From tractor rallies in India to spraying police with manure in Belgium, protests by European and Indian farmers are making headlines worldwide. While the grievances behind the protests vary from country to country, one thing is certain: farmers are tired of current global agriculture policies.

Farmers across Europe are organizing within their regions and even across borders, expanding a protest movement centered around disagreement with EU farming policies. Farmers began protesting in Europe in spring 2023 in Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria, sparked by Ukrainian grain imports. Farmers argue that Ukrainian grain is a cheaper good that does not follow EU standards and therefore presents unfair competition in the market. Those initial protests began spreading to Germany, France, Italy, Greece, and Spain in recent months, drawing similarities to the 2019 protests against a nitrogen emissions crackdown in the Netherlands.

In India, farmers are protesting in the state of Punjab to guarantee a minimum purchase price for crops. The ongoing protests are reminiscent of the 2020-21 mass protests against agriculture reforms.

To better understand the reasoning behind each set of protest movements, the agricultural policies in question, and the broader impact of the protests, we asked SIS professor Garret Martin, an EU policy expert, and SIS professor Garrett Graddy-Lovelace, an expert in sustainable and equitable agriculture, some questions.

Garret Martin

What are the main grievances driving farmers to protest across the EU?

There are certainly recurring grievances that stand out as significant drivers of the current protests across Europe. Many farmers are struggling because of a combination of challenging factors, ranging from crippling debt, the pressures of retailers and agrochemical companies, and extreme weather patterns. They also complain of the burden imposed by government and EU regulations, at a time when their income is facing a sharp decline. Indeed, as pointed out by Politico, “prices paid to farmers fell by more than 10 percent from 2022 to 2023” in 11 EU countries. But on top of that grim picture, there are additional layers of frustration that are specific to different nations and communities. For example, while German farmers are pushing back against the phasing out of tax breaks on agricultural diesel, their French counterparts are railing against the rising cost of farm diesel and the competition from imports.

A particular subject of ire has been the pending EU trade agreement with Mercosur, covering Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay, which would reduce tariffs on agricultural products. French farmers are particularly worried that this would invite unfair competition because of what they perceive as Mercosur’s lower standards for agricultural goods.

How has the war in Ukraine impacted the EU’s agricultural policies and farmers in Europe?

The war in Ukraine has certainly, if unintentionally, played a part in fueling the current protests. Russia’s aggression has had a very adverse impact on trade flows, helping to provoke a supply glut. In response to grain shortages and the inability to use Ukrainian ports, the EU decided to suspend tariffs and quotas on Ukrainian agricultural products and to rely on rail and truck transport via countries on the border, such as Hungary and Poland. But that led to significant pushback from the farmers in countries bordering Ukraine, worried that this influx was pushing prices further down. After all, the EU’s decision was bound to create difficulties since we are not facing an even playing field: an average Ukrainian farm is 1,000 hectares against 41 hectares for its EU counterparts.

Are governments and EU institutions taking steps to address the concerns raised by protesting farmers and prevent further escalation of tensions, and are these messages intended to avoid the erosion of support for Ukraine?

Governments and institutions are scrambling to placate the protestors, but they are facing a difficult challenge because of the very heterogeneous nature of grievances, both within countries and across the continent. The EU, for its part, has quickly adopted a series of short-term measures. These include changing the rules around environmental standards and rolling back an anti-pesticide proposal, providing evidence that the EU is willing to dilute its environmental commitments in a bid to gain the support of farmers. While national governments and the EU are certainly concerned about avoiding any further erosion in the support for Ukraine, they are also worried about the electoral implications of the European elections in June. Populist parties are already likely to make gains and may try to further capitalize on farmer unrest.

Garrett Graddy-Lovelace

What issues are of the most concern from an agricultural standpoint?

There are so many cascading issues of concern regarding agriculture including expensive inputs, including the land itself; low farmgate prices; corporate concentration; labor exploitation; unfair terms of trade; climate impacts on agriculture, in the form of natural disasters, floods, salinization, storms, fires; and agricultural emissions on climate.

All of these issues are compounded on top of water scarcity and agrobiodiversity decline. From the standpoint of farmers themselves, the disastrously low and volatile farmgate prices epitomize the political-economic squeeze on growers, who cannot guarantee their increasingly high costs of production will have been covered by harvests' sale.

How do EU agricultural policies contribute to the frustrations expressed by protesting farmers?

The EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has historically contained a large portion of its budget for agriculture. But these funds have increasingly gone to the larger landowners, though there has been funding for geographic indicator programs. The CAP has supported conservation and organic practices, but overall political-economic pressures trend toward monocultural production with high external input—meaning toxic pesticides—and increased industrial factory livestock operations. Most recently, the CAP has earmarked large funding for “green direct payments” to farmers who maintain permanent grassland, undertake crop diversification, and dedicate five percent of arable land to ecological focus areas. It has also instituted cross-compliance so that only farmers pursuing sustainable agriculture garner subsidized crop insurance and other supports.

But at the end of the day, farmers must pay their bills, and the agricultural market is dominated by mega-grocery chains and other transnational agro-corporate firms that pay disrespectfully and, over time, devastatingly cheap prices to farmers for their goods. The cheap prices do not cover the costs of production and are considered an insult to the hard work of keeping a farm going. Tariffs and other measures to protect domestic markets have been vilified and criminalized by the WTO, leaving a neoliberalized flow of cheap commodities and a race to the bottom in prices.

Of note, Polish farmers and others near the Ukrainian border are furious with the flow of free or highly subsidized agricultural products coming out of Ukraine—with global financial assistance for geopolitical reasons—due to the crushing impact on local farmgate prices and overall market displacement.

While these protests are happening in Europe, farmers are also protesting in India. Are these protests similar?

They are different in cultural, political, and environmental contexts, and yet surprisingly similar with regard to the central role of farmgate price for farmers.

As we speak, tens of thousands of Indian farmers have again packed their belongings to march to the capital city to resume mass civil disobedience reminiscent of the historic 2020-2021 Indian Farmer Uprising, the largest sustained peaceful protest in recorded history, which was about parity. The Indian farmers movement erupted to counter the Modi government’s neoliberalizing “Farm Laws,” which ended protected markets and minimum support prices and started agro-corporate contracts in their stead. Tens of millions from scores of diverse regions, languages, religions, and agricultural contexts joined forces with farmers who left their farms and occupied Delhi for over a year.

Rallying to protect Minimum Support Price (MSP), they endured police brutality, COVID-19, cold, and heat all with the rock-solid consciousness that without a government-guaranteed market and price floor—even for just the basic commodity crops—the corporate buyers would drive the farmgate price to lethal lows, leading to debt, foreclosure, land loss, mass de-agrarianization, and even more farmer suicide. Improbably, in November 2021, they won—blocking the neoliberal laws and offering a model of brave agrarian resistance for the world.

The Indian Farmer Revolution, as it self-describes, has expanded to demand Minimum Support Prices not just for commodity crops like wheat and rice, but for agrobiodiverse native pulses and other nourishing traditional foods. Yet 2022 and 2023 passed with the BJP not fulfilling their promise to lock in MSP as a legal right.

The furious farmers who have been continuing to organize for a specific MSP ratio of 150% of costs of production and an expansion to many other native, nutritious crops beyond rice and wheat, intensified their protests with the goal of entering the capital to place more pressure on the government. The authoritarian BJP responded with police repression, concrete blocks, spikes embedded into the road to puncture tractors, drone tear gas, and rubber bullets. Delhi itself is a maze of razor wire and blockades as if to attack an invading army—of largely elder farmers. Amid these protests, police have already killed one farmer at the Punjab-Haryana border.