands. A press conference will be organised following the mobilisation in Place de Luxembourg with farmer leaders from various European countries.
