Updates from EU Member States, including reports from ARC Web Correspondents
Despite the exaggeration and spin, oilseed rape yields are up, not down, in the UK. […]
Along with Land grabbing, CAP and how it is interpreted in Romania, are negatively effecting family farms in Romania. […]
Farmer protests are spreading around Europe, with six roads blockaded in France, along with food trucks carrying imported produce turned back. The UK is now seeing protests congest motorways there too. The A50 road protest has focused more on milk than the French protests. The UK’s largest farmer organisation the National Farmers’ Union (NFU), have not backed these occurrences. A spark in the UK was a further milk price drop. Arla Foods amba, a co-operative owned by 3000 diary farmers, announced yet another cut in price paid, reducing the standard litre price to 23.01 pence per litre, or about 32 euro cents. Dairy farmers are growing increasingly frustrated by the milk price crises. All across the EU, prices are plummeting. In Ireland, the price is 10-12 cent lower than the same time in 2014, typically 28c per litre from some companies, with similar stories from Germany, Lithuania and elsewhere on the Continent. “We should have learned our lesson by now, but we keep producing ever more milk, anticipating Russia and China to re-enter the market, whilst farm-gate milk prices […]
More than 1,000 French farmers blocked the border between France and Germany at six points on Monday, as part of an ongoing wave of protests by French livestock producers over below cost farmgate prices. Starting on Sunday night, the federation of farmers’ unions (FDSEA) in the Lower Rhine blocked five bridges over the river and another border crossing with tractors and improvised barricades. “We’re letting all cars through and lorries out of France,” a union spokesman told journalists, adding that foreign lorries carrying food imports would be blocked. The farming unions are encouraged by the public support they enjoy: “The French are prepared to pay more, which is encouraging,” Xavier Beulin, the national farmers’ union leader, told journalists. This expedient half-truth sidesteps the fact that supermarkets have been relentlessly grabbing ever larger margins and profiting at the expense of their suppliers and customers alike for years. During a separate action in south west France, 100 farmers stopped dozens of Spanish lorries at a motorway blockade, looking for meat and fresh produce bound for the French […]
Applications close at 5pm on September 30, 2015 for the UK’s new community and socially aware food fund […]
New interactive map reveals extent of land grabbing in Romania. […]
Despite mounting scientific evidence, UK authorities have made an exemption for the bee killing pesticide. Peter Crosskey reports […]
Greening was weak enough to begin with. Now, many ministers and the Commissioner himself seem to see the genuine greening component of CAP as more honoured in the breach than in the observance. […]
Is land concentration just a politically neutered way to say land grabbing? […]
Between 2002-2010, 150,000 small farms disappeared. And this process has continued since then. A new Report on Land Grabbing by Eco Ruralis reveals shocking extent of the practice. […]
How will sustainable agroecological methods get to get passed on, as peasant farmers age? […]
Across Europe, TTIP and CETA free zones are being established. Ramona Duminicioiu of Eco Ruralis tells us about Romania. […]
Are Gene Banks a solution in a world of agri-biodiversity decline, or museums of seed diversity? | ARC2020 […]
New ARC2020 correspondent Pavlos Georgiadis on Greece, the economic and political crisis and agri-food’s role in it […]
Hidden costs and extra bureaucracies in a new law have made it more difficult for farmers to sell their own produce, as Eco Ruralis explain. […]
Agricultural and Rural Convention