On a farm in northern Belgium, not far from the hundreds of tractors blocking Europe’s second-biggest port to demand more respect for farmers, Bart Dochy was switching on his computer, waiting for a government program to load with maps of his land next to empty digital boxes demanding to be filled with statistics on fertilizer, pesticides, production and harvesting.
“They also supervise us with satellite images and even with drones,” Dochy said.
His frustration highlights the yawning gap in trust and understanding that has opened up between European farmers and what they increasingly see as a nanny state looking into every nook and cranny of their barns, analyzing how every drop of liquid manure is spread.
Photo: AP
From Greece to Ireland, from the Baltics to Spain, tens of thousands of farmers and their supporters joined protests across Europe in recent weeks. It was enough to put the farmers’ plight on front pages all over the continent, setting it up as a key theme for the June 6 to 9 parliamentary elections in the 27-nation EU.
Farmers have always lived by the whim of nature. Fickle regulation, though, they cannot accept.
“That is what is creating this level of distrust. It’s like living in Russia or China,” Dochy said, instead of the fertile flatlands of Flanders in northwestern Belgium.
Farmers have many complaints — from insufficiently regulated cheap imports to overbearing environmental rules — but the reams of red tape set everyone off almost instantly.
However, the EU is also the hand that feeds them, with about 50 billion euros (US$53.7 billion) going into a vast network of programs that touch on agriculture in various ways every year.
In return, farmers must account for their spending — in ways they find increasingly onerous.
At 51, Dochy is far from an embittered, extremist farmer setting bales of hay on fire or spraying manure into government buildings. In his office, as essential as a barn in the life of a current-day EU farmer, hangs the warning “God Watches — No Cursing Here.”
He comes from old-time farming stock, generations of conservative Christian Democrats that have traditionally provided the backbone of European agriculture.
Once Dochy finishes dealing with 900 pigs and 30 hectares of corn or potatoes, he exchanges his blue overalls and rubber boots for a three-piece suit. He is also the mayor of this farming community, Ledegem, 120km west of Brussels where much of the detested EU farm bureaucracy comes from.
Over morning coffee, his father, Frans Dochy, 82, remembers how, in his youth, he would harvest beets out of the cold, thick earth by hand for hours.
However, he said, current bookkeeping “would have driven me off the farm long ago.”
He sees how his son has to register the arrival of any artificial manure within seven days.
“And it has to be done even at the busiest times on the field, of course,” said Bart Dochy.
“Then it has to be registered exactly how it is spread on every single little plot of land — how many kilos and how it is distributed,” he explained, going through some of the thick folders in his office. “And with the smallest error, there are fines.”
Bart Dochy said he often heard from dozens of the farmers in his town how the fines can amount to hundreds of euros, simply with a wrong click of the mouse.
The same stories come up at every farmers’ protest — be they Italian, French, Dutch or Spanish.
What really gets Bart Dochy is when bureaucratic deadlines are imposed on him, for example if certain crops or green fertilizers need to be sown by Sept. 1.
“If the last week of August is unbelievably rainy, you will not be able to sow this properly, but you are nevertheless obliged to sow. Otherwise, you may be faced with a fine,” he said.
“A farmer actually lives in conflict between the government, which wants to be in charge, and nature, which is still in charge, and you can’t actually change anything about nature,” Bart Dochy said.
Because the rules also change so fast, it becomes increasingly harder to invest wisely, he said.
However, EU officials point to the need for strict regulation after decades of lax enforcement. Soil pollution was once widespread from the dumping of excess manure in gutters and rivers. Such was the stench hanging over parts of Bart Dochy’s province that, several decades ago, it was popularly renamed Mest (Manure) Flanders instead of West Flanders.
Farms had to be thoroughly checked to make sure they were spending subsidies correctly.
Now, though, the pendulum has swung the other way. After years of piling on ever more intricate rules, politicians realize they might have gone too far.
“Our farmers continue to face huge challenges,” European Commission Vice President Maros Sefcovic told EU parliamentarians this week, making sure to mention “administrative requirements.”
“We hear our farmers — loud and clear. We acknowledge your hardship, and politicians need to do better,” Sefcovic said.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to