Farmers have returned to protest; the push was once again given by theFrench, who have always been determined (and it is no coincidence thatthey obtained positive responses from the government), this timeassisted by the Germans. Throughout Italy, tractors invade roads,motorways, squares and place on the agenda the question of agricultureand farmers who have been mistreated for a long time, marginalized andsubordinated to the omnipresent and harmful logic of the market, whichliterally steal products from those who produce them to sell them atexorbitant prices for the sole purpose of making profits. At theforefront of this mechanism are large-scale retail trade andmultinationals, in other words (even if you don't say it: capitalism).In fact, national and European policies guarantee the giants of thesector and large-scale retail trade enormous profits while neglectingand marginalizing the millions of small and medium-sized producers,burdened with taxes and cut off from European funding, which in mostcases goes to the large companies in the sector (80% ends up at 20% ofcompanies), always favoring intensive agriculture, which consumes soiland water, poisons the land, kills biodiversity and generally marketsquestionable 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 agriculturalIRPEF eliminated under the Renzi government in 2017, calculating that itwill suck 280 million euros a year from farmers. It is no coincidencethat the protests of recent weeks directly accuse national governmentsand the EU, but also challenge the large organizations in the sector,starting from the most powerful, Coldiretti, which has turned into asupporter of the Meloni government, and therefore responsible for thedamage to the category that says to represent and defend.Rural workers raise the question of the dignity of their work, theyremind everyone, with the many signs and banners displayed on tractors,that agriculture is life and that without agriculture there is no foodon our tables. In short, they reiterate that behind the supermarketshelves, where the vast majority of us buy the food we consume, there ishuman toil, there are the sacrifices of millions of farmers, even ifconsumerism and alienation make us forget it too often. In fact, food isnow degraded to a commodity, it is denaturalized by advertising(deceptive par excellence) and as such it performs functions that areonly secondarily nutritional, but mainly financial and commercial, thepurpose of which is not to feed people (so much so that if throws away ahuge quantity, around 25%) but the insatiable appetite of the bosses, ofthe multinationals who manage the entire food supply chain or in anycase control it.Even in the province of Ragusa, tractors have invaded the streets andcities, even if (yet) the level of protest has not reached the intensityof that of the pitchforks of more than ten years ago, yet many of thefarmers fighting are the same ones who animated that battle, anexperience which, beyond the contradictions it contained and which endedup exploding, was a great moment of social redemption which however wasunable to go all the way in its action.Now at tractor rallies you can see politicians of various colors, allintent on making friends of the farmers. On the other hand, the Europeanelections are approaching, and perhaps also the provincial ones, and thepoliticians' paraculism has six faces like our local caciocavallo.Politicians who have been in various governments and sub-governments foryears and even when it is their turn to be in opposition, certainlycannot present themselves as virgins, given that the policies ofdestroying agriculture come from afar and have been launched by all thegovernment coalitions. There were quite a few cases in which these falsefriends were chased away with whistles from the garrisons.The Ragusa garrison went further, issuing a statement of no confidencein any leadership of the movement: "As far as we are concerned, alsomindful of the experience lived in 2013, we would like to point out thatwe absolutely do not recognize any self-proclaimed national or regionalleader such in the current tractor protest, which arose spontaneously inthe wake of the demonstrations of our French and German colleagues". Animportant position that gives rise to hope.Certainly the problems raised by farmers should be accompanied by theclimatic one, which is also increasingly significant and conditionsagricultural activity, and, especially in Sicily, has risen to levelsthat we could define as dramatic, often not addressed at the root butreduced to a mere question of compensation of the damage caused by thevarious "states of calamity". And the climate issue is not free from theactions of governments, which prevaricate, postpone, subtract resourcesfrom what is considered the obligatory turning point to reduce globalwarming 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, organizemilitary missions to protect ENI, in short, continue to march tirelesslytowards the abyss while simultaneously feeding us nonsense about thecommitment to an energy reconversion that is nowhere to be seen. Indeed,they trumpet "made in Italy" (they even made us a ministry) allunbalanced on toxic production and the intensive and industrialexploitation of lands and animals, and defining all of this as "foodsovereignty".In the two issues preceding the current one, our newspaper published twosignificant articles by Roberto Brioschi on the bluff of Made in Italy;but he has highlighted on several occasions the centrality of theagricultural question, most recently with the special on "Will farmerssave the world?"; from this issue, furthermore, on page. 6 we inauguratea new column entitled "Environment, food, climate" in which we examinemany aspects of the agricultural question, starting with that on theso-called synthetic meat.True food sovereignty can only be ensured by farmers who are notsubservient to the logic of the market, those who take action to protectand conserve the ancient and original seeds, who take care of the landfrom the aggressiveness of the chemical industry and from the threats ofoverbuilding which takes away soil agriculture at unsustainable rates.The farmers in struggle should aim for an alliance with consumers, whichis increasingly necessary to break slavery towards multinationals; analliance made up of land reconversion projects, the production oforganic and quality food, the creation of bottom-up distributionstructures that bypass the large-scale retail sharks. A necessarycomplicity between city and countryside, because this struggle concernsus all.Daddy Trippìlahttps://www.sicilialibertaria.it/_________________________________________A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C EBy, For, and About AnarchistsSend news reports to A-infos-en mailing listA-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten