Leaving aside the presence of the gendarmerie, the recent French farmer protests look the sort of party anyone would want to attend: all-day barbecue with decent wine, fresh produce and a bit of a sing-song.
Dutch farmers have been street-partying like this for five years, albeit with less aplomb, given that their chief party trick is dumping manure near politicians.
Spanish farmers staged their own indignant fiestas late last year, and although not renowned for all-day raves, the Germans have also pimped their tractors for mass blockades. Belgian farmers were the first up in arms, marching on the European Parliament itself – but apparently so politely no one took much notice.
But European farmers appear to have won. Many of the pending new climate mitigation restrictions drawn up by the European Union countries for agriculture are being delayed or diluted. Few governments can stomach avoidable food price inflation just now.
But the underlying issue is a much older story: the economics of food, or rather, the difficulty of making food production economic at all.
The EU was formed partly because continental agriculture was struggling to so much as wash its face. Heaven knows, these farmers had been doing it for enough centuries to have the hang of it. But it seemed the more efficient modern trade and logistics became, the more outdated and inconvenient the food production part of the deal became. Some industrialisation improved efficiency – but not nearly enough to mitigate the ensuing social and environmental damage.
And however efficiently or otherwise Europe’s food was grown, transport, processing, storage and the myriad other overheads for getting it to market would have made it unthinkably expensive had farmers not received a subsidy drawn from other parts of the economy to compensate for their meagre returns.
This has always been a controversial trade-off, not least for New Zealand, which can hardly remember subsidies and guaranteed export market access.
For Europe, it’s been a case of trying to manage existing agricultural market distortions rather than risking creating new, less manageable ones. EU politics dictate consideration, too, for the cultural and heritage value of food production. Above all, people need to be able to afford to eat.
Climate change mitigation, however, has imperilled that delicate balance between managed inefficiency and food affordability. By some measures, net zero won’t be reached unless practically all European farming stops. That would likely hand more polluting countries Europe’s forsaken market share, setting the climate improvement dial back rather than forward.
And there’s the literally counterproductive effect of letting productive land lie fallow when the world faces the likelihood of a grave food shortage in coming decades.
That farmers are batting above their minority weight is partly down to the post-pandemic tendency for EU countries to consider greater self-sufficiency. Covid and now war-related shortages have come as a shock and farmers have benefited from a modern dig-for-victory sheen of virtue.
A rather more sinister knee-jerk is farmer militancy being cultivated by right-wing and nationalist activists. They conjure images of grasping foreigners marauding over honest sons and daughters of toil while oblivious Eurocrats generate ever more officious prohibition schedules.
More-centrist politicians are trying to head off this populism with a new focus on supermarket profit margins. Giant grocery chains remain plumply immune from the increasingly marginal existence of their food suppliers. Forcing them to share the misery of regulation and squeezed margins would be potent rival populism.
Whether aggrieved supermarket owners can beat the French farmers for exuberant street party blockades is another matter.
