 Hello, hello, hello, and welcome. I'm Meroen Kilele. We are DM25, a radical political movement for Europe. And this is another coordinating call, well, a call with our coordinating team featuring subversive ideas you won't hear anywhere else. And today, we are looking at the farmers' protests the farmers' protests that have erupted across the EU. The wave of protests is dominating the headlines and in Germany, Greece, Italy, France and other countries, as well as in Brussels, of course, with the heart of the EU, farmers are bringing city centres to a standstill with their tractors. They're spraying manure on government buildings and they're pelting officials with eggs. There are a number of issues that the farmers say are making their livelihoods unsustainable. The rising prices of animal feed, fertiliser and the energy they use. They're protesting cheaper imports from outside the EU, particularly Ukraine. High taxes and red tape and, of course, the impact of climate regulations, both nationally and EU-wide. Now, the EU spends around 34% of its budget supporting farmers and yet an increasing number of farmers are still unable to make ends meet. Further complicating matters, the European elections are on the horizon and these protests are already being successfully exploited by far-right parties seeking votes. So, tonight, we'll be jumping into this topic and asking, what's really behind these protests? What could a just transition that curbs our emissions while minimising the impact on farmers' livelihoods look like? What is the role of the far-right here and where the hell are left-wing parties in all of this? And what could this wave of resistance mean for the European elections and for the future of the continent? Our panel, including our own Yanis Varoufakis, as well as Karin Derigo, our lead candidate for our German bid for the European elections and Federico Dolce, the spokesperson for our party in Italy, Mera25 Italy, as well as our range of activist thinkers and doers from across Europe, especially Brussels, will be weighing in on this topic and you, you out there. If you've got thoughts, comments, rants, personal experiences of these protests, anything you'd like to chime in, then please do so. Put your comments in the YouTube chat and we will put them to our panel. Let's kick off today with Eric Edmund, our political director, who's sitting in Brussels right in the heart of it. Eric. Good evening, everybody. Thank you, Mechran. I've been in the middle of it until recently, although everybody's eagerly awaiting the meeting of the agricultural ministers of the European Union, meeting that is scheduled for the 26th of February. So even though the farmers protest is no longer here with the same intensity, the eyes are still turned to Brussels to see what the EU level reaction to the situation will be. Famously, Volsula von der Leyen, when she was besieged by farmers last week, promised a lifting of bureaucratic weight from agriculture at the European level. And we're all waiting to see what that will mean in practice. She promised that the Commission will have a plan that they will suggest in time for the meeting of the agricultural ministers at the end of this month. So we're waiting for that. But let's take a bit of a bigger picture approach before we get into the integrating. What is the reality of farming right now in Europe? In the last 15 years, something like a third of farmers, of European farmers have disappeared. That is not because we eat any less, the opposite. In fact, it'll be because we're less involved in the global food market, the opposite, once again. It is because farming has been taken over by big agricultural business, bigger machines, fewer farmers, fewer smaller farms. We're moving in the direction of American farming, essentially. And all of that is grounded in the way that the European Union does policy. And of course, all the member states as well. Concretely, what does that mean? We have the famous, for some infamous, for others cap. Policy cap is the common agricultural policy of the European Union. It's one of the few policy areas in which the EU really has teeth. And by that, I mean the biggest part of the EU's budget goes to the common agricultural policy. However, from that huge chunk of money, the billions escaped me now. I don't remember the exact size of the budget, but it is substantial. 80% of that budget goes to 20% of the farmers. So there's a huge inequality in the way that that budget is distributed in Europe. And the reason for that is because, like with everything in our societies and our economies, fewer people have more meaning that 20% of the farmers in Europe, essentially global multinationals and a few rich farmers, own 80% or theirabouts of the land. So 80% of the budget goes to only 20% of farmers, leaving 80% of Europe's farmers struggling to make ends meet. And what this is essentially what these demonstrations that we're seeing all around Europe are all about. Put on that the pressures of extreme weather events, which are only going to get worse with the climate catastrophe. We are at a crisis point and the farmers do very well to remind us of that. However, there is huge hypocrisy and a twisted understanding of what the situation is really about here. Because the narrative that is dominating among farmers and in general in society is that it is the increasing number of environmental protection rules that are to blame for the situation in Europe's harming. But the reality can be further from the truth. The vast majority of these environmental policies are not yet in effect, either because they haven't been legislated or because governments are dragging their feet about implementing them. In fact, what we are seeing is a steady falling in income which is experienced by farmers, same as everybody else. Rising costs of farming made much worse by the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and the skyrocketing and the policy of the EU with the boycotting and so on, which resulted in the skyrocketing of things like fertilizers and energy costs and the rest of it. So rising costs of farming, unfair pricing where if you allow me brackets here, unfair pricing meaning that retailers who mask the hiking of the prices towards us the consumers at supermarkets for things like vegetables, mask those prices behind what they call a rising costs such as energy and the rest of it and the rising costs of farming in order to make a killing and farmers still are forced to sell their goods more or less at the same prices that they sold them before the price hikes while retailers make a huge profit by hiking the prices. So unfair pricing that is also damaging farmers and of course the infamous Byzantine bureaucracy of the European Union, which makes it quite difficult for small farmers to stay legal and within the confines of European law while big nationals that can afford the kind of infrastructure and the personnel, the staff to handle the bureaucracy are much better off in the EU. So, and finally all the failing governments who with their policies for the last 20, 30 years have led us to this situation and I must say here in their overwhelming majority these governments in Europe have been right-wing. So what these right-wing governments are doing those politicians are doing is they're masking their failure behind this narrative of environmental rules in order to hide from the fact that their politics, their policies, their constant favoring of multinationals them dragging their feet on environmental policies that could have softened the burdened have all led us in this agricultural crisis that we are today. It's a very, very handy narrative for these right-wing politicians who are still in government unfortunately hopefully not for much longer all around Europe to roll back on the few environmental policies that we do have, which famously they very much dislike using the farmer's protest as an excuse to roll back on the very few environmental agreements that we have achieved and the policies that we have achieved. Just a smaller side, an example, the Dutch government has been in trouble lately because of a crisis in the levels of nitrate in the water sources around the country. This is the result of over farming of pigs, the waste of which animals have polluted the waterways of the country to the point where drinking water has become poisonous for human consumption. This isn't a new problem. The Dutch government knew about this and had been warned since the late 90s, believe it or not, that this was going to be a problem and the European Union even had a directive on nitrate levels that came into effect in the early 2000s and they had consistently been warning the Dutch government for the past 20 odd years that they would need to do something about this. The Dutch government, as usual, right-wing again or centrists at best, constantly opted for short-term economic goals over dealing with the long-term problem to the point where we got to where we are today and drinking water became undrinkable for people in the Netherlands and they were forced to put into practice draconian measures simply shutting down huge parts of the agricultural infrastructure of the Netherlands for pig farming, undermining the livelihood of thousands of farmers because they didn't do something when they could have 20 years ago. This is an excellent example of the kind of issues that we are up against with environmental policy across the boards. This isn't just about pig farming. If we don't act, well, we should have been acting 20 years ago just with nitrate across all of these areas of policy. But this is exactly why we need to be acting now about the issues that were coming up because the sooner we act, the less draconian those measures need to be. When the situation becomes untenable, that is when the policies are gonna be extreme and then of course farmers are going to be up in arms against it. So in closing, there's much more to talk about that I'm sure others are going to jump in. In closing, we shouldn't allow politicians to dominate with this completely false narrative to try and put the weight on environmental policy which in turn, because of the Green Party has not been approaching this in a left enough way and the left has not owned the green policy area as much as it should have done. And that's something we in DMR are working towards reclaiming for progressives and for the left. Farmers have been, as individuals, left to shoulder huge structural capitalist problems which basically leave them with a huge burden of shouldering and environmental catastrophe that they on their own cannot unless we really tackle what is at the root of the problem, systemic oppression, a system that is based on exploitation and that is exactly what, whether the discussion needs to be and away from this kind of pandering and superficial approach which only benefits the people in power currently. Thanks, Eric. Jannis, I think you're muted, Jannis, still. Yeah, go for it. This is not the time to be muting ourselves. Eric has set the scene brilliantly. Let me take you to the right, to the outset of the European Union's creation. We all remember that the European Union began life in 1950 as a cartel of heavy industry. It began, the first name, let us remind ourselves, was the European communities of coal and steel. So it was a cartel of what was back then the heavy industry of Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Northern Italy, producing steel and coal. They soon, within a year, by 1951, they had copied, they had included in the cartel the car manufacturers, the electrical goods companies, what was essentially the whole of the industrial sector of Northern Europe, Northern Central Europe. And then you have the Treaty of Rome which is essentially the birthday of the European Union, the creation of the European economic community going beyond coal and steel. And what was that? That was a deal between industrial capital, industry, heavy industry, and large-scale farmers. Essentially, for the cartel of coal, steel, electrical goods, cars and so on, pharmaceuticals to work, they had to have free trade, completely free, to do away with the borders so that the steel produced in Belgium could also circulate freely in France, in Italy, in Germany and so on, similarly with electrical goods, cars, blah, blah, blah. To do away with borders, they had to co-opt the large-scale politically powerful farmers, particularly those in the Netherlands, in Germany and in France, Northern France. So the deal was very simple. Eric pointed out very usefully that the common agricultural policy is the largest item on the budget of the European Union. That is not an accident. That is the deal that created the European Union. And the deal is really very simple. The industrialists of Germany, of Holland, of Belgium, of France, essentially, told the big-scale farmers of Europe of that original European Union. Okay, folks. We are the beneficiaries of doing away with borders. We are, as a cartel, going to make a huge amount of money in cartel profits, like OPEC, right? Because the way that they worked was, they agreed with one another to reduce production of steel, of coal, of cars, and so on, to reduce production, to drive price up and have monopoly profits, cartel profits. Okay, so we are going to make this huge amount of money, and we're going to give you a cut. That's what the common agricultural policy is. It's a bribe, a perpetual bribe, by the cartel of big business in Europe, to the French, German, Dutch, Belgian, and non-Italian farmers. We will give you a part of our loot, and we, so you can work less, you can produce less, because if you diminish production, then agricultural good prices will also go up, right? You restrict supply as well, but we will help you do it because the farmers didn't have a cartel similar to that of big business. So that's the common agricultural policy. And this has been with us since then, right? Now, that's at one level. However, another important note by Eric is that farmers are not homogeneous, they're not uniform. There is a class war happening that involves farmers. And it has a number of dimensions. One is a class war between farmers. It is not the same to own hundreds of acres of land in North Germany or in the Netherlands, for that matter, as it is to be a smallholder in Sicily. Different land, one is highly productive, it's industrialized, it has become part and party of agribusiness. Whereas smallholders in Spain, in Southern Italy, not Northern Italy, Southern Italy, in Greece are simply not geared up to take advantage of the common agricultural policy, which is geared towards maximizing the rents, the economic rents of large-scale agribusiness in Northern Europe. It's also a question of the land. If you look at the land in Sicily, in Northern Southern Italy, it's fragmented, rocky, very small plots, as opposed to Northern Europe, which is endless. So there is a class war between farmers. And Eric highlighted that by saying that 80% of the CEP money goes to 20% of the farmers. Then there is another class war between farmers and cartels of energy and of course agribusiness. Take energy. Farming is very energy-intensive. When you're applying the land, you need lots of diesel. When you are pumping water out of a well, you need lots of electricity. The supply of electricity for the first decades of the European Union was... effectively provided by nationalized public utilities. Since that charism crossed over from the channel to the European Union, and you had the breakdown, the breaking up, not breaking breakdown, the breaking up of electricity grids from power generation. The power generation was privatized. The electricity grids became vessels of the oligarchs who owned the power stations. Increasingly, you had energy prices that rose much faster than the price of agricultural commodities. If you take into consideration the effect of Ukraine on boosting magnificently through this cartel of energy, the capacity of the cartel to expand its rents, its profits, its price-cost margins at the expense of consumers, but farmers as well. Then you can see that this class war between farmers and the cartel of energy is being exacerbated. I'll come back to this in a moment. Then, of course, there is the cartel of agri-business. Now, that is not specific to Europe. We see it in Pakistan. We see it in India. We can see it everywhere where agri-business is essentially poisoning the land. It comes along with making proposals, offers to farmers that they can't object to. I will make an offer you can't refuse, mafia style, in the sense of genetically modified seeds that come along with particular kinds of pesticides that boost magnificently production. But then, of course, once you've used those seeds, you cannot go back to normal seeds because the land has been poisoned and you don't even have seeds that can reproduce themselves. You have to keep buying them from buyer Monsanto. But that's not specific to Europe, but it is also a problem in Europe. Because those pesticides, which are now essential for the poisoned earth, to continue producing agricultural products, these then become an instrument of blackmail of farmers. A third kind of class war, of course, is between North and South, North of Europe and South of Europe, for the reasons which I outlined before, the differences in the areas and in the productivity of the soil between the North and the South. I now have a huge clash between East and West. Recently, the European Union, the European Commission, along with the governments of Germany, France, of the Baltic States and so on, managed to overcome the resistance by Orban and others to commit to inducting Ukraine into the European Union. Let me be clear on this. If Ukraine comes, I'm not going to pass judgment on whether Ukraine should enter the European Union or not, not at this stage. But let's run a mental experiment in our heads that it happens. If Ukraine comes into the European Union, the business model of every farmer in Europe is blown up. It simply cannot work. The common agricultural policy is going to become explosive. Ukraine has more of a productive capacity in terms of its agriculture than the whole of Germany, France, Holland and Belgium together. That means that the bulk of the monies that are now spent on the common agricultural policy will go to Ukraine. So Poland, which has been gung-ho about the European Union, even under the illiberal democratic government, the right-wing populist government, they have been major beneficiaries of the common agricultural policy. They will shift from being net beneficiaries to being net contributors to the common agricultural policy. That is not going to go down well. The French farmers will be cut off of the common agricultural policy. The Greek farmers will be finished. So if Ukraine comes in, either the common agricultural policy will have to be scrapped or they will have to find a huge amount of money, which of course, neither Berlin nor Paris are prepared to inject into the... So to put it bluntly, already Ukraine is putting a huge amount of pressure because due to solidarity with the Ukrainian farmers, the European Union allowed Ukrainian products to enter the east of Europe and Europe more generally, the European Union. That already, we have seen that the Polish government, which was extremely gung-ho about Zelenskij and Ukraine, have started videoing any aid to Ukraine. That's because of precisely the stress that the huge increase in supply of agricultural products from Ukraine is putting upon the farming class of Poland. Let's now touch upon again, something that Eric has introduced very nicely, the question of the green transition. This is the height of hypocrisy by the European Union and by the governments of the European Union. Eric gave a very good example with the nitrates in Holland, Holland, which is supposed to be gung-ho about the green transition about environmentalism and the environment and so on. They've been poising their own land now for yonks and they haven't even been owning up to it. And now their farmers are worried that they will have to bear the full brunt of the cost of cleaning up. And you can see that the result of that is the green transition. If you go to a farmer today anywhere in Europe and you use those two words, green transition, you become their enemy. Because for them, the green transition is not green. It's not a transition. It simply means they're bankruptcy. It's like going to anybody and saying, you know what? We've decided we will bankrupt you. Now, you're not going to get a very good reception. The fact that it sounds green and nice and cozy and transitionable, it doesn't mean anything to them. It means they will be go bankrupt because the green transition plans of the European Union are not for buyer wants to pay. They're not for those who are producing all those toxic pesticides to pay. It is not for the cartel of big business that created the European Union in the first place to pay. It is for consumers, you know, low classes amongst the consumers and the farmers that are going to pay. So the green transition is an intensification of the class war, both within farmers and within the working classes of Europe. This is why it is important for DEM25 in the forthcoming European Parliament election, the third act, the third plank. Remember, we have three planks. One is peace. The second is basic income. The third is make the haves, the oligarchs pay for the green transition. The tragedy is this, that in exactly the same as in the United States, in the same way as in the United States, where the victims of the establishment of the oligarchs are turning right-wing. And they are empowering parties which appear as anti-establishment, but which went in government, like Donald Trump, when he was in the White House, become the establishment's greatest servants. We have a similar problem here. Farmers in the north of Europe are not the natural allies of the left. They are large-scale capitalist employers. They load trade unions. They load workers. They load urbanites. They load cosmopolitan. There is a tendency to reproduce the blood and soil ethos of what Marx used to refer to as the idiocy of rural life. Don't quote me on that. And it is really very easy for these people, especially the rich farmers, to recognize their class interests in the ultra-right that will go into bed with center-right parties, as it's happening already in Holland, in the Netherlands, in order to postpone forever any environmental legislation, any green transition, and to ensure that since big capital is not going to pay for the green transition and they don't want to pay for it, it would be the proletarians and the precarious that pays for it. So they are a natural victim of the way the European Union has been structured, of the liberal establishment of the European Union, and at the same time a natural ally of the ultra-right. We have to be clear on that. The small holders of Greece, of Italy, and so on, because they are small holders, they are more amenable to a progressive line of thinking like ours. They are not natural allies. They are just more amenable because they are not large-scale employers. They also have a tendency to be misanthropic in the sense of being simultaneously interested in having undocumented laborers toiling their land as it happens in Greece, right? And siding with the anti-immigration political forces because the anti-immigration political forces are functional to their purpose of keeping those land workers undocumented. It's what keeps their wages low. So in short, DM25 and all progressive movements, we have our work cut out for us. This environmental crisis, the farming crisis, the war in Ukraine, which is boosting the capacity of energy oligarchs to extract rents from farmers, large-scale farmers, small-scale farmers. This is all a symptom of the cruelty of the liberal establishment and a source of strength for the ultra-right. Our job is to create a rapture within the agricultural sector and to try to take on our side, if we can, the part of the farming class of the farmers who are the victims of the class war within the farming community. Thank you. Thank you, Janice. And to the rest of you on our panel, I'd definitely be interested to hear more on that challenge that Janice and Eric laid out of how the left can reach out to farmers, given the disparities within that group. A couple of quick comments from the chat. Ronny asks, is large-scale industrial farming actually more productive? To use tractors, you need large industries to build and maintain them, from mining to road building to repair workers. That all needs to be factored in. A couple of comments saying that the experience of farmers in Europe is very similar to farmers in Canada and also in India. And Michael Kay quite provocatively asks, since you talk about the CO2-induced climate catastrophe, are you suggesting curtailing CO2 with the industrialization, depopulation, lowering economic growth, raising the price of energy? If not, what are your proposals? So please factor these comments and questions into your responses. Let's move to Karin Derigo, our lead candidate for our German party. Karin, the floor is yours. Thank you, Maron. Hi, everybody. So I would like to give the perspective of Germany. So because the protests actually started before Christmas and they are a bit different from everywhere else. Actually, they started not because of Europe or other reasons, but for very small, small detail. Basically, the government announced a budget deficit before Christmas. And since we have the debt break in Germany, so we cannot make more debt than we want to. In order to find 17 billions that were missing, it just decided to cut somewhere. And this went directly to the diesel subsidies, basically, and the tax rebate on vehicles. So these two measures, let me clear, they are not life-threatening for the companies because we are speaking about 3,000 to 5,000 euros per year. But it became kind of the same, like the apex of the frustration of the last years, probably. And because of the problems that we said before, and the right parties have taken advantage totally of this because, obviously, the discontent is going to destabilize the government, which is already struggling a lot here. They will discredit the EU and they just basically want to maintain things as they are because the farmers will vote for them again, basically. So apart from this, it's also important to know how the German market is structured because, basically, we have an oligopoly. So four corporations own 75% of their retailers, so of the supermarkets, which means basically that any farmer need to negotiate with them. And if he doesn't accept their policies or their decision, he will just be cut out of the market, very simple. Plus, these big corporations, as they do also in many other sectors, like fashion, for example, they pursue strategies of vertical integration, which means they are owning from the tree, let's say, to the shelf in the supermarket the whole supply chain. So that means a lot of pressure on prices, on producers, and obviously, again, small companies cannot even compete on that. A small part of the emphasis, Germany is also the place where discounters were born. So there are very eager to push on the prices in general. So to add something to all this, as Eric was saying, not only the subventions are divided 80%, 20%, but they are allocated according land. So the bigger the company is, the more subsidies it gets. So the small companies that intend to invest and take responsibility in the green transitions and do sustainable restructuring just don't even get the money back from their investments. So it is very understandable that the farmers need to protest, they have the right to do so. Just the important thing would be to direct the disc protester in the correct way because in the end, there are different measures that we can take, but we have to think first of all, which kind of role has food in our society. So for me, for us, it is not a commodity, it shouldn't be subject to speculation actions. It is human rights basically. So with all the technological progress that we have now and we produce huge quantities of food, how is it possible that there are still people starving in the world? So it is really a matter of food security in the end. We also have the right to eat healthy food. So because this affects not only our bodies, but also our health systems and the costs related to it. And third, obviously there is also the right to have a safe job coming from the farming sector with the dignified salaries. And for this, the only way we have is to break this monopolies basically. We need to restructure the whole EU subvention system and reorganize it according to our goals that we propose in our pre-new deal. And most of it, I think that it's important that every person answers these questions honestly. So do we want corporations to keep receiving subsidies, to absorb the competition, to exploit the territory, keep polluting and keep the salaries low, pretending to give a choice in all this, or do we want that smaller companies are rewarded because they are offering good food, they respect the nature, the animals, the biodiversity and offer good, safe jobs and good salaries? I mean, in the end of the game, it is only a political decision. Thank you, Karin. Let's move to Federico Dolce now for the view from Italy. Federico. Hi, everyone. Well, you have said so much already, but as far as I can tell, what we're seeing is a recurring product that started many years ago and it's cycling coming back. I mean, we've seen roughly the same thing happen 10 years ago. Things actually can trade back to when we had Jose Bovet, I don't know if you recall him. Those are symptoms of a situation that's definitely not fine as a solution, but only palliatives. Right now, they do claim to be anti-green policies, but that's not actually true, in my opinion. First, they are led by a confederation representing only the measure firms, as you have already said. Measure firms in larger realities pushing aside small farmers and are led by far from down towards years. And I don't know, for example, in France, we have Orno Orosso, who began his career in commodity trading and he took over his family's 700 hectare cereal farm. He's the perfect embodiment of productivities, agricultural stuff with CAP subsidies. In Italy as well, we have a similar character. I mean, directly from the Jawar in which he showed up at railways against the internal revenue system. We have Danielo Calvani, who is a larger producer from Lazio. And second, these protests are not opposed in this crude system, but they're rather pushing for more subsidies, coherently to a CET that keeps subsidizing bigger farmers in order to keep them alive in a system designed to crush the smaller ones. You mentioned already how 80% of the farm aid goes to about a quarter of the EU farmers and those are the ones with the largest land holding. In the same time, Europe's small rural farmers receive no significant aid. Now, to be fair, we do have a problem matching green revolution and the current agricultural system. And this problem has been called the supermarket revolution. Already for some time, the connection between the industrial model underlying the dominant agricultural business system and climate change and adverse effect on human health has been demonstrated. This is achieved through governance mechanisms based on outsourced production control and an end-to-end distribution of finished products across the globe through chains defined as buyer-driven because they are mainly controlled by the large intermediates operating in distribution. And this system chain contribute to homologization according to the principle of monoculture and domestic agricultural production. In Italy, this revolution has developed over the past 25 years. Today now, 74.5% of fresh and packaged food retail goes through this channel and that smaller 13% remains with traditional source. And in Italy, the situation has progressively worsened going toward in agriculture with fewer and fewer production in the last 30 years, the Italian farms has gone from 3 million in 1982 to 1.4 million in 2014 and between 2000 and 2010, the numbers of farm decreased by one third. Now, why family workers and farms are decreasing the most well-known and mid-digitalized change is the steady increase of foreign workers employed in mainly in a legal way as wage earners in Italian agriculture and now reached more than a third of the number of the wage earners in the whole field. Now, these three processes, the growth of great distribution supply chains, the marginalization of small producer and the increase of migrant wage labor in the countryside are the new system that those in command these protesters do not want to change. They just want to obtain favorable condition so that they can be part of it and survive some more. For what I can tell the real enemies of the agricultural world are large distribution, agribusiness industries, fake agricultural unionists and the crooked CAP system. As we do well explaining our Green New Deal for Europe plan, we need to push so hard for a CAP reform. Yang's already explained how this is bound to happen, but this reform need to change a system where we need to subsidize radical model change for both the polluting side of the agricultural business and we do need to optimize the supply chain so that the farmer can retake an important role and a mean to survive with dignity for them and for their employees. Thank you, Fede. Two comments from the chat. H.E. wonders why don't farmers withhold their products from the monopoly and only supply directly to the people? There are echoes there of Greece in 2012 because that's what they ended up doing here. And Mark Bulma asks, why not have food? No, sorry, he says there should be food price controls on basic groceries and there should be social housing like they have in Austria. Daphne Delcara, based in France, who is yours? Hey, yeah, so much to say, I was just kind of distracted by the questions for a moment there, price controls on food, I think there's actually, I don't want to talk about the stuff I don't know about, but I could give an example from what's going on in France was that in November, there was a law proposal to reintroduce floor prices for producers so that they don't, they are, they can sit, they're not, so their minimum production costs are covered and they are not like working in themselves into poverty, but it got, it was short of six votes thanks to the government and it didn't pass. And for example, now the left is trying to reintroduce this policy and call it out for a vote again. We will see what happens, but of course, was this mentioned in the media? No, it was all like, all of those left wing environmentalists destroying everything, they don't know what they're doing. So just how the media portrays these protests is also a big way into how our opinion about it is shaped. So there's lots to say, I'm a bit frustrated, but I do want to look at some other historical moments maybe, which might be interesting, just to show how ruthless this collaboration between state and these mega corporations can be. You guys all remember Guatemala when United Fruit was owning one third of arable land in Guatemala and the US government decided to overthrow the arborist government that wanted to redistribute to the land, to the peasantry. And 200,000 Guatemalans died, including a genocide of 160,000 mine peasants. So just to remember how far and how dark these issues can go. Now another historical moment to remember maybe is that after the global shock in the US where the floor closures were sweeping the country, this included farmers of course, and small farms were devastated. And later when Nixon's agricultural minister, Earl Boots, came to power and he kind of ended the new year a lot of farming policies and really kind of put the grain of what we now know as corporate farming. And he famously said to the farmers, well, you know, get big or get out. So this has a long history making the system following in memory lane. So when did the Ukrainian products started to flood the European markets and bring down prices? If memory recalls it was after you were made and right when we lowered the trade barriers between Ukraine and you. And that really priced out, started to price out European farmers as well. And it's very interesting when we talk about land in Ukraine as well. So when after the Soviet collapse, there was very quickly the state farms were starting to in the typical way that happened to become hoarded by like oligarchic class. And now 28% of that apparently available land is owned by big agribusiness, not only Ukrainian multinational, including trust funds and lots of transfers from European investment bank and so on. And just going back again, when the first opening of the land market was like so devastating to the country is that in 2001, they had to introduce more time on land sales. So this moratorium stayed for a long time until Ukraine's foreign debts start to go up and up. And each time they were getting money from the IMF, the IMF was saying, oh, you have to stop with the land reform. You have to open the land market. You have to open the land market. But because so much of Ukraine's work force is penetrate, they were resisting, they were resisting. And Zelensky finally, after he got his latest IMF agreement said, okay, we're doing it. And there was massive protests in Ukraine. They had to withdraw the proposal and then the pandemic hit. People could no longer leave their houses to protest and the land reform was passed. So it's interesting how things go, isn't it? So we have to know that farming is a big class with very different actors in them. And we have to resist also that this idea that like the centrists, at least in France, now the centrists, the government is saying, oh, you know what's the problem? The problem is too much national regulation. Our farmers are not competent enough. Well, the far right is saying, oh, no, no, the problem is the international regulations. The problem is not the regulation. And just for two last things. So one interest by me also, according to a recent study, 1% of farms, the largest 1% of farms operate 70% of the world's farmlands. So this is the concentration of wealth we're talking about, yes. And another thing is that I want to talk about the Black Sea Green Deal and how the third world factors into this. So when the steel was passed, everybody was saying, oh, we're doing great. We're gonna help the low income countries avoid disaster and famine. And according to the World Bank's own numbers, only 3% of grain has gone to the low income countries. So this really represents whose interests gets served during deals. And why is the third world so, especially Africa, so dependent on exports? Can they not farm? Of course they can. But here we come back to the common agricultural policy that is kind of really based on this overproduction in cereals. But then the overproduction, what does not get exploited in European markets gets dumped out to Africa. And because it's subsidized, it destroys African farming as well. And the cycle continues. So thanks, this was all I wanted to add. Thank you, Daphne. Apologize to you. Apologize to you all out there for some of the internet trouble that we've been having. Clearly big agriculture is attacking us digitally. Next. Judith, you'd admire from Germany. Those yours. Thank you, Mehra. So when Daphne started going down memory lane, I wanted to bring one more incident to our attention because I also think it is foreshadowing. And that is the policy of Mao in China. In the early 60s, he told people to kill all the sparrows that were eating too much grain from the fields. And without the sparrows, China quickly had a problem with way too many insects. As a result, they started using way too many pesticides. And even now, if you go to Sichuan province, there are barely any bees or other pollinators. And in fact, they have had to resort to paying humans to play the role of pollinators. So you can actually see like at a certain time of year, everyone in the village is going to climb up all the trees and try to pollinate. And it's ridiculous. I mean, it's something that you can do if the wage is like $2 a day, but it would not work for Europe. So it really scares me that now in Europe, one out of three pollinator species is currently disappearing in the US. 51% of US bee colonies died just last year. We really have to step in now and stop the use of the excessive use of pesticides. But the EU is not doing any of this. I mean, this would be a primary place where they could step in and do something good without even hurting the big business all that much because maintaining our bee populations would really benefit everyone. But instead on November 28th, the EU re-approved glyphosate for 10 more years. And today, as Eric also mentioned, they promised to scrap the plan to half pesticide use. So it's really like, what are they even doing? What do we have an EU for if they don't even do the obvious? Thank you, Judith. We're nearing the top of the hour. So we're going to accelerate our interventions a bit. But a quick fire round. We've got Dushan. Dushan Payevich, Montenegro. The floor is yours. Dushan. Thanks, Mechner. So I think the greatest slide that these governments together with the fire are pulled is tricking those farmers and people believing that this is a kind of left-wing propaganda of state control and stuff like that. In fact, even though it is state imposed, measurements, it's still liberal, now liberal because they're benefiting the richest of us, the richest of people. And what we need to acknowledge is that they should be the ones that are paying for that transition and not further benefiting from the green transition. However, what I must say is that none of us, if the green transition happens, will continue living the way we live if we want this to be truly sustainable. What I mean by this, I don't mean some scarcity measures, but I really do mean that we need certain type of degrowth or growth in sectors where we need growth and degrowth completely in the sectors where we don't. So like in military, in animal agriculture, in commercials, advertising, and so on, some of those things should be minimized if not abolished, I think abolished. Thank you, Duchenne. Evie, we have Evie on you, CC member, Evie Petzagoraki from Greece, floor is yours. Thank you. I want to just add something to what Julian said because I'm the same spirit, that yesterday talking with Agil Sarri from the deliberative democracy department, he mentioned within the discourse that in Romania are not allowed anymore the seed, the seedbanks. The seedbanks are a treasure in our hands that we have to defend in many ways if by any means we mean to restore what has been already damaged and protect what we are trying to destroy by now. Thank you, Evie, and thank you for being concise. Janice, to close. Regarding what needs to be done, because TM25, we are very critical of what's happening, but we always have an answer to the question of what needs to be done. Part of our Green New Deal for Europe back in 2019, and ever since it's been developed further, has quite a few answers, and we don't have all the answers, but we have quite a few answers of what needs to be done. On the one hand, we need very strict regulations on what is allowed and what is not allowed. So pesticides that destroy the land and the water, the practices that Eric mentioned with pig farming and so on, simply ban them. It's really very simple. I'm not allowed to poison my neighbor. I don't know why anyone should be allowed to poison the water table. It's not rocket science. Of course, the answer to that is, but if we don't use these pesticides, the price of it is going to go up. At the moment, we have, let's forget, over supply, over production of very low quality, pesticide infected and low nutritional value, agricultural produce, because this is what the common agricultural policy does. It doesn't measure quality, it measures only quantity. And at the same time, decades of austerity have emissarated large sections of the population who can only afford to buy a shit to eat. So if you say to them that we're going to increase the cost of production in order to create organic produce, they say, hang on a second, we've already been destroyed by austerity. So the answer is to do away with austerity. We need a large chunk of wealth and income to go to the have nots, because this very straightforward redistribution of income and wealth is going to allow families to choose instead of mass produced chemically treated and processed foods coming straight out of the agri-business complex, to put fresh vegetables on the table. Once an environmentalist is put very, very well, decades ago, when she said that when a Mars bar costs more than a piece of cauliflower, that is when we're going to solve the problem, right? Alternatively, you can say that the moment a family can afford to buy fresh cauliflower, independently of what the cost of a Mars bar, then you have the solution to the problem. So you see austerity is not simply a question of class struggle, there's an environmental dimension to it. The more you shift the income distribution to the rich, the more you make the whole of society dependent on the mass production of shit food, using methods that destroy the environment, poison or water and our soil. Therefore, we at DM, as part of a Green New Deal for Europe, we look at the holistic nature of our policies. So our policies for the basic income, our policy for ending austerity, a policy for breaking up the monopoly, the cartel of the energy of the privatized public utilities in the energy sector and the re-nationalization and socialization of the energy sector. Now, those are all parts of what is necessary in order to make the production of decent food with ways that are treating the soil and the earth and the water decently, right? What it takes to do all that and to recalibrate the whole thing. One last thought. Last time, there was the European Parliament election, we ran with the Green New Deal for Europe. In the end, Ursula von der Leyen won that race, not Ursula herself, but the forces of conservatism and oligarchy that propelled to that mighty position. And she introduced not the Green New Deal that we were proposing, but the Green Deal. She dropped the new, which is very significant. And she promised one trillion to go into this Green Deal. Of that trillion, my estimation is that only 29 billion that is of the 1,000 billion, only 29 have seen the light of day. So now that we are approaching the European Parliament election, we've got to remember the lies and the subterfuge that has come from Brussels. They used the term Green and Deal, they dropped the new in order to cover up for the fact that there is nothing green about it and it's really not a deal. It is a coup d'etat against the soil, against the water, against the farmers, against the pro-Italians, against the precariat, against Europe itself. That's why we need to buckle up and to get ready for the European Parliament election. We're not going to win, like the conservative forces have won, but we need to do better than we did in 2019 and we need to give a chance to this voice to be heard beyond the small band of people who are listening to TM25 at the moment, not because we need to be heard, but because this particular narrative and this particular analysis is a prerequisite for any change that will make Europe viable, both environmentally and socially. Thank you, Janis, and we have gone past the top of the hour, so with that, we will close. Thank you to our panel, thank you to you out there. If you would like to get more involved, if you'd like what you've heard tonight and you'd like to get stuck in, as mentioned, we're running in the forthcoming European elections, check out our proposals on our website, dm25.org. Join us, dm25.org slash join, donate to us. We need all the support we can get, dm25.org slash donate. Thank you again to you out there and we will see you at the same time, same place, two weeks from now. Take care and stay safe.