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.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS