Rundale

by Patrick Bresnihan

This article looks at the establishment of the Farmers’ Alliance, a new rural political organisation in Ireland that shares a lot with other farmer-based, regressive populist movements that have been surfacing in recent months in other European countries. These movements have been organising effectively around the economic grievances of farmers and, in particular, the burdens of environmental regulation. This article gives some historical context for this and why we need to amplify and grow alternative, progressive rural-urban political platforms.

In April 2023, the Irish Farmers’ Alliance formed from a Facebook group that had grown in prominence over the last few years. Initially, the Alliance claimed to simply represent the interests of (mostly beef and sheep) farmers who were struggling to make a living – some of those involved had also been part of the Beef Plan, a renegade farmer’s organisation that had blockaded Dublin city centre with tractors and picketed meat processing plants back in 2019.

For its official launch, the Farmers’ Alliance invited Caroline van der Plas, leader of the Dutch agrarian party (BBB or Farmer-Citizen Movement). Founded in 2019, the BBB registered significant electoral successes last year, channeling the frustrations of Dutch farmers on a right-wing, populist platform. These frustrations had intensified in response to the Dutch Government’s decision to restrict nitrogen pollution and buy out farmers unable to comply.  Van der Plas urged the Farmers’ Alliance to form a similar political party and contest local and European elections.

Over the past few months, the Farmers’ Alliance have followed that advice, interviewing potential candidates, developing a broader policy platform and throwing themselves behind the anti-migrant protests that have sprung up across the country, particularly in rural towns and villages.

Scrolling through their website and social media account, you will find an incoherent grab bag of reactionary tropes. While building from genuine grievances, such as the high cost of living, lack of affordable housing, and the impossibility of making a livelihood for many farmers, the source of these problems are traced to a familiar assortment of enemies: an overbearing state, environmentalists, migrants, and the ‘woke’ brigade reigning in ‘free speech’ and importing ‘cultural Marxism’ into the classroom.

Against these forces, the Alliance claims to defend the family, national sovereignty and individual freedom, particularly the institution of private property. The Alliance is regressive, grounding its politics in the defence of an imagined order that is being undermined by external foes. We can question the coherence of their platform but the strength of right wing mobilisation elsewhere has been an ability to articulate different, even contradictory positions, around a common ‘us’ and ‘them’.

It remains to be seen how effective the Farmers’ Alliance will be at election time, but the reactionary tendency they are tapping into has been bubbling up across rural Ireland for years. The same pattern is observable in other places – the Netherlands, France, Spain, Greece, Belgium, Romania and, most recently, Germany, where an eight-day countrywide protest was led by farmers objecting to the Government’s decision to cut diesel subsidies and tax breaks for farming vehicles.

While housing and migration have been key areas of far-right organising, the rise of the Farmers’ Alliance and its links with other regressive, rural-based organisations, make it clear that there are other sources of political reaction. As with housing, the roots of economic precarity and inequality in the agricultural sector stretch back decades – the result of neoliberal agri-food policies and the imperative to maximise profit within a highly competitive, capitalist agri-food system.

These economic contradictions are now coming up against the real and urgent need for action on climate and environmental protection in the sector. As tightening environmental regulations appear the most immediate threat to farmer livelihoods, the response has been a near visceral rejection of what is commonly described as the ‘green agenda’, a term that manages to conflate environmental action with everything from anti-rural prejudice to great replacement conspiracies. How did we get here?

Containing the contradictions

In the early 1990s, Ireland’s agri-food industry underwent significant structural change. In the wake of the overproduction crisis of the 1980s – the ‘butter mountains’ created by two decades of European production-driven subsidies – the focus of Ireland’s dairy industry shifted towards processing: in 1995, dairy processors recorded a turnover of £6,000 million, compared to £20 million in 1970. Clearly, the money was in the development of protein-based products and the markets to absorb them.

The state threw itself behind the profitable dairy processing sector, where the potential for capital accumulation was far greater than in any other sector. Since then, the global expansion of the dairy processing industry has only accelerated, with free trade agreements opening new international markets and diversification into niche ingredient supply chains, including milk derivatives that undercut local production in other parts of the world.  Ireland now accounts for 13% of the global baby formula market. This amounts to €1 billion in exports a year from just six global infant formula manufacturers.

This model of agri-production generated significant profits for some farmers, but the main beneficiaries were the processors, chemical and feed providers, and financial institutions that offered easy credit to ‘entrepreneurial’ farmers. The model also intensified inequality within the agricultural sector. As the dairy sector expanded from the 1990s, supported by Teagasc and other state institutions, a dualistic agricultural system emerged. One class of (dairy) farmers were encouraged to become more efficient enterprises, and another class of farmers were forced to diversify into other sectors, including the less profitable beef sector which itself is characterised by high levels of consolidation.

Today, the majority of farms in the country earn less than €20,000, with agriculture having the most severe inequality in income distribution of any sector in Ireland. While this is not new, the EU subsidies that have contained the uneconomic nature of EU farming for decades are now being linked to environmental performance and new forms of bureaucratic administration, sparking particular ire from farmers.

Since the 1990s, the environmental consequences of Ireland’s livestock intensive agricultural sector have also mounted. GHG emissions from the agricultural sector account for over 38% of the total emissions in Ireland – the highest proportion from any agricultural sector in the European Union. The EPA reports annually on the decline of surface water quality, largely due to nutrient run-off from agriculture. The agricultural sector is also the main driver of habitat decline according to the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS). In a recent report, they identified that agricultural practices are negatively impacting over 70% of terrestrial and coastal habitats.

From the beginning, the state’s response to these environmental problems has been to treat them as ‘externalities’ that can be brought under control through appropriate incentives and technological innovation, or, in the words of the sociologist George Taylor writing as early as 1993, ‘organising consent around new definitions of justifiable pollution.’

Multiple state initiatives, including agri-environmental and eco-certification schemes, have proliferated in an attempt to control agricultural pollution, rather than prevent it. By placing the focus on the pollutant – nitrogen, MCPA, methane – the policy and economic drivers that produce the pollution are hidden. The result has been ever more elaborate efforts to plaster over the deep contradictions that exist between the dominant agri-food model and environmental quality. What is more, the burden of these measures is applied to all farmers, hiding the deep inequalities that exist within the sector, both in terms of responsibility for pollution and capacity to respond – through investment in new technology, the purchasing of more land or the offsetting of pollution elsewhere.

Coming home to roost

Farmers understand that environmental policies as they are currently designed and implemented will make it harder for them to make a living. The recently passed EU Nature Restoration Law, for example, promises to protect more land necessary for viable ecosystems but does nothing to challenge the existing, highly concentrated system of agri-food production. Shrinking the area of productive farmland without radical agrarian reform will increase the already high cost of land, benefiting those with financial resources, often the biggest polluters.

The effect of these environmental policies will be a reduction in the number of farmers, which gets to the heart of the present conflict: struggling farmers are worried about their future. Farmer representative bodies use this to stoke anti-environmental sentiment. They argue that environmentalists are anti-farmer and don’t think about ‘food security’. This allows them to deflect from the reality that most of our productive land doesn’t produce food for people in Ireland – we export the vast majority of our cattle-based products, and we import the vast majority of the calories consumed here. The slogan ‘no farmers, no food’ also allows them to build up a narrative around the ordinary farmer trying to make a living under the ‘unfair’ pressures of environmental regulation, masking the gross inequalities within the sector.

One of the most urgent and difficult tasks for any progressive environmental politics is figuring out how to challenge unjust environmental policies, while at the same time not ceding ground to reactionary, ‘anti-environmental’ forces that defend ‘business as usual’ – to build a popular environmentalism that is attuned to, not ignorant of, the precarious social and economic conditions of the majority and their desire for something different. In the context of food production, these conditions are not the same for all, and extend beyond the landowning farmers in Ireland or Europe, to food producers around the world and the exploited workers that exist all along the globalised food supply chain.

At the core of the politics espoused by the Farmers Alliance and their European counterparts is a desperate clinging on to an imagined past, to tradition, that is embodied in the image of the ‘farmer’ (akin to the white, blue collar worker in Trump’s MAGA narrative). The only antidote to this is to build an alternative vision of food production and land-use that is in the interests of more farmers, workers and ‘consumers’.

Fortunately, there are many who desire different rural futures which include different ways of producing food and living on the land. In Ireland, such visions are articulated by alternative, progressive farmer-led organisations like Talamh Beo and the Landworkers’ Alliance. Theirs is a vision grounded in agroecology and food sovereignty, requiring more people on the land, not less, producing good quality food and caring for land and ecosystems. For this vision to move out of the margins, it will need to connect with social issues beyond food, building new rural-urban platforms and organising with other movements, here and internationally, just like the Farmers’ Alliance appear to be doing so effectively.