The Big-Agri Bully Boys
Protests by angry farmers have swept across Europe this year. But from country to country, powerful groups have taken these protests over and changed their agenda. Who are these people, and what are they up to?
This is a special episode produced in collaboration with investigative journalists from Lighthouse Reports and media partners across Europe.
Read the articles published as part of this investigation:
REPORTERS
Wojciech Oleksiak, Thin Lei Win, Marianne Kerfriden, Silvia Lazzaris, Elena DeBre and Emmanuel Freudenthal
Sound design and scoring
Wojciech Oleksiak
EDITOR
Katz Laszlo
MUSIC
Jim Barne, BlueDot Sessions
PRODUCer
Wojciech Oleksiak
MIXING AND MASTERING
Wojciech Oleksiak
EDITORIAL SUPPORT
Dominic Kraemer and Katy Lee
sound effects
Freesound.org (miastodzwiekow, Cosmopolight, Quistard)
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Katy: Hello! This is Katy.
Dominic: Hello, and I’m Dominic.
Katy: We’re coming to you, as always, from Paris and Amsterdam. And today, we wanted to talk about something that often seems a bit distant from our lives, especially for people who live in cities, like us. But we literally eat the fruits of its hard work every day.
Dominic: Yes, we’re going to talk about the food on our plates and the people who grow it. It’s been a very difficult and pivotal year for farmers. If you’re listening to this from basically anywhere in Europe, there’s a strong chance you’ve seen farmers on the streets protesting. And in response to these protests, we’ve seen some of the EU’s most progressive green policies watered down.
Katy: Honestly, we’ve been trying to get our heads around the whole thing. And when I say ‘we’, I mean Dominic and me, but also our producer Wojciech.
Wojciech: It’s May 10th, 2024, five months into farmers’ protests that have rocked cities across Europe. I’m attending one in Warsaw, organised by the biggest farmers’ union in Poland. It’s billed as a protest of food producers marching in opposition to the EU’s big package of climate legislation, the European Green Deal. There’s a massive crowd. The voice working the crowd from the speakers says that 50,000 people are here. A mic in my right hand, a recorder hanging down my neck, I plunge into the crowd ready to ask questions and understand these farmers. Why are they hating on the Green Deal so much? After 15 minutes though, I realise it’s gonna be goddamn hard to find a farmer in this sea of people. I met a lot of miners and guys from the steelworks, there were lots of backers of Poland’s most right-wing television channel, Republika; some pensioners too. And by the looks of it farmers constituted maaaaybe 20% of the crowd, at a stretch. For the story that you’re gonna hear today, I visited several farmers at their farms. And when I spoke to those farmers, they had very well-informed and detailed criticism of EU green policies. But at this protest, people were just expressing more of a general feeling of frustration. The crowd seemed to have come here with all sorts of demands, mostly right-wing ones: putting an end to, quote unquote, LGBTQ+ propaganda, demanding the resignation of Poland’s prime minister. There was even this huge effigy of the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, depicted as the Grim Reaper. What the hell was this protest actually?
Katy: These farmers’ protests… The early ones started with farmers pouring onto the streets due to some real, tangible struggles. All across Europe, the local circumstances vary but one thing is consistent: the people who produce our food are really struggling to keep afloat: their farms are just becoming less and less financially viable. And they’ve had enough. But again and again, something in these protests shifted. And, they often ended up being dominated by completely different groups than the farmers who started the protests in the first place, with different demands.
Dominic: This is a special episode in close collaboration with our friends at Lighthouse Reports - an international investigative newsroom that does amazing deep-dive journalism. We’ve got reporting coming in from all over the continent today, it’s very luxurious.
Katy: And we’re gonna be asking the question, who are these people swooping in on these protests? And with what agenda? So, a couple of introductions. The voice you’ve just heard is Wojciech Oleksiak, you’ve probably heard him before.
Wojciech: Hi!
Katy: We’ll also be hearing from Thin Lei Win.
Thin: Hello!
Dominic: Thin is Lighthouse Reports’ Lead reporter on Food Systems. You might recognise her voice too – we interviewed her last year after she and her team published a very troubling investigation looking into Copa-Cogeca. Copa-Cogeca is a Brussels-based union that represents all Europe’s biggest national farmers’ unions. Kinda like a union of unions.
Katy: And in fact, that investigation is somewhat connected to what we’re talking about today. So here’s a quick recap from Thin about what she and her colleagues found back then:
Thin: So we did an investigation and found that Copa Cogeca has a lot of power in Brussels, but they represent mostly the interests of the big industrial farmers and cooperatives and not the small and medium sized farmers that make up the bulk of European agriculture.
Katy: But they really represented themselves as being, like, the voice of all Europe’s farmers, right?
Wojciech: Before Thin’s investigation, they literally described themselves on their website as… ‘representing Europe’s 22 million farmers’.
Thin: In fact, their former secretary general, Pekka Pesonan himself, admitted to our media partner, Politico, that they do not represent 22 million farmers.
Katy: Oops.
Wojciech: But after the investigation was published, Copa-Cogeca toned it down a bit. Their website now reads: ‘We represent 10 million farmers’.
Katy: Nice to see that ‘typo’ corrected!
Dominic: The power of journalism, well done Thin!
Katy: After that investigation, Thin wanted to dig a little deeper. And lately she’s been pretty obsessed with trying to work out what the farmers’ protests that have been rocking Europe this year are really about, and who’s really leading them.
Thin: And both the media coverage and the policy response from politicians, both at Brussels and national levels, have very much focused on environmental policies, right? Portraying these farmers' protests as against the environment, against policies that will make farming more sustainable.
Katy: I have to admit, this is exactly how I saw the farming protests at first. Because there did seem to be this strong message coming out of the media reports of like, ‘Oh, the farmers are mad because the EU wants to stop them using chemicals’, and ‘the farmers don’t want to do all this biodiversity stuff that the EU wants them to do’. There was this very clear narrative of like, you know, ‘young people, people in cities – they’re worried about the environment, but these farmers don’t want to change.’
Wojciech: But what Thin and I, and the other reporters working on this investigation have learned is that farmers also want change - but as with every protest, there is some variation on what they think that change should be. And let’s just say that some voices have been pretty good at drowning out others in these protests.
Thin: We really wanted to delve deeper into who are the protest leaders? Who are these union leaders at a national level? What do they represent?
Dominic: Trying to answer those questions took us and a team of reporters across Europe several months. Wojciech joined forces with Lighthouse to help them better understand what was going on in Poland, so we’ll let him paint the scene.
Wojciech: We all love farmers, don’t we? These good people who run small, family farms, passed on from generation to generation, who care about the land, soil, who know all their pigs and cows by their names, and who deliver fresh and healthy food that we later put on our tables. Right? Hmmm… Sorry that’s not how reality looks. And most certainly, that’s not where the food you can find on the supermarket shelves comes from.
Katy: Ok. Thank you for destroying the fantasy I learned about from nursery rhymes, as a child who had never been to a farm. But this has come up on the podcast before, right? Most farms in Europe genuinely *are* quite small and run by families, no?
Wojciech: Actually almost 95% of the farms in the EU are family farms - which is very specifically defined as farms on which 50% or more of the people working the land are family members. Which is not to say these are all these idyllic family businesses from the fantasy I just painted.
Dominic: Ok, but most of our farms are these smaller farms. So where’s the problem?
Wojciech: The problem is that even though most of our farms are small, the amount of food they produce is just a tiny fraction of what’s produced by the industrial farmers. More than half of Europe’s agricultural output is actually produced by just 3.3% of the biggest farms.
Dominic: Woah!
Katy: That’s way more concentrated than I thought it was.
Dominic: Yeah. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Capitalism, eh?
Wojciech: It’s the top few percent that actually owns the vast majority of the land and grabs the vast majority of the money. And these companies within this 3.3% have nothing to do with the image I painted for you a while back. These are massive enterprises employing hundreds or even thousands of people, where, as one interviewee pointed out to us, ‘Its directors never see the animals their companies breed’.
Dominic: Ok, but do we still describe these directors who run these massive industrial farms as farmers, even if they have no direct contact with the animals?
Wojciech: They call themselves farmers and so do mainstream media. Whether we should or not is a valid question that I asked Sylwia Spurek. She’s a soon-to be-ex member of the European Parliament. And throughout her term she was persistently trying to broaden the debate around the necessity of change in our food systems.
Sylwia: For me, what we've long called agriculture is not agriculture. It's industry, heavy industry, because if we look at the impact of this sector on the climate, the environment, biodiversity, water, air, consumer rights, and the quality of life of those living near these so-called farms, we would all have to agree that this is not agriculture.
Wojciech: Now, some people would say, listen, this is what modern day agriculture looks like - where do you think all of our food is coming from?! But one thing’s for sure - it’s definitely a very heavy industry with a huge impact on our climate, and there is an alarming amount of data backing this up. Like, if you just take the intensified methods we use to breed livestock to produce meat and dairy these days – studies suggest these account for somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions.
Katy: I remember we talked last year about the shipping industry and how bad that was for the planet. And that was responsible for only, like, 2% of global emissions.
Wojciech: Right?! I also had that 2% in my memory. So I almost fell off my chair when I saw the figures for livestock. And just as Sylwia said, this intensive livestock farming is a major factor in driving the decline in biodiversity because it uses so much land. And then, you know, the cows and sheep, they also get pumped full of antibiotics to fend off diseases since they are living in such close quarters, which gradually makes animals and humans resistant to antibiotics. Then, there’s the problem with a massive amount of manure that goes into our rivers and soil and, you know, I could go on forever.
Dominic: It’s difficult because, I think we can all agree that this is not sustainable, and not how we’d like to see our food systems working. And at the same time, this is how we get a never ending supply of eggs in every supermarket. Unfortunately that is how our food systems work right now. Like, we are the people driving this system, through everything that we buy and eat on a daily basis.
Wojciech: Yeah, the system seems to be fundamentally broken and it’s increasingly the case. More and more, farming in Europe is dominated by giant companies.
Thin: Unfortunately, the system behind it and the way the farm unions have been working has been essentially moving further and further towards the consolidation and making it harder and harder for the kind of farmers that we think we are helping to protect to no longer exist.
Katy: This massive inequality of power makes it that much more frustrating if it’s these big companies, and not the small farmers, who get a seat at the table with politicians. And yet, we can’t exactly say that farmers, including small ones, haven’t been visible this year, right? They’ve actually been super visible, they’ve been blocking roads, they’ve been setting fire to big piles of tyres…
Thin: And then we've seen these tractors turning up in Paris, spraying manure, you know, destroying property and police just standing back and not doing anything. And to me that really struck me as like, oh, wow, made me sort of realize how powerful farmer protests are and how different they're being treated from normal protests.
Dominic: Here in the Netherlands, it is truly remarkable to see how differently the Dutch police respond to the farmer’s protests blocking roads, and say, an Extinction Rebellion climate protest blocking a road. And I mean, it is very convenient for these farmers that a part of their job is to have these huge terrifying spiky tractors that can do things like spray manure.
Wojciech: And that’s something we are seeing echoed all over the continent. Same in Poland. Environmental activists block a bridge - rage. Farmers block the entire country - no problem! Clearly, society, and especially people in power, seem to give a lot of leeway to farmers.
Katy: And it’s been the same here in France, as Thin says. Having said that, France is famous for protests, so if there was gonna be a Europe-wide farmers’ protest movement, you can bet that French farmers were always gonna be some of the noisiest.
Dominic: FRAAAAANCE!
Katy: No one’s gonna understand that reference.
Wojciech: That’s a bit of an old meme, Dominic. Let’s stick with France then and go deeper. Our French reporter for this story is Marianne Kerfriden, an incredible journalist who reported on this story for Splann!, an investigative media outlet from the region of Brittany.
Marianne: It really came from the base, meaning that it came from a guy called Jerome Bayle, who is not a member of any union. So it was really like a anger scream, you know? And it started in the south, in the region Occitanie, which is really a cattle region, you know.
Wojciech: These cattle farmers were struggling with low livestock prices and they wanted some direct aid to help them make ends meet. Simple as that. But suddenly, France’s biggest farmers’ union, which is called the FNSEA, started to get involved.
Marianne Kerfriden: They tried to get control of it. And that's the second phase of the movement of protests, you know, where FNSEA gets the power of the protest and put all his members on the streets and that the cereal farmers join the movement.
Wojciech: So on the one hand, more farmers join the protests, on the other hand, this big union becomes the main force steering what the protests are about.
Marianne: I think the farmers got a little bit upset, because definitely there are some demands from FNSEA that were not the demands of the farmers.
Wojciech: Marianne went on to tell me that this big French farming union added completely new demands to the list. Things like better retirement conditions for farmers, but they also wanted French farmers to be exempt from this EU scheme to reduce their use of pesticides. And the cattle farmers were really frustrated - because they had started this protest, demanding better livestock prices - and now the FNSEA and all of these cereal farmers were showing up, and they are the ones who got to talk directly to the politicians.
Marianne: And in fact, we can see that FNSEA is a big winner of the protest, because almost all they asked for, the government said yes.
Wojciech: Now let’s talk about Poland for a sec. That protest you heard in Warsaw at the start of this podcast – I’ll dare to say, it predominantly felt like a march against Poland's current prime minister and the EU in general. And that is so different from how the farmers’ protests started here. The Green Deal did have something to do with it – Polish farmers have been worried about these policies, lacking information about how much they were gonna affect their lives. But the biggest thing driving the farmers’ protests in Poland relates to the war in Ukraine. After the Russian invasion, the EU removed its trade restrictions on crop imports from Ukraine, to help Ukrainian farmers…
Katy: … which in turn rocked the market by flooding Poland and other central European countries with cheap Ukrainian grain, right?
Wojciech: Yeah exactly, so, one of the Polish farmers I talked to - Dorota - she was getting €350 for a tonne of corn in 2022. And a year later it was only €150. Devastating, right? Barely any more than it cost her to sow that much in the first place. They got some aid from the government but it compensated for only half of the drop in the price, making it incredibly difficult for farms like hers to stay afloat.
Dominic: Ok, so this Ukrainian grain deal seems to be having a big effect on farmers in Poland. But how much of the protest movement in Poland is actually related to the Green Deal? I know in the Netherlands, there’ve been farmers voicing what do sound like reasonable complaints about feeling like they haven’t been consulted enough about green policies.
Wojciech: I’ve heard exactly the same complaints from Polish farmers I’ve spoken to. They feel like they have not been consulted enough or informed enough about what’s coming. And the bureaucracy involved! It really made my head spin when another farmer I interviewed - Danuta - and she’s someone who already runs her farm as sustainably as possible, explained to me step by step what she would have to do to get all the subsidies she needed. It was mind boggling. So, don’t get me wrong – farmers do have legitimate beef with European green policies.
Katy: See what you did there. Great farming pun.
Wojciech: But you see, my point is, these protests were for very specific reasons and born from peoples’ struggles and now, do you know who eventually became by far the most recognizable face of all these protests, in Poland?
Katy: No idea.
Wojciech: An industrial mink fur producer, an incredibly rich businessman who’s been trying to fight the looming ban on mink fur production for a couple of years now.
Katy: Huh.
Wojciech: So, picture this - in France cattle breeders want better prices. This big union comes and joins with swathes of cereal farmers fighting limitations on pesticide use. In Poland, folks are struggling because of the war on their doorstep, and this millionaire jumps on the bandwagon and tries to get his own, unrelated business done. Imagine being a farmer, scraping to make ends meet and having your protest diverted into a millionaire’s cause. Isn’t that the most annoying thing that can happen to you?
Katy: Yes, it is.
Dominic: Yes. It. Is.
Thin: So one of the things that we discovered with our investigation into Copa-Cogeca last year was that there were a lot of farmers who felt misrepresented by the big unions. These turned out to be particularly younger farmers and small scale farmers. And to be perfectly honest this investigation just sort of reinforced some of those findings So this time around, we spoke to farmers in Italy, France, Poland and Germany. And a lot of them were very, very worried about their livelihoods. But they are also really, really upset with some of their big unions because they felt like they haven't been receiving the kind of support that they need to actually continue doing their jobs.
Wojciech: And I have to say this is not so surprising, simply because the people at the helm of most of these unions and the quote unquote agri-millionaires, like the mink fur guy, they are far away from the people they are supposed to or claim to represent.
Katy: Far away in what kind of sense?
Wojciech: A very important part of what we did with this investigation was to see who’s leading the biggest unions and how big is the difference between them and people they claim to represent.
Dominic: So like, ordinary farmers?
Katy: Yeah, but you say ‘ordinary farmer’ – what is an ‘ordinary farmer’?
Dom: Like old McDonald!
Katy: Ee ay ee ay oh….
Wojciech: Yeah, that’s super hard to quantify, very country specific. but let’s just say that two thirds of farms in the EU are under five hectares, and it’s fair to say that at around 50 hectares, we are starting to talk about industrial production rather than family-run farms.
Katy: I’m kind of embarrassed to ask this, but what does a hectare look like? I’m capable of visualising what, like, a 50 square metre apartment looks like, but I have no idea what a hectare looks like.. How big is a hectare exactly?
Wojciech: Hmm… like, 2.5 football fields big? So a farm of 5 hectares would be 12-15 football fields.
Dominic: And so, I assume all these farming union leaders run farms bigger than 50 hectares.
Wojciech: Oh yes. Let’s take the French union, the FNSEA for example. Its president, Arnaud Rousseau, runs a farm that’s 700 hectares big and he received a little short of €2 million in EU subsidies over the past decade.
Dominic: 2 million!
Katy: Nice job.
Wojciech: 2 million and approximately 1,750 football fields. That’s an area beyond my imagination.
Dominic: Isn’t that, like, the size of Luxembourg?
Katy: We’re gonna get complaints from Luxembourg.
Dominic: Sorry, Luxembourg.
Katy: Anyway.
Thin: So in Germany, the largest union is called Deutsche Bawavaban, DBV. The president Joachim Rukweid runs his own arable and cereal farm and vineyard, which, according to research, spans over 360 hectares in total. Now, he also seems to co-own an industrial farming company. But the big thing is that he sits on the supervisory board of a company called Bewa, which, according to Lobby Facts, is the largest agricultural trader in Germany.
Katy: Isn’t that possibly a conflict of interest?
Thin: So I think it is worth questioning how a representative who should be standing for all farmers, big, small, you know, struggling, successful, could be doing that and also supervising one of the largest agro businesses, or the largest agribusinesses, in Germany.
Katy: Aha. It is a massive conflict of interest. It’s quite striking, isn’t it, to have all these unions that supposedly represent the workers being run by, um… really powerful guys from big business?
Wojciech: It all adds up to these mega-farms just having so much more financial and political power than any small farm. It’s like running a tiny, local grocery shop and trying to compete with a giant supermarket chain.
Dominic: How did we end up with a system like this where big, strong, industry players are supposedly representing their smaller, more vulnerable competitors?
Thin: One of the things that keeps coming up is they're like, look, farmers are busy. You know, sometimes it takes us three or four tries to even speak to a farmer because they're in the field, they're working. You know, it's harvest time or it's sowing time. And a lot of the time, you know, the ordinary farmers that need the help, that need the support, just don't have the resources, the capacity or even the time to actually be going out doing the lobbying.
Wojciech: You remember how I had a hard time finding a farmer at a farmers’ protest? It was May - a crucial month for every European farmer. More than a few of the farmers I called told me something along the lines of - ‘great to hear you’re working on this, call me in the winter’.
Thin: So obviously, the people who are able to do the lobbying, who are able to run for offices at the national farm unions or be able to be in Brussels, mean that these are farmers that employ other people, you know, have big farms that, you know, doesn't need you to be on the farm. So I think that explains part of it, is that, you know, the people who are able to do the lobbying are the ones that don't represent the majority of farmers.
Wojciech: With all of this in mind, let’s take a look at what the EU has actually done in response to all the farming protests across Europe.
Thin: A lot of the green ambitions have been rolled back. Efforts to reduce use of toxic pesticides have been shelved. There were efforts to improve animal welfare that, you know, they’ve been dramatically pared down, there were plans to set aside land to improve biodiversity. That’s also been scrapped. Which means we are now back to business as usual, and this tends to benefits big, large scale farms and agro businesses, that you know, engage in monoculture and that kind of practices, that are really bad for the environment, can continue.
Wojciech: Following the huge tractor protests in Brussels, the spokespeople of the farmers protests were very quickly given a direct audience with Ursula von der Leyen, and the Dutch and Belgian prime ministers.
[LASAGNE OF MEASURES CLIP]
Dominic: A lasagne of measures?! What the hell does that mean?
Katy: ‘Lasagne of measures’ is my new favourite expression.
Dominic: Which I mean, is amazing from a democratic perspective, that the leaders actually so quickly talked to the protesters banging outside their door. Thing is, I cannot think of other protesters getting anywhere close to that kind of audience.
Wojciech: And a lot of environmental groups have been enormously critical of Ursula von der Leyen and the Commission for so quickly incorporating so many of the farmers’ demands. Or, shall we say, the big powerful farming unions that dominated the protests. Here’s Sylwia Spurek, the former MEP again:
Sylwia: We can see the discrepancy between how many times Ursula von der Leyen, the Commission President, met with CopaCogeca, and how many times she met with organizations fighting climate disaster, advocating for animal rights, ensuring a change in the system for the protection of the natural environment.
Wojciech: This might sound crazy, but in von der Leyen’s official schedule, which you can view online, there wasn’t a single meeting with environmental activists listed at any time in the past year.
Dominic: What, not one?
Katy: Come on, she’s the president of the European Commission. She must’ve met with environmental activists at some point?
Wojciech: Well, it’s not like Ursula von der Leyen has never been face-to-face with a climate campaigner. Like, she spoke at the COP climate conference in December, for example. But we found no record in her agenda of any private meeting, behind closed doors, with an environmental group since these farmers’ protests. What we did find, in the past four months alone, were three separate meetings with farming groups, two of them linked to Copa-Cogeca.
Katy: Hmm.
Wojciech: When we reached out to von der Leyen’s office about this, her spokeswoman told us, quote, ‘the President regularly exchanges in dialogues in which environmental NGOs are present’. And she insisted that the European Green Deal remains the number one priority of von der Leyen’s Commission.
Dominic: Okay. But did the spokeswoman deny this rather striking disparity that you found in her boss’s calendar, in terms of the facetime climate activists are getting versus farmers?
Wojciech: No, she did not.
Dominic: That’s quite something considering this is a time when some pretty major changes have been made to the Green Deal.
Sylwia: Organisations like Copa-Cogeca, but not only, make sure that no one even thinks about making decisions that could violate their interests. These are groups, huge groups of enormous financial interests.
[AD BREAK]
Dominic: It’s such a pity that environmental activists don’t drive around in massive spikey vehicles! Somehow I don’t think my garden spade or microphone would have the same effect. All this makes me so angry that I’d like to grab my garden pitchfork and start a revolution.
Katy: You tell ‘em, Dominic.
Wojciech: Uh-uh. Hold your horses. That’s not gonna be so easy I’m afraid, we haven't talked yet about what some of these powerbrokers do to keep others in check.
Dominic: Oh, this sounds ominous.
Katy: This actually feels like yet another one of Wojciech’s stories, like the one on media freedom you did last year, that goes from bad to worse to a complete darkness and despair.
Wojciech: It’s not my fault! World can be a dark place these days!
Dominic: This is the last time you’re allowed to do this, Wojciech.
Wojciech: I’m so sorry. But I promise there will be some words of consolation and encouragement at the end though.
Katy: Ok, go on then. But you’d better not disappoint me with this one.
Wojciech: Ok, I promise, I promise. So there’s quite a lot of evidence that these unions and big agri lobbies can be pretty decisive in the use of methods they use to silence people who oppose them. You might have noticed by now that you haven't actually heard many farmers' in this podcast. The team who worked on this investigation spoke to more than three dozen farmers. And a lot of them didn't want to speak on the record, because of the kind of stuff you're about to hear.
Here’s Marianne Kerfrieden again, she happened to produce a documentary on exactly how this works, in France, a few years back:
Marianne: So when I did my documentary seven years ago on FNSEA, all the farmers told me, okay, I am a member of FNSEA, not because I agree with what the union defend, but it's because as they hold all the chamber of agriculture, meaning that they have representative in the bank, in the Social Security, in the cooperative. If I'm not a member, or if I stand against FNSEA, I won't be able to buy lands, I won't be able to get a loan from the bank, I won't be able to get a loan from my cooperative, I will have trouble to get my retirement payments…
Katy: This is giving me Godfather vibes.
Wojciech: Right? And it could get really crazy at times. So our French reporters on this story, they told us that the activists they spoke to were afraid to use the name of the union, FNSEA, during a call because they were afraid they were being eavesdropped on.
Katy: That’s literally like Voldemort from Harry Potter.
Dominic: Katy, make a choice. Which film is this? Godfather or Harry Potter? It can’t be both.
Katy: It’s everything! It’s everything scary.
Wojciech: Sometimes it can be almost like The Bourne Identity, because one of the other interviewees I spoke to, she asked me to turn my phone off, and leave it in a fridge in a separate room.
Katy: That is so intense.
Wojciech: It is. And as for Poland – oh man, I sometimes feel like the further east you go, the crazier things get.
Dominic: You said it.
Wojciech: Yeah, I said it. In a nutshell - the most powerful people in Polish agriculture are people who make money from industrial meat or fur production. To say the least, their farms are not places where animals thrive. Welcome to the dark side of Polish farming. These insanely rich men have three groups that they’re trying to silence at all cost: activists, unfavourable policymakers and residents of areas where they are planning to build their industrial farms. They go pretty hard against activists: the first tactic is defamation lawsuits, aiming at deterring people from protesting.
Dominic: Oh, these are called SLAPPs, right?
Katy: Good knowledge, Dominic.
Dominic: Thank you, I don’t remember what that stands for but I remember these are lawsuits aimed primarily at scaring off potential rivals.
Wojciech: It stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. That’s a pretty standard procedure. But they go a step further too. They don’t only want to shut these people up, they want to discredit them and put their own narrative on top. Here’s Sylwia again:
Sylwia: These are groups that allocate a lot of money for research, for funding speeches by scientists, who talk about animal products, meat, dairy, and show that there's nothing alarming here, that everything is fine, that nothing needs to be changed, that we still need to subsidise this sector.
Wojciech: They spread misinformation in a lot of sophisticated and unsophisticated ways. Like, the big mink fur guy I mentioned earlier, he’s set up a whole universe of foundations, institutes and questionable media outlets that assure their audiences that industrial livestock and fur production are crucial for Poland and its economic and food security.
Katy: Ooh, dirty tricks. This doesn’t sound unfamiliar, actually. Let’s just say there’ve been some other dubious industries in the past that have done stuff like this to convince us they’re not actually that harmful.
Wojciech: But also through these dodgy media outlets and social media connected to it, these giant Polish farming companies spread a lot of crazy smear campaigns against people opposing them. People like Sylwia.
Sylwia: My entire background is related to human rights in general. But in my entire career related to this activity, and I also deal with issues of non-heteronormative persons, LGBT+ rights, I have never encountered such attacks as when I started to speak very clearly about the need to change the food system. Actions of ridicule, intimidation. All this, of course, happens on the internet.
Wojciech: I was provided with the list of the slurs that were used against Sylwia and they were absolutely graphic and awful, not to be ever repeated anywhere. She actually said that all this abuse she got, for campaigning against industrial farming, is one of the reasons she’s decided not to run for re-election.
Katy: Mm. That’s really sad.
Wojciech: She said it was too much for her family to bear.
Dominic: if they are able to intimidate Sylwia, this powerful politician and lawyer, I can imagine why farmers are intimidated.
Wojciech: Other activists we spoke to recounted similar things - online violence with no limits or breaks.
Dominic: Didn’t you also tell Katy and me previously about the dirty tricks that big farming companies in Poland have carried out to stamp out any objections when they’re trying to build new farms?
Wojciech: Oh my. This is by far the worst. And it is what quite a lot of companies do, not only the mink producers. So, they’re exploiting lacklustre regulations regarding area development plans in certain regions of Poland and acquiring permissions to build industrial poultry, pig or mink farms next to people who have been living there and working the land for decades.
Dominic: Ooofff. I was reading the other day that living next to one of these megafarms is really touch. There's a terrible stench, and they can produce, I think it was more than 400 substances that are harmful to the environment and the people who live nearby.
Katy: I actually stayed in an Airbnb right next to a pig farm once, and I can confirm the stench was terrible. But that’s another story.
Dominic: Classic Katy Lee holiday.Katy: It was a previously unreviewed property. The listing didn’t mention the fact that it was right next to a giant pig farm. But I mean, can you imagine someone building a farm like this right next door to where you’ve been living forever?
Wojciech: It’s appalling, it changes your life drastically for the worse and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can move out, or sell your farm and land, but those have just lost a lot of value due to the new neighbours.
Katy: Mm. Have the people affected by all of this been protesting about it?
Wojciech: Yeah, some people have become so involved, they started dividing their lives to pre-protest and after-protest. Some of these companies are doing everything to keep their plans under wraps so that when people learn about the construction it’s already too late to do anything about it. You wake up and the next thing you know you’ll have new neighbours - several farms with literally a million chickens inside, for example.
Dominic: Fucking hell.
Wojciech: You can’t imagine how many times I thought exactly those words during my trip
Dominic: Actually I can, you swear a lot.
Wojciech: …to a region where a leading Polish poultry producer decided to build 150 farms. It’s really hard to process that you can invade peoples’ lives like that, just to make even more money. And, if people protest too loudly they’re met with quite some unpleasantries - ranging from legal threats, to actual physical threats, being followed and intimidated. And they operate very directly against small-scale farmers. In a meeting with farmers and residents, the chairman of this company said that small-scale farmers have no reason to exist and that he sees no place for them in the future of agriculture. They’re not big enough partners for him to make business with.
Katy: Ok, Wojciech enough! You promised that there’s a light in this tunnel.
Wojciech: Yes. Sorry, sorry, sorry. There are two bright sides to this. One is that the local residents protesting against this are absolutely incredible and they have managed to block a lot of this kind of construction, despite all the threats against them. Secondly, guess where these big-agri bully boys get their money from.
Dominic: From us!
Woj: From our pockets! By making smarter grocery shopping choices, we could get them into serious trouble. If we limit buying, for example, industrially produced meat and dairy and show them, with our own wallets, that this is not the way to go, they’ll have to pivot and change the way they operate. It’s as simple as that.
Dominic: Where does all this leave us?
Wojciech: We need to learn that farmers are not a monolithic group and that all types of farmers need representation, not only the biggest, more influential ones. Remember, these protests started because farmers, the smaller ones, are actually experiencing real struggles and a long-term crisis.
Thin: You know, European farmers are getting older, right? The average age of a European farmer is 57 years old. Farmers are facing rising debt, mental stress and anxiety.
Wojciech: We, the reporters working on this story, felt like the media coverage was as if all these farmers were protesting about green policies. But that really was not the case.
Thin: And I really don't want this narrative of farmers as anti-environment to take hold. It has, and I think that's extremely unfortunate because it becomes an us versus them, you know, like the society versus farmers. It's not. We are all together.
Dom: Which is a really important point! Like, farmers are WAY more willing to acknowledge the fact that we need to seriously reduce pesticides and carry out all kinds of other climate initiatives, than they were ten years ago. And that is a h ge and really very important development. If there’s one big lesson I take from all of this, it’s that politicians and farmers and environmental activists are going to have to collaborate to make these big climate adjustments possible.
Wojciech: Change is inevitable but we need everyone involved in these processes to be able to speak loud and clear.
Thin: And a lot of the farmers I've spoken to totally understand they need to change farming practices, but they also need support. The fact is, climate change is already affecting farmers. And many farmers I've spoken to admit that they're already at the front line of it. Their harvests are being affected.
Katy: It does feel like the farmer’s protests have made us pay a bit more attention to the fact that that something’s really wrong with our food systems, even if a lot of the media coverage has been over-simplified. When we hear someone saying, "This is what farmers want", we should really ask who they are representing. I have to say I often feel quite ashamed at how little I know about where my food comes from, although I’m trying to fix it. And I hope that conversations like this one can help a bit.
Thin: Many of us now live in urban areas. We no longer have connections with rural areas. But really, when we talk about farmers and farming, we're talking about the food that gives us sustenance, the food that we need to stay alive. It is the very basis of our existence. So what happens to farmers, farming and agriculture policy, concerns every single one of us.
Wojciech: This episode is a result of a joint investigation by The Europeans, Lighthouse Reports, L’Espresso, Food Unfolded, Politico, Taz, Front Story, and Splann! It was written, produced and sound designed by me, Wojciech Oleksiak.
Editing came from our all-star producer Katz Laszlo, with invaluable editorial support from Katy Lee and Dominic Kraemer.
Thank you so much to all the journalists who worked on this story: Thin Lei Win, Marianne Kerfriden, Sivia Lazzaris, Elena DeBre, and Emmanuel Freudenthal.
Our participation in this investigation would not have been at all possible without generous support from our Patreon supporters. Thank you sooooo much, we love you!
Thank you to our latest supporters: Anna, Hugo, Jason, Federico and Krystof.
In the show notes you’ll find links to all the other publications stemming from this international project - I heartily recommend you have a look, these are all fascinating findings that’ll make you understand each country’s struggles with the Big-Agri Bully Boys better.
Thank you so much for listening.
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