A-Infos (en) Sicilia Libertaria 2-24: On the side of the farmers (ca, de, it, pt, tr) [machine translation]

Farmers have returned to protest; the push was once again given by the 
French, who have always been determined (and it is no coincidence that 
they obtained positive responses from the government), this time 
assisted by the Germans. Throughout Italy, tractors invade roads, 
motorways, squares and place on the agenda the question of agriculture 
and farmers who have been mistreated for a long time, marginalized and 
subordinated to the omnipresent and harmful logic of the market, which 
literally steal products from those who produce them to sell them at 
exorbitant prices for the sole purpose of making profits. At the 
forefront of this mechanism are large-scale retail trade and 
multinationals, in other words (even if you don't say it: capitalism).

In fact, national and European policies guarantee the giants of the 
sector and large-scale retail trade enormous profits while neglecting 
and marginalizing the millions of small and medium-sized producers, 
burdened with taxes and cut off from European funding, which in most 
cases goes to the large companies in the sector (80% ends up at 20% of 
companies), always favoring intensive agriculture, which consumes soil 
and water, poisons the land, kills biodiversity and generally markets 
questionable products from the quality point of view.

In Italy the Meloni government (and the prime minister's brother-in-law, 
the agriculture minister Lollobrigida) has reinstated the agricultural 
IRPEF eliminated under the Renzi government in 2017, calculating that it 
will suck 280 million euros a year from farmers. It is no coincidence 
that the protests of recent weeks directly accuse national governments 
and the EU, but also challenge the large organizations in the sector, 
starting from the most powerful, Coldiretti, which has turned into a 
supporter of the Meloni government, and therefore responsible for the 
damage to the category that says to represent and defend.

Rural workers raise the question of the dignity of their work, they 
remind everyone, with the many signs and banners displayed on tractors, 
that agriculture is life and that without agriculture there is no food 
on our tables. In short, they reiterate that behind the supermarket 
shelves, where the vast majority of us buy the food we consume, there is 
human toil, there are the sacrifices of millions of farmers, even if 
consumerism and alienation make us forget it too often. In fact, food is 
now degraded to a commodity, it is denaturalized by advertising 
(deceptive par excellence) and as such it performs functions that are 
only secondarily nutritional, but mainly financial and commercial, the 
purpose of which is not to feed people (so much so that if throws away a 
huge quantity, around 25%) but the insatiable appetite of the bosses, of 
the multinationals who manage the entire food supply chain or in any 
case control it.

Even in the province of Ragusa, tractors have invaded the streets and 
cities, even if (yet) the level of protest has not reached the intensity 
of that of the pitchforks of more than ten years ago, yet many of the 
farmers fighting are the same ones who animated that battle, an 
experience which, beyond the contradictions it contained and which ended 
up exploding, was a great moment of social redemption which however was 
unable to go all the way in its action.

Now at tractor rallies you can see politicians of various colors, all 
intent on making friends of the farmers. On the other hand, the European 
elections are approaching, and perhaps also the provincial ones, and the 
politicians' paraculism has six faces like our local caciocavallo. 
Politicians who have been in various governments and sub-governments for 
years and even when it is their turn to be in opposition, certainly 
cannot present themselves as virgins, given that the policies of 
destroying agriculture come from afar and have been launched by all the 
government coalitions. There were quite a few cases in which these false 
friends were chased away with whistles from the garrisons.

The Ragusa garrison went further, issuing a statement of no confidence 
in any leadership of the movement: "As far as we are concerned, also 
mindful of the experience lived in 2013, we would like to point out that 
we absolutely do not recognize any self-proclaimed national or regional 
leader such in the current tractor protest, which arose spontaneously in 
the wake of the demonstrations of our French and German colleagues". An 
important position that gives rise to hope.

Certainly the problems raised by farmers should be accompanied by the 
climatic one, which is also increasingly significant and conditions 
agricultural activity, and, especially in Sicily, has risen to levels 
that we could define as dramatic, often not addressed at the root but 
reduced to a mere question of compensation of the damage caused by the 
various "states of calamity". And the climate issue is not free from the 
actions of governments, which prevaricate, postpone, subtract resources 
from what is considered the obligatory turning point to reduce global 
warming and implement works to mitigate atmospheric phenomena.

Governments, starting with "ours", prevaricate, focus on fossil fuels, 
launch phantom Mattei plans to secure African gas and oil, organize 
military missions to protect ENI, in short, continue to march tirelessly 
towards the abyss while simultaneously feeding us nonsense about the 
commitment to an energy reconversion that is nowhere to be seen. Indeed, 
they trumpet "made in Italy" (they even made us a ministry) all 
unbalanced on toxic production and the intensive and industrial 
exploitation of lands and animals, and defining all of this as "food 
sovereignty".

In the two issues preceding the current one, our newspaper published two 
significant articles by Roberto Brioschi on the bluff of Made in Italy; 
but he has highlighted on several occasions the centrality of the 
agricultural question, most recently with the special on "Will farmers 
save the world?"; from this issue, furthermore, on page. 6 we inaugurate 
a new column entitled "Environment, food, climate" in which we examine 
many aspects of the agricultural question, starting with that on the 
so-called synthetic meat.

True food sovereignty can only be ensured by farmers who are not 
subservient to the logic of the market, those who take action to protect 
and conserve the ancient and original seeds, who take care of the land 
from the aggressiveness of the chemical industry and from the threats of 
overbuilding which takes away soil agriculture at unsustainable rates.

The farmers in struggle should aim for an alliance with consumers, which 
is increasingly necessary to break slavery towards multinationals; an 
alliance made up of land reconversion projects, the production of 
organic and quality food, the creation of bottom-up distribution 
structures that bypass the large-scale retail sharks. A necessary 
complicity between city and countryside, because this struggle concerns 
us all.

Daddy Trippìla

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe https://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en