Thousands of farmers and consumer rights activists gathered at the German chancellory on Saturday (January 17) to protest against the rise of industrial-scale agriculture and genetically modified foods.
The protest, under the headline “We are fed up”, coincided with the start ofEurope’s biggest agricultural fair, the International Green Week, and is one the largest annual protests in Germany.
The protesters said they blamed the German government for not doing enough to support traditional farmers and investing too much in industrialised agriculture.
“It (the German government) has many options. Firstly to regulate the markets so that the farmers do not have to suffer from the constantly falling prices. It can clearly take a stand against genetic engineering and it must take a stand against the building of big barns, while over 70 percent of pig farmers have had to quit over the last 15 years,” said
Jochen Fritz, the spokesman of the “My agriculture” campaign, an alliance of more than 50 NGOs, which organised the event.
Fritz said the onus was also on the consumer to make the right decisions when buying their food.
“Eating is political. With every single decision about what to buy, I am deciding how the animals are being kept or what grows in our fields. Of course, I can buy humanely kept animals, I can eat less meat – we eat too much anyway – but good meat instead, and I can make sure that I support the farmers and not the big agricultural industry corporations,” he said.
Farmers said the government needed to step in and start supporting traditional agriculture.
“Policy-makers should stop the massive and fairly one-sided assistance to large companies, so that differently structured farming even stands a chance. Because if I distribute the money in the way of: ‘if you are big you get a lot and if you are small than you get a little’, then I create a large agrarian industry. And we know the results of this today. The results are negative and so we have to tell the politicians to stop,” said Joachim Bienestein.
“Look at how many people are employed in industrial farming. They have thousands of hectares per firm and only five employees. That is not the future,” added farmer, Joachim Maunz.
The European Union is currently negotiating at free trade agreement with theUnited States, known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.
The TTIP would eliminate all tariff barriers between the U.S. and EU nations.
But political parties and campaigners from across Europe under the banner “Stop TTIP” oppose the deal, saying an accord will undermine European food and environmental laws and give too much power to U.S. corporations.
Reuters
