Evidence that Parkinson’s, the fastest-growing neurodegenerative disease globally, may be linked to pesticides used in agriculture has been accumulating for decades. Yet, after finally appearing to take experts’ concerns seriously, EU authorisation bodies have failed to take meaningful action. An excerpt from Dirk de Bekker’s book Het pesticidenparadijs (“Pesticide Paradise”).

“If you are the CEO of Bayer, tossing and turning in bed at night, how can you justify this to yourself… Suppose that Roundup is the cause of Parkinson’s, how are you able to sleep soundly?”

It is 29 March 2022. Sitting opposite me is Bas Bloem, professor of neurology and an internationally renowned expert on Parkinson’s disease. He has just explained to me, speaking rapidly and in precisely formulated sentences, which processes in the brain are disrupted when someone develops Parkinson’s disease. Although he speaks fluently and barely pauses for breath, something changes in him from the moment the words “pesticides” and “glyphosate” are uttered. His gaze becomes more intense, his voice louder, and his sentences a fraction slower.

We are at the Parkinson’s Center of Expertise at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, in the southeast of the Netherlands. Here, scientists are working on treatments for a disease that does not yet have a cure. Current therapies, procedures, and medication are aimed at slowing down and alleviating the symptoms. Tremors, stiff movements, and difficulty speaking – those are what the general public is familiar with, but describing Parkinson’s as “that shaking disease” is incorrect, says Bloem. “The disease is like an iceberg.” Most symptoms – including depression, dementia, bowel dysfunction, sleep disorders, balance problems, loss of smell, and pain – are often just as serious but are hidden beneath the surface.¹

Most people with Parkinson’s experience many symptoms simultaneously. Often, new ones continue to develop and become increasingly severe. As a result, the disease is very disruptive – both physically and mentally – for patients and their loved ones.

Bloem is sounding the alarm. Parkinson’s is the fastest-growing neurodegenerative disease – not only in the Netherlands, where the number of cases has risen by 30 per cent over the last 10 years, but worldwide.² There are now approximately 12 million people globally with Parkinson’s. According to recent estimates, this figure will more than double by 2050 to 25 million.³

This explosive increase can be partly explained by age: Parkinson’s is more common at advanced ages, and the global population of older people is growing. Furthermore, average life expectancy is rising worldwide. However, even after adjusting for ageing, researchers are seeing rapid growth. So there is more to it than that.⁴

As early as the 1980s, there were strong scientific indications that exposure to pesticides was an important risk factor for the development of Parkinson’s disease. Over the past 10 years, the evidence supporting this has grown significantly.

For this reason, Bloem views Parkinson’s as a disease not primarily caused by ageing per se but by “all sorts of rubbish” in our environment. By this, he means pesticides and other hazardous substances. As people live longer, there is more time for them to be exposed to these substances. Furthermore, the disease often develops over decades before it manifests itself. As people live longer on average, this also means that accumulated neurological damage has a greater chance of becoming apparent.

As early as the 1980s, there were strong scientific indications that exposure to pesticides was an important risk factor for the development of Parkinson’s disease.

Growing concerns

A disease that is growing explosively, the increasingly clear link to pesticides, the fact that there is still no prospect of a cure – all of this is cause for concern. But Bloem’s full-blown alarm comes from somewhere else: a conversation he had at the Dutch Board for the Authorisation of Plant Protection Products and Biocides (the College voor de toelating van gewasbeschermingsmiddelen en biociden, Ctgb) in late 2020.

At his request, the Dutch authorisation body agreed to personally meet with him in November 2020 to explain step by step how the approval procedure for pesticides works. The meeting was intended to allay his concerns, but the opposite happened: he was struck with terror. “It was only then that I fully realised that we actually know nothing when it comes to the risk of Parkinson’s.”

During the presentation, Bloem was told that existing approval tests for the neurotoxicity of pesticides only examine external characteristics in laboratory animals. For example, do the animals move more slowly or display apathetic behaviour after coming into contact with a pesticide? “That is completely inadequate,” according to the neurologist. “It takes years for Parkinson’s to develop; you don’t immediately see anything on the outside. You therefore need to look inside the relevant areas of the brain: does the substance damage the substantia nigra?”

The substantia nigra (Latin for “black substance”) is the area of the brain where dopamine is produced. This chemical plays a key role in essential functions such as movement, memory and well-being. In people with Parkinson’s, the substantia nigra deteriorates, slowly but surely. It is only when 60 to 70 per cent of the substantia nigra has already been affected that the outward symptoms of Parkinson’s become noticeable. But by that point, the disease has already been long in the making. “You also need to know if, say, 40 per cent of the substantia nigra is destroyed and you can’t yet see anything externally. Currently, this is simply not tested.”

Bloem and his fellow neurologists are increasingly seeing patients in their clinics who report having been exposed to pesticides. They are not alone: more and more general practitioners and physiotherapists working in agriculture-intensive regions are also voicing concerns about the rising number of Parkinson’s cases they are seeing in their practices.⁵

^{The cover of Dirk de Bekker’s book Het pesticidenparadijs (“Pesticide Paradise”).}

“I recently had a woman with Parkinson’s at the outpatient clinic. She had just buried her husband, who also had Parkinson’s. In addition, six other people in her street had the disease. They live next to a field where small planes used to spray pesticides,” says Bloem.

Over the years that I have been publishing on pesticides, I have also regularly heard striking accounts from people with Parkinson’s who attribute their illness to pesticides. They mention having peeled bulbs for years, or working for the parks department with pesticide tanks on their backs and spray guns in their hands, or growing up on fruit farms where they played hide-and-seek in the orchards. I’ve also heard from people who have worked with pesticides for long periods of time in laboratories, in greenhouses, or on their own fields. Multiple members of a family are sometimes affected by the disease.

Puzzles and cocktails

The sheer frequency with which such personal anecdotes crop up is striking, although they prove nothing in themselves. But these stories do not stand alone.

A growing body of scientific studies shows that Parkinson’s disease occurs significantly more frequently among people living in areas of intensive cultivation. In France, for example, Parkinson’s is 8.5 per cent more common in the most intensive wine-growing regions compared to the national average.⁶ Consequently, the French government officially recognises Parkinson’s as an occupational disease among winegrowers.⁷ Studies in the United States and Canada, among other places, reveal the same pattern: in the examined regions, Parkinson’s disease is spread across the map like a patchwork quilt, and the areas with the most intensive farming practices – and the highest pesticide use – stand out most clearly in terms of the number of cases.⁸

It is virtually impossible to establish a definitive causal link in this type of “map-based study”. To do so would require a great deal of specific data: which substances were used, where and when? What is the residential history of the individuals who became sick in the area under investigation? What is their occupation? What did they eat? What is their genetic makeup? Are there other polluting activities in the area? The aim of such research is therefore not to establish or rule out an irrefutable causal link; it is about identifying a potential problem. In combination with other studies, the puzzle can then be pieced together more fully.

Although the scientific puzzle is not yet complete, the pieces that are already in place suggest that the explosive rise in Parkinson’s disease over the past decades can at least partly be attributed to exposure to pesticides. There is, for instance, a historical piece of the puzzle: the rapid post-war growth in Parkinson’s largely coincides with the period when pesticide use increased dramatically. In itself, this is not very convincing evidence, but together with the piece showing that the disease occurs more frequently in areas with intensive arable farming and high pesticide use, the picture changes. It becomes even clearer when you add the piece showing that farmers and gardeners in particular have a significantly increased risk of developing Parkinson’s.⁹

Therefore, contrary to what various agricultural organisations still regularly claim, the missing pieces of the puzzle do not so much lead to the question of whether a link exists, but rather to the question of exactly how strong that link is, and which specific substances are responsible. Scientists are also wondering whether there are substances that pose no risk individually, but can be dangerous in combination. This, in turn, raises other questions: what is the smartest way to investigate such “pesticide cocktails” without having to test an endless number of combinations? Are there genetic factors that increase the risk of harm following exposure to pesticides? Are there interactions between pesticides (or cocktails of pesticides) and other pollutants in the environment? And what is the situation with other neurodegenerative diseases, such as ALS and dementia, for which links to pesticides also exist?¹⁰

It has already been established that some specific pesticides, such as rotenone and paraquat, can damage the substantia nigra. This was not discovered during the official assessment of these pesticides but later in independent studies (and subsequently they were withdrawn from the European market). However, this type of research has not been carried out on the vast majority of substances, let alone for pesticide cocktails.

A recent large-scale study has found that trifluralin and tribufos, two pesticides frequently used in combination on cotton plantations in the United States, do not pose a proven risk for Parkinson’s when used individually. When used together, however, they prove to be highly damaging to dopamine-producing brain cells, suggesting that they can indeed cause Parkinson’s in combination.¹¹ This highlights the importance of taking pesticide cocktails into account in the authorisation process, and placing this topic high on the research agendas of independent scientists in relation to both Parkinson’s and other conditions.

Lack of action

According to Bloem, the way the risk of Parkinson’s is handled in the authorisation procedure violates the precautionary principle. “Given all these clear links, should we say that we are only going to ban this rubbish once it has been irrefutably proven that they cause Parkinson’s? Or, with all the evidence that already exists, should we say that we are only going to re-authorise the substances once it has been proven that they are safe? In reality, what happens is the former, meaning the burden of proof has been reversed.”¹²

The way the risk of Parkinson’s is handled in the authorisation procedure violates the precautionary principle. 

Bloem is not calling for an immediate ban on all pesticides. He does, however, advocate for subjecting the substances that are already authorised to a special Parkinson’s test as soon as possible. And as far as he is concerned, this should become standard practice when new pesticides are assessed. To this end, a testing procedure must be developed that makes it possible to look inside the brains of laboratory animals following prolonged exposure. There, it must be determined whether the substantia nigra has been damaged – for example, by counting the number of dopamine-producing cells. In the near future, it should be possible to carry out this procedure without subjecting animals to testing, by isolating the relevant cells outside their bodies.

The weedkiller glyphosate seems to be the most appropriate substance to first undergo testing for a link to Parkinson’s disease. It is by far the most widely used pesticide, and everyone is exposed to it to a greater or lesser extent. Moreover, several studies suggest a link between glyphosate and the development of Parkinson’s. The evidence, though far from conclusive, gives neurologists more than enough reason to be on alert.¹³ In addition, an increasing number of studies are emerging that show that even low doses of glyphosate can lead to disruptions in the gut flora.¹⁴ Such disruptions in the microbiome might – indirectly – increase the risk of Parkinson’s due to the communication between the gut and the brain. Researchers suspect that these disruptions could lead to a change in the structure of alpha-synuclein, a protein essential for communication between nerve cells. In mice, it has been established that this altered protein can reach the brain, where it subsequently damages the substantia nigra.¹⁵

Notably, the Dutch pesticide authority, the Ctgb, supported Bloem’s call for the speedy development of a Parkinson’s test. The November 2020 presentation was a wake-up call not only for the neurologist, but also for the Ctgb itself. This was evident in the fact that a few months later, in March 2021, the Ctgb wrote a letter to the agency responsible for pesticide risk assessment in the EU – the European Food Safety Authority, or EFSA – asking it to facilitate research into the development of an adequate testing procedure for Parkinson’s.¹⁶

The EFSA could not ignore this appeal by the Ctgb. Not only is it one of the leading national authorisation bodies with which the EFSA cooperates, but also, in its appeal, the Ctgb explicitly referred to Bloem – internationally renowned and known to frequently pop up in the international press to voice his concerns. Bloem’s message and extensive media reach have made many people in the pesticide world – from regulatory authorities to pesticide manufacturers – quite nervous.¹⁷

The EFSA responded just two weeks later with a proposal to organise a working conference “to take stock of the situation from a scientific and multidisciplinary point of view”.¹⁸ But over a year later, as I learned during my conversation at that time with Bloem at the Parkinson’s Centre of Expertise, that conference was yet to happen. Bloem could not contain his frustration. “How on earth do you explain to future generations – with a disease that is skyrocketing and an environmental role that seems so obvious – that we are not taking more decisive action?”

Breakthrough and disappointment

Six months later, however, on 8 September 2022, Bloem was again in high spirits. The conference that the neurologist had been pushing for over the past two years had finally taken place.¹⁹ In the presence of the EFSA and an international panel of experts, he was able to share his concerns about the authorisation procedure and Parkinson’s disease. And this had yielded results. All 49 attendees – experts affiliated with the EFSA as well as external research institutes and national authorisation bodies – reached an agreement. This is a rare occurrence among such a large group of international, often independent-minded experts. “There was broad consensus that the currently existing procedures […] offer an inadequate assessment of the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease in case of human exposure,” the minutes of the meeting state. The EFSA emphasised the urgent need to develop a new testing method that can actually provide insights into the risk of Parkinson’s. “A real breakthrough,” said Bloem. This was the first time that the EFSA had unconditionally acknowledged that the system it uses to assess pesticides was flawed.

The EFSA decided it would issue a call for tenders for a 3.5-million-euro contract aimed at the development of the required test. Specialised scientists were invited to submit bids.

The EFSA personally approached two Dutch research organisations with the request that they respond to this call: the Radboud University Medical Center (Bas Bloem’s employer) and RIVM, the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment. “That’s how strongly they felt about our case,” explained neurotoxicologist Harm Heusinkveld, who attended the conference on behalf of the RIVM. For years, toxicologists at the RIVM had also been worried about pesticides and Parkinson’s – concerns that were finally being taken seriously by the EFSA with this research call. ‘‘Afterwards, we thought: guys, something is really going to happen now.’’²⁰

This sense of urgency and enthusiasm felt by many researchers was heightened by the fact that the European re-evaluation of glyphosate was taking place at the same time. If the EFSA call for tenders were to be released quickly, there might still be an opportunity to use the weedkiller as the first case for the Parkinson’s test under development, perhaps even before the reassessment of the pesticide was completed.

Seven long months passed before the EFSA finally sent out the official Parkinson’s tender on 9 April 2023. But when he read the text, Bas Bloem immediately realised that something was wrong. “At the meeting, everyone was in complete agreement: we need to develop a good new testing method for pesticides and Parkinson’s. And then I read the call, in which the EFSA has made no money whatsoever available for such a new testing method. It was as if that conference had never taken place.” He lets out an audible sigh over the phone. His voice, so enthusiastic after the conference, is now filled with disbelief. Neurotoxicologist Harm Heusinkveld reacted with the same astonishment: “This is a huge mystery. I really haven’t the faintest idea how they arrived at this.”

The original intention was to develop a comprehensive Parkinson’s test in one go, based on the substantia nigra. But the promise made earlier by the EFSA to issue a research brief for this purpose was not fulfilled. The research brief set out in the call specifically concerned the development of a testing method focused on the mitochondria, the cell’s energy powerhouses. “But that test already exists, so you’d just be rehashing the same thing all over again. Besides, that test is far too limited,” commented Heusinkveld.

The Radboud University Medical Center and the RIVM were so taken aback by the research mandate that landed in their inboxes that they sent a joint letter on 17 July to EFSA Director Bernhard Url to express their disappointment. It is particularly noteworthy that a third party signed on to their objection: the Ctgb.

It is unusual for the Ctgb to hold a view that is at odds with an opinion of the EFSA. These two authorities, one working at the national level and the other at the European level, cooperate closely within the same legal framework. The letter, which came into my possession during an investigation into glyphosate for De Groene Amsterdammer, offers a rare glimpse behind the scenes.

“Specifically, we were disappointed as to what the call envisioned to achieve, considering […] the broad agreement that an ambitious and novel approach was required,” the three parties wrote. “We had the clear impression from the workshop that the EFSA had decided to move forward, but the recent call solely repeats steps that had already been taken earlier. […] The resulting testing strategy will not provide full insight in the potential of chemical substances to induce or progress [Parkinson’s disease].” In conclusion, the RIVM, the Radboud University Medical Center and the Ctgb stated that, “despite the explicit question and encouragement” from the EFSA, they would not be competing for funding for the proposed research.

A contested report

Four months later, in July 2023, the EFSA announced its recommendation to renew the authorisation for glyphosate for the maximum period of 15 years. Bloem was stunned, and he was not the only one. Scientists all over the world criticised the EFSA’s decision in a reaction that was unusually vocal for the scientific community.

Although during previous glyphosate authorisations the debate revolved primarily around the risk of cancer, this time concerns about Parkinson’s dominated. Ecotoxicologist Peter Leendertse succinctly summarised the essence of the many scientific comments on the re-authorisation: “If there are so many questions surrounding a substance, surely you cannot approve it for the maximum term? Extend it by two years if there is no other option, and in the meantime, ensure that you get clarity on the risk of Parkinson’s disease.”²¹

In an effort to calm tensions, the European Commission ultimately decided to reduce the maximum term from 15 to 10 years. As far as critics were concerned, this was little more than a token gesture. They pointed out that not only independent studies but also the EFSA’s own assessment report provided sufficient grounds for revoking the license altogether.

The glyphosate report runs to a total of 6,354 pages. What is striking is the large number of “data gaps” that are mentioned. The EFSA generally uses this term to indicate that knowledge is lacking and further research is required. Data gaps can thus influence the decision to grant authorisation and the potential duration of that authorisation.

The EFSA identified data gaps regarding the effects of glyphosate on gut flora, biodiversity and groundwater, amongst other things. However, none of these were considered “critical concerns”. That determination already made many scientists raise their eyebrows – but what the report says regarding Parkinson’s led to even greater surprise. There is no mention of a data gap anywhere in the passages on Parkinson’s disease, giving the impression that there is no lack of information on this topic whatsoever. On the contrary, the report’s conclusion is that current evidence “does not trigger a concern for parkinsonism”.²²

Although the EFSA acknowledged that risks of Parkinson’s could not be ruled out under the current authorisation procedure, the agency chose to ignore this conclusion in its glyphosate report.

“Absurd”, said ecotoxicologist Peter Leendertse. “Of course there is a huge data gap when it comes to Parkinson’s. Surely the report should mention that no reliable testing procedure exists. The findings of that conference are now simply being swept under the carpet.”

In short, although the EFSA itself acknowledged at the September 2022 conference that risks of Parkinson’s could not be ruled out under the current authorisation procedure, the agency chose to completely ignore this conclusion in its glyphosate report published the following summer.

The minutes of the September 2022 conference (which I obtained shortly afterwards) proving that the EFSA knows (and acknowledges) that a good Parkinson’s test does not exist have never been officially released. This is highly unusual – a considerable amount of information from comparable EFSA conferences is publicly available, ranging from advance announcements, participant names and meeting transcripts to complete video recordings. It is as if the much-heralded meeting in the late summer of 2022, attended by 49 international experts, including six EFSA staff members, never took place; as if the unequivocal conclusion regarding Parkinson’s was never reached.

Three EFSA staff members who attended the conference were also directly involved in the reassessment of glyphosate. Therefore, the assessors had first-hand knowledge of the discussions held during the conference regarding Parkinson’s disease and the lack of a sufficient test. Nevertheless, they did not include any of this in the dossier when the neurotoxicity of glyphosate was re-examined.

What makes the course of events even more peculiar is that during the re-assessment of glyphosate, the EFSA worked closely with the Ctgb. Alongside the national pesticide authorities of Hungary, Sweden and France, the Dutch authority was one of the responsible parties to which the assessment work had been outsourced. In other words, the Ctgb itself played a leading role in the decision to extend the authorisation for glyphosate for the maximum period. This is difficult to reconcile with the critical letters it sent to the EFSA during the same period: the first, dated 9 March 2022, requesting that EFSA Director Bernhard Url make room for research into a testing procedure for Parkinson’s disease, and a joint letter with the RIVM and Bas Bloem on 17 July 2023 complaining that the EFSA had broken its promise to make funds available for a Parkinson’s test.

It is as if there were two completely different Ctgb bodies. Whilst one was sending critical letters to the EFSA regarding Parkinson’s, the other was assisting the EFSA with the re-authorisation of glyphosate without raising any critical objections to the fact that the substance has not been tested for a link to Parkinson’s – even though such testing might be more urgent for glyphosate than for any other European-authorised pesticide.

The missing test

In a formal response to my questions, the Ctgb stated that a “very extensive data package” was available during the re-evaluation of glyphosate, containing “many more studies than merely the required ones”, including epidemiological research. While there may not be an adequate test to rule out Parkinson’s, said the Ctgb, the assessors decided that there was no cause for concern after studying a great deal of other supplementary information. “That is something different from being able to establish this with scientific certainty,” the Ctgb concluded.

The EFSA in turn denies that the conclusion regarding Parkinson’s disease reached at the conference has ever been its official position. The meeting was “merely informative” and should only be seen as “preparatory exchanges” for subsequent future tenders, the agency informed me shortly after the publication of the glyphosate report. EFSA also stressed that the assessment of glyphosate was carried out entirely “in line with the current legal framework”.

When I published the outcomes of the conference in De Groene Amsterdammer in September 2023, I received an angry email from the EFSA. The September 2022 meeting had not been a real “conference” at all, the message said, but merely a “procurement meeting”. And the outcomes of that meeting, the EFSA communications department emphasised once again, in no way represented the official position of the EFSA. “It’s a pity,” the email concluded, “[that you] decided to provide an angle which does not factually represent reality”.  

This reaction did not surprise me. By making information from the meeting minutes and the Ctgb’s letter to the EFSA public through my publication, the European pesticide authority was left exposed. After all, these documents prove that what the EFSA publicly states about Parkinson’s disease does not correspond with its own behind-the-scenes views on the matter.

What the EFSA publicly states about Parkinson’s disease does not correspond with its own behind-the-scenes views on the matter

The fact that the EFSA has neither publicly disclosed the conference’s conclusions nor included them in its assessment of glyphosate is, I suspect, essentially a legal strategy. If, following the conference, the EFSA had officially acknowledged that there is a gaping hole in the authorisation system, this would have provided the necessary ammunition for parties seeking to obstruct pesticide use. Invoking the precautionary principle in court is much easier if the shortcomings of the authorisation procedure regarding Parkinson’s disease are officially documented by EFSA itself. In that case, EFSA would be admitting that the risk of Parkinson’s disease “cannot be determined with sufficient certainty”, one of the basic conditions for invoking the precautionary principle.²³

Due to the lack of a Parkinson’s test, the risk of the disease cannot be completely ruled out in connection with any authorised pesticide. Officially acknowledging this on the record could throw the authorisation system – and with it the entire pesticide industry and the world of agriculture – into chaos. This would also happen if the EFSA were to officially acknowledge that the pesticide models it uses were not developed in a neutral manner.²⁴

When Bloem and the Ctgb sat down together in November 2020, both the neurologist and the pesticide authority realised that the authorisation procedure was flawed with respect to Parkinson’s. Three to five years: that would be the time needed to develop an adequate testing protocol, thought Bloem. “I think we need to do this together as soon as possible,” confirmed the then director of the Ctgb, Ingrid Becks-Vermeer, emphasising the need for a Parkinson’s test when I questioned her in 2022. She envisioned a development process lasting “a number of years”.²⁵

More than five years have passed since Bloem’s meeting with the Ctgb, and the EFSA conference took place three and a half years ago. The authorisation system still does not include a Parkinson’s test. Legally speaking, the EFSA may be able to defend this situation. The question, however, is how long they can keep up their defence in a society increasingly confronted with Parkinson’s disease.

This article is a lightly edited translation from Het pesticidenparadijs (“Pesticide Paradise”), an investigative book by Dirk de Bekker on the hidden world of pesticides, published by De Arbeiderspers in the Netherlands in January 2026.

1. Over the past few years, I have interviewed Bas Bloem on several occasions. Parts of these interviews have previously appeared in publications such as the podcast Red de Lente and the Dutch periodical De Groene Amsterdammer. See for example: De Bekker, D., et al. (24 January 2023). “Parkinson en pesticiden” [Parkinson’s and pesticides]. Red de Lente, season 2, episode 3. De Bekker, D. (25 September 2023). “De gezondheidsrisico’s van glyfosaat” [The health risks of glyphosate]. De Groene Amsterdammer. In this text, I draw on all the conversations held. Where necessary, I mention the date on which these conversations took place in the main text. ︎
2. Van der Gaag, B.L., Hepp, D.H., Hoff, J.I., Van Hilten, J.J., Darweesh, S.K.L., Bloem, B.R., and Van den Berg, W.D.J. (8 September 2023). “Risicofactoren voor de ziekte van Parkinson” [Risk factors for Parkinson’s disease]. Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde, 167. ︎
3. Su, D., Cui, Y., He, C., Yin, P., Bai, R., Zhu, J., Lam, J.S.T., Zhang, J., Yan, R., Zheng, X., Wu, J., Zhao, D., Wang, A., Zhou, M., and Feng, T. (2025). “Projections for prevalence of Parkinson’s disease and its driving factors in 195 countries and territories to 2050. Modelling study of Global Burden of Disease Study 2021.” BMJ, 388e080952. ︎
4. See for example: Bloem, B.R., Hoff, J., Sherer, T., Okun, M.S., Dorsey, R. (2021). “De parkinsonpandemie: Een recept voor actie” [The Parkinson’s pandemic: a call to action]. Poiesz Publishers. ︎
5. Opten, N., Wildenborg, F., Bolwerk, P. (2023). ‘Hoe het gifspook door de Betuwe waart. “Aan hun manier van lopen kun je zien dat ze het ook hebben.”’ [‘How the poison spectre haunts the Betuwe: “You can tell by the way they walk that they have it too.”’]. De Gelderlander. 3 November. 
   Folkerts, N. (23 July 2025). “Bestrijdingsmiddelen zorgen voor onrust in Drentse dorpen: ‘Op één dag zag ik vijf patiënten met parkinson’” [“Pesticides cause unrest in Drenthe villages: ‘In one day I saw five patients with Parkinson’s.’’]. Trouw. ︎
6. Kab, S., Spinosi, J., Chaperon, L., Dugravot, A., Singh-Manoux, A., Moisan, F., and Elbaz, A. (2017). “Agricultural activities and the incidence of Parkinson’s Disease in the general French population”. European Journal of Epidemiology, 32(3), pp. 203-216. ︎
7. Within the EU, in addition to France, Italy – and more recently Germany – also recognise Parkinson’s as an occupational disease. ︎
8. Barbeau, A., Roy, M., Bernier, G., Campanella, G., and Paris, S. (1987). “Ecogenetics of Parkinson’s Disease. Prevalence and environmental aspects in rural areas”. Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences/Journal Canadien des Sciences Neurologiques, 14(1), pp. 36-41.
   Hugh-Jones, M.E., Peele, R.H., and Wilson, V.L. (2020). “Parkinson’s Disease in Louisiana, 1999-2012. Based on hospital primary discharge diagnoses, incidence, and risk in relation to local agricultural crops, pesticides, and aquifer recharge”. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(5), 1584.
   Li, S., Ritz, B., Gong, Y., Cockburn, M., Folle, A.D., Del Rosario, I., Yu, Y., Zhang, K., Castro, E., Keener, A.M., Bronstein, J., and Paul, K.C. (2023). “Proximity to residential and workplace pesticides application and the risk of progression of Parkinson’s diseases in Central California”. The Science of the Total Environment, 864, 160851.
   After Het pesticidenparadijs was published,a Dutch study appeared showing regional clustering of Parkinson’s in the Netherlands, but no clear overlap with intensive arable farming areas was found. Although pesticide use and exposure were not taken into account, the authors suggested that the Dutch regional disparities “are not readily explained by known environmental indicators, warranting further investigation”. See: Simões, M., Peters, S., Huss, A., Darweesh, S. K., Bloem, B. R., & Vermeulen, R. (2026). “Incidence and spatial variation of Parkinson’s disease in the Netherlands (2017–2022): a population-based study”. The Lancet Regional Health – Europe, 62, 101565. ︎
9. Elbaz, A., Clavel, J., Rathouz, P.J., Moisan, F., Galanaud, J., Delemotte, B., Alpérovitch, A., and Tzourio, C. (2009). “Professional exposure to pesticides and Parkinson Disease”. Annals of Neurology, 66(4), pp. 494-504. ︎
10. See for example: Meerman, J.J., Wolterink, G., Hessel, E.V., De Jong, E., and Heusinkveld, H.J. (2022). “Neurodegeneration in a regulatory context: The need for speed”. Current Opinion in Toxicology, 33, 100383. ︎
11. Paul, K.C., Krolewski, R.C., Moreno, E.L., Blank, J., Holton, K.M., Ahfeldt, T., Furlong, M., Yu, Y., Cockburn, M., Thompson, L.K., Kreymerman, A., Ricci-Blair, E.M., Li, Y.J., Patel, H.B., Lee, R.T., Bronstein, J., Rubin, L.L., Khurana, V., and Ritz, B. (2023). “A pesticide and ipsc dopaminergic neuron screen identifies and classifies Parkinson-relevant pesticides”. Nature Communications, 14(2803). ︎
12. For more background information on this ruling, see: Darweesh, S.K.L., Vermeulen, R.C.H., and Bloem, B.R. (2024). “Paraquat and Parkinson’s Disease. Has the burden of proof shifted?”. International Journal of Epidemiology, 53(5). ︎
13. See for example: Bloem, B.R., and Boonstra, T.A. (2023). “The inadequacy of current pesticide regulations for protecting brain health. The case of glyphosate and Parkinson’s Disease”. The Lancet Planetary Health, 7(12), pp. e948-e949. ︎
14. Lehman, P.C., Cady, N., Ghimire, S., Shahi, S.K., Shrode, R.L., Lehmler, H., and Mangalam, A.K. (2023). “Low-dose glyphosate exposure alters gut microbiota composition and modulates gut homeostasis”. Environmental Toxicology and Pharmacology, 100, 104149.
    Matsuzaki, R., Gunnigle, E., Geissen, V., Clarke, G., Nagpal, J., and Cryan, J.F. (2023). “Pesticide exposure and the microbiota-gut-brain axis”. The ISME Journal, 17(8), pp. 1153-1166.
    Puigbò, P., Leino, L.I., Rainio, M.J., Saikkonen, K., Saloniemi, I., and Helander, M. (2022). “Does glyphosate affect the human microbiota?”. Life, 12(5). ︎
15. Singh, Y., Trautwein, C., Romani, J., Salker, M.S., Neckel, P.H., Fraccaroli, I., Abeditashi, M., Woerner, N., Admard, J., Dhariwal, A., Dueholm, M.K.D., Schäfer, K., Lang, F., Otzen, D.E., Lashuel, H.A., Riess, O., and Casadei, N. (2023). “Overexpression of human alpha-Synuclein leads to dysregulated microbiome/metabolites with ageing in a rat model of Parkinson disease”. Molecular Neurodegeneration, 18(1).
    Silva, B.A., Breydo, L., Fink, A.L., and Uversky, V.N. (2012). “Agrochemicals, a-Synuclein, and Parkinson’s Disease”. Molecular Neurobiology, 47(2), pp. 598-612.
    Uversky, V.N., Li, J., Bower, K., and Fink, A.L. (2002). “Synergistic effects of pesticides and metals on the fibrillation of a-Synuclein. Implications for Parkinson’s Disease”. NeuroToxicology, 23(4-5), pp. 527-536. ︎
16. De Leeuw, J.F. (9 March 2021). Subject: possible relation between the use of specific pesticides and the development of Parkinson’s Disease. Ctgb, reference number 202103090024. ︎
17. See for example: Brzeziński, B. (2025). “Parkinson’s is a man-made disease”. Politico. 14 April. Bloem, B., Boonstra, T. (11 October 2023). “Glyphosate: ‘En tant que médecins spécialistes des maladies neurodégénératives, nous avons trois conseils à donner au ministre de l’agriculture Marc Fesneau’” [“Glyphosate: ‘As doctors specialising in neurodegenerative diseases, we have three pieces of advice for the Minister for Agriculture, Marc Fesneau’”]. Le Monde. ︎
18. Url, B. (n.d.). Subject/Re.: Possible relation between the use of specific pesticides and the development of Parkinson’s Disease. EFSA, Ref. ic2021-24570142. Although the letter is undated, the upload date provided by the Ctgb (23 March 2021) suggests that it was probably received two weeks later (and in any case no later than that). ︎
19. The following reconstruction is partly a reworking of my earlier research article in De Groene Amsterdammer, which was published on 25 September 2023. ︎
20. Quote from: De Bekker, D. (25 September 2023). “The health risks of glyphosate”. De Groene Amsterdammer. ︎
21. Ibid. ︎
22. Álvarez, F., et al. (2023). “Peer review of the pesticide risk assessment of the active substance glyphosate”. EFSA Journal, 21(7), paragraph 9. EFSA. (July 2023). Peer Review Report on Glyphosate, Part 3 of 6, p. 163. ︎
23. Commission Communication on the precautionary principle (2 February 2000), Document 52000dC0001, p. 3. ︎
24. Elsewhere in the book, I write about the pesticide models that are currently in use to calculate the distribution of pesticides through the environment. I conclude that these models, which form the basis of the authorisation system, were developed in close cooperation with the pesticide industry. ︎
25. Quoted from: De Bekker, D., et al. (5 June 2022). “The director of the Ctgb responds”. Red de Lente, season 1, episode 8. ︎

In one of Italy’s most industrialised farming regions, a new approach to agriculture is slowly emerging. Some farmers in the Po Valley have begun to reverse decades of reliance on monoculture and chemical fertilisers, choosing instead to rewild fields, rotate crops, and leave parts of the land for hedgerows. But can this regenerative way of farming – which has already shown promising results – be replicated on a broader scale in Europe?  

Right in the middle of the Po Valley, a green streak suddenly breaks the square geometry of the fields. As we enter, we are catapulted into a tangle of bushes, trails, wetlands, lakes and canals. There’s a profusion of animals that you wouldn’t expect to encounter in these parts: roe deer, herons, woodpeckers, frogs, and even a herd of white Camargue horses, roaming through the tall grass.

Some Camargue horses roaming free in the Simbiosi nature area. ©Michele Lapini

We are in Giussago, Pavia, 18 kilometres as the crow flies from the Duomo of Milan. Right here, planted in the heart of the most built-up and anthropised plain in Europe, a new form of coexistence between farming and nature is being tested. Here, where the land is scarred by monoculture and the air is filled with the acrid odour of intensive livestock farming, where the agricultural focus is maximum productivity, someone has decided to turn that logic on its head: return land to nature, and allow the earth to breathe again.

This place is called Simbiosi (“Symbiosis”), and it was born from a simple but radical idea: returning to the ecosystem what intensive farming has taken from it. It is neither a park nor a nature reserve, but rather a new agricultural model, one that departs precisely from the productivist assumptions that dominate the plain. Every intervention is designed to restore equilibrium: the canals follow the ancient course of the waters, hedgerows mark the edges of the fields like in the old days, the wetlands once again hold rainwater and host amphibian life and migratory birds.

“Simbiosi was born almost by chance,” says Piero Manzoni, manager and CEO of the company that bears the project’s name, specialising in the efficient and sustainable use of natural resources. It was his father-in-law, Giuseppe Natta, who envisioned, built from scratch, and developed this place.  The year was 1995. He imagined recreating, in his own 500-hectare estate, the habitat of the valley as it had been one thousand years ago.

Ecological memory and regeneration

Led by the intuition and the ingenuity of Natta – whose father Giulio won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1963 – the project involved Italian and Dutch universities. “The transformation could not be limited to merely aesthetic or scenic modification,” explains Manzoni. “It required a scientific approach, capable of restoring the territory’s original structure.” The Universities of Milan and Pavia in Italy helped to reconstruct the ecological memory of the Po Valley, and how the territory looked before the rush towards productivity and development. The University of Wageningen in the Netherlands – among the most advanced in the world when it comes to agricultural science and environmental planning – led the next stage: transforming the historic data and ecological maps into a genuine project of regeneration. “It was long, almost artisanal work, requiring us to rethink every detail, from soil drainage to tree species. But this was the only way we could restore authentic – as opposed to artificial – equilibrium to the land.”   

The rest, continues Manzoni, fell into place: during and after renaturalisation, the migratory birds began to reappear, as well as the wild animals. Everything the agricultural model of the valley had expelled came back. Manzoni recalls that only the roe deer and Camargue horses were artificially introduced, with an initial founder stock. All the other species settled in spontaneously. Within just a few years, the area had recorded a significant increase in biodiversity.  More than 220 species of birds have been counted, many of which return seasonally, following the natural rhythm of the territory.

A lake that is home to numerous species of birds within the Simbiosi nature area. ©Michele Lapini

The original 500 hectares were left in a state of naturalisation, without any further intervention. Then, a new model of regenerative agriculture was created, inspired by nature’s own regeneration processes.  At base, there was a fundamental decision: give up a part of the cultivable area – around 10 per cent – to the environmental margins – hedges, groves – that act as a filter, habitat, and natural protection. The result: healthier soil, cleaner production, improved biodiversity, and consequently, less reliance on pesticides and chemical fertilisers.

“The territory functions like an organism: every part is interdependent, every agricultural decision takes the surrounding ecological dynamics into account.” Thus, between a rice field and a poplar grove, you see frog-filled ponds, hedgerows populated by sparrows and swathes of grassland where white horses run free.

According to Manzoni, the 10 per cent left uncultivated is an investment. “This natural strip is our most effective defence. It protects the field from harmful insects and external contamination, creates a more stable microclimate and returns life to the land. But above all, it changes the way we think about farming: it is no longer a battle against nature, but an alliance.”

Piero Manzoni, CEO of Simbiosi. ©Michele Lapini

Agriculture as innovation

The result seems counterintuitive: by not farming the entire area, yields increase. According to Simbiosi’s estimates, they achieve better results with 90 per cent of their productive area than those who farm every square metre. The benefit, the manager adds, is not only in terms of production: a living soil holds more carbon, has better water filtration, and is therefore more resistant to drought. “And then there’s a value that cannot be quantified: beauty. That of a living, breathing landscape, a field that is no longer a factory, but an ecosystem.” 

Simbiosi is not intended as an isolated experiment, a solitary monad in a valley dominated by a totally different production model. The aim is to create community and spread knowledge. Thus, for some time now, 95 agricultural businesses in the area have joined this experiment and begun producing according to the example of the “mother farm”. Underlying the choice is an equation cited by the manager: you produce more while spending less and doing no harm to the environment. In the fields of Simbiosi and associated companies, the use of chemical fertilisers has been gradually reduced to the point of entirely disappearing from certain parcels of land. Even water consumption has fallen: the fields are only irrigated when necessary, thanks to the natural moisture of the soil and the increased capacity of the regenerated land to hold rainwater. 

Machinery inside Simbiosi’s start-up labs. ©Michele Lapini

With this systemic vision, Manzoni has tried to spark further synergies. In a restored farmstead in the middle of his property, Manzoni has created an Innovation Centre, where he hosts groups and startups that work in the same spirit. In the ample 3000-square-metre space, there are companies that experiment with new farming materials, technological solutions, circular energy models, zero-waste food chains, etc. These entities may have entirely different missions and backgrounds, but they are united by the idea that the land can be a laboratory for innovation, rather than a place from which value is extracted. Reducing waste, closing cycles, creating shared value – around these principles, the concept of smart land was born. The concept is illustrated by a model at the entrance to the Innovation Centre, which outlines the different sectors of intervention. “Smart land is smart because it reconfigures the relationship between soil, water energy and production, creating a model that imitates the workings of nature, not only in agriculture but also in other industries, connecting the entire territory,” concludes Manzoni.

At this point, the question is inevitable: can this experiment, begun 30 years ago in a little corner of the valley between Pavia and Milan, be replicated elsewhere? Could this model be deployed systematically, and help reverse the ruin caused by an agricultural model that seems increasingly at the end of the road?

View of the Simbiosi nature area. ©Michele Lapini

From monoculture to community

The Po Valley is a case study of a production system particularly hard-hit by the effects of climate change. In this context, Simbiosi has an important lesson to teach. You only have to travel a few kilometres from Giussago to see that the same old model still prevails: maize monoculture stretching as far as the eye can see, grown to feed factory-farmed livestock; single-variety orchards; vast swathes of rice fields. Over the last 40 years, such developments have radically transformed the Po Valley, and they have also been actively supported by the funding mechanisms of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Rewarding those who possess the most land, European subsidies have encouraged a gradual concentration of land ownership, as well as hyper-specialisation and production of single varieties.

Today, this system is in serious trouble. Costs are increasing, soil fertility is falling, the climate is rebelling, not to mention the supermarkets paying ever-lower prices for farming produce. Consequently, many farmers in the valley are asking themselves whether a different way of doing agriculture is possible, one based on a fresh relationship between town and country, and a closer rapport between those who produce the food and those who consume it. Daniele Bucci is one of these people. He likes to call himself a black sheep, “because I do the opposite of what everyone else is doing around here,” he says with a laugh. His story begins in Faenza, on the hills of Emilia-Romagna between the Lamone river and the Marzeno stream, where he has decided to reinterpret the family farming tradition in light of organic farming and a new relationship between product and consumption. 

The difference between Simbiosi (right) and the dominant agricultural model in the Po Valley. ©Michele Lapini

Almost ten years ago, Bucci created a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) project. The idea is simple: members pay a fee and are guaranteed a portion of the farm’s produce. One box every week for the whole year. In this way, they participate in productive operations and guarantee the producer a secure income at the start of the season. “It’s a way to escape contractual mechanisms in which the price is determined by distributors. And to regain our autonomy.”

The CSA model guarantees the farm a stable base, sufficiently solid to allow Bucci and his wife Sara Sansoni to try new directions. And today the pair have decided to go further, to imagine a project capable of turning the traditional production paradigm on its head. In a farmhouse with five hectares of land that they acquired on the Faenza hills, they have launched a regenerative agriculture initiative. At Podere Roncona, ten minutes by car from Faenza, they planted rows of different tree varieties, which are placed at a distance from each other, both to allow them to breathe and to guarantee the necessary space for egg-laying hens that will be left to roam, with a sort of mobile henhouse. “Their droppings will serve to enrich the soil, re-establishing the intimate link between agriculture and animal husbandry that existed for 10,000 years, and has only recently been broken.” They then planted a vegetable garden and ancient tree varieties. Their approach is holistic: alternating fruit trees and vegetables, hedges and pastures, creates a living mosaic that challenges the dictates of industrial agriculture as it has been conceived over the last forty years.

“The production model has encouraged specialisation: one variety, one species. But historically,” insists the farmer, “agriculture has always been about connecting diverse elements.” From the top of the farmhouse, Bucci and Sansoni show me the extent of their estate and the projects underway. “I still remember when my grandfather gave away the last cow, because it was no longer worth keeping.” This is no mere nostalgic detail: Bucci dreams of returning cows to pasture in the land that borders his property, which he would like to rent. The aim is to build a community of intentions and activities, transcending the verticality of the classic farming business, and giving shape to a shared enterprise. “I want to create a more horizontal community, with various farming and cultural activities, and with the direct participation of the community in the project.”

Daniele Bucci, owner of the Podere Roncona farm in Faenza, Emilia-Romagna. ©Michele Lapini

This horizontal community already exists in embryonic form: the active members of the CSA, who Bucci will involve in the new project starting in Spring, along with others from the agricultural sector whom he hopes to bring on board and turn the farm into a genuinely multi-functional operation. Bucci also insists that farming of this type produces essential ecosystem services – regenerating the soil, preserving rural areas otherwise doomed to desertion, and generating widespread environmental benefits – but that these services are not yet recognised by the funding mechanisms of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). His project has only been possible thanks to winning a tender offered by Ecosia, a Berlin-based company that finances climate-action initiatives, as well as support from Slow Food for planting some of the trees. A structural question remains, however: how can an alternative agricultural model that genuinely rewards large-scale regeneration be constructed?

Back to the future

Today, many are asking themselves the same thing, as well as two related questions: in what direction is European farming headed? And how much space will be given to regenerative models in future agricultural policies? On the one hand, these practices are gaining more ground in an increasing number of countries. On the other, they still face a fundamental obstacle: there are no widely agreed-upon evaluation criteria, no officially recognised measurement tools, and – most importantly – no adequate economic reward for the ecosystem benefits they deliver. In other words, regenerative agriculture produces value for the soil, the climate, water, and the local community, but this value is not yet accounted for or rewarded in any systematic way.

The picture is even more complex when we consider the current debate on the next cycle of the Common Agricultural Policy. The widely feared cuts to the CAP for the 2028-2034 period, combined with the need to introduce much stricter environmental criteria for allocating funds, represent a major challenge. For many observers, Europe is at a crossroads: either it decides to steer investments towards genuinely sustainable models, or it risks further consolidating agricultural systems that are already in trouble. It’s no surprise, then, that there are working groups, informal networks, and authentic alliances working to build a critical mass. They talk with the institutions, gather comparable data, and lobby to make regeneration a priority of the new CAP.

Aerial view of Podere Roncona in the hills above Faenza. ©Michele Lapini

Bucci is an active member of one of these groups: the European Alliance for Regenerative Agriculture (EARA), an independent platform that brings together pioneering farmers from across Europe. The aim of EARA is two-fold: precisely measure the impacts of regenerative practices; and persuade policymakers that these practices deserve structural investment. The report they published in June 2025 is a good illustration of their activity. The study, which looks at dozens of farms in 14 European countries, has produced data that leaves little room for doubt: between 2020 and 2023, chemical inputs plummeted – synthetic fertiliser use fell by 62 per cent and pesticide use by 76 per cent — with no loss in yield. In fact, when productivity is measured using their “Regenerating Full Productivity” indicator – which factors in not only the quantity produced but also soil ecological quality, water-use efficiency, and energy required to farm – regenerative systems outperformed conventional models by 33 per cent

This is a genuine revolution, given that regenerative agriculture is often perceived as a return to the past or as a “poor” practice. Instead, the data shows an increase in climate resilience, a growth in plant diversity by more than 15 per cent, and a drop in surface temperatures in the fields during the summer, which signify a more balanced ecological functioning.

In Italy the potential for this transition is enormous, all the more so when the point of departure is so critical. According to a recent study by Re Soil Foundation, 80 per cent of agricultural land shows clear signs of erosion, and, in many cases, the organic substance does not exceed one per cent: a level that indicates exhausted soil. The Po Valley, the agricultural heart of the country, is one of the most vulnerable territories, trapped for decades in a model of hyper-specialisation that has privileged quantity at the expense of ecological quality. Monocultures, deep tillage and dependence on chemical inputs have gradually impoverished the natural capital on which agricultural productivity was based.

In this context, which many call “agricultural desertification,” the first cracks are beginning to appear in the dominant narrative. There is a growing number of farms – large and small, traditional and innovative – that are choosing to experiment with techniques such as minimum tillage, agroforestry, complex rotations and organic fertility management. What Bucci calls the “black sheep”, the farmers who veer off the beaten path of linear production, are becoming less and less isolated. Some of these projects, such as Simbiosi or Podere Roncona, are becoming veritable living laboratories: places where an agricultural model can be tested, one that is capable of returning life to the soil while also generating stable income, new social relations and a new balance between production and territory.

From this frontier, Italian and European agriculture may find a new beginning: not from what remains of the old model, but from what is already emerging as a possible alternative.

Stefano Liberti is a 2025 Bertha Challenge Fellow. This is the last article in a four-part investigation coordinated by Internazionale with the support of the Bertha Challenge fellowship. The Italian version of this article is published by Internazionale.

 Translated by Ciaran Lawless | Voxeurop

Once the motor and binding force of European integration, the CAP has become a tool for standardisation that showers large farms with subsidies and punishes those that practise sustainable agriculture. This is particularly evident in the Po Valley, Italy’s breadbasket, where the mantra of productivity at all costs clashes with the impact of both climate change and urban sprawl. 

“If you really want to understand what is happening in the Po Valley, or at least part of what is happening, you should come to me.” Giuseppe Trecate doesn’t talk much, but when he does, he gets straight to the point. I meet him in February, among the tractors that were gathered to protest against the European Union. The valley is in turmoil: the farmers, at their breaking point, have decided to take action. Under the banner of Riscatto agricolo (Agricultural Redemption), they organise roadblocks and drive their farm vehicles through the cities. They have surrounded the headquarters of the Lombardy Regional Council on several occasions, demanding to be heard. 

So, what exactly is happening? How is it possible that the breadbasket of Italy, the most productive agricultural area in the country, is in crisis? According to a press release, “if things go on like this, 30 per cent of farms will close by next year.” Which farms are they talking about? And where does the data come from? 

These are the questions that cause me to travel across the plain, which appears uniform at first glance but hides subtle differences, unique stories and diverse experiences within its folds.  

Giuseppe Trecate’s farmstead is the first stop on this journey. It is located in Lomellina, on the extreme south-western border of the gigantic Po basin. Nestled between the provinces of Pavia and Novara, never knowing whether it belongs to Piedmont or Lombardy, it is an area overflowing with water, with rice being produced here for centuries.  

To reach the Trecate farm, you have to leave behind the straight roads that cross the plain like rulers, abandon the safety of road signs, and rely on ditches, field boundaries and remembered names that no longer appear on maps. Satellite navigation is useless here: it leads you along routes that end in a canal, or in the middle of a rice field. That’s why Giuseppe prefers to pick me up at Novara station. “That way you won’t risk taking a dip,” he jokes. 

He arrives in a pick-up that says a lot about its owner: the bodywork covered in scratches, the lingering smell of hay and diesel, the flatbed bearing the marks of a thousand days in the fields. Even Giuseppe’s worn-out baseball cap and dry handshake convey the same message: a straightforward man, no frills, more comfortable with practical matters than words. 

Giuseppe’s farm is not a farm in the traditional sense of the word. It is more like a living organism. There are courtyards that smell of dust and mud, corners filled with iron scrap and bolts, a workshop that looks like an alchemist’s laboratory. And then there’s the silence of the countryside, interrupted only by the cries of herons and the gurgling of water flowing through the canals. 

Giuseppe sows rice as they did in the old days: by flooding the fields. No dry cultivation, as almost everyone does now. “It’s more laborious,” he explains, “because you have to drive the tractor into the water. But it uses fewer chemicals. Water is a natural weedkiller.” 

The next morning, at dawn, Giuseppe takes me with him to sow. The slanting light of the rising sun reflects off the water covering the fields. Giuseppe loads a sack of seeds onto the back of the tracked tractor, drives into the flooded field and moves forward in a straight line. From behind, the machine throws the rice grains into the air like tiny sparkling arcs. “Once upon a time, you needed two men with two poles, one at each end of the field, to make sure you were going straight. Today, GPS is enough.” 

Number of agricultural holdings in Italy (2000-2020):

Giuseppe does not use water from the reclamation consortium for this process, but rather spring water that rises naturally from the aquifer. Very few people still use this method, which is more laborious due to the necessity of constantly maintaining the canals. “But then in 2022,” Giuseppe reflects, “when there was a drought, we had water and our colleagues were dry.” 

Giuseppe takes me to see an embankment. He points it out with restrained pride, like someone showing off a family heirloom. This is no ordinary embankment, but a collective construction: Giuseppe and four other farmers – “the last madmen in the area who use the springs” – built it with their own hands. They brought large boulders from the Alps by lorry and used them to reinforce the embankments at the outlet of the aquifer, which was in danger of being buried by mud. “We spent twenty thousand euros on it, but it was worth it.” When I ask him why they didn’t build a concrete embankment, he looks at me as if I’d said a dirty word. “Because it was ugly. I don’t want ugliness where I live.” 

Conservation Agriculture 

Between Giuseppe’s plots of land – his farm covers over a hundred hectares, which is average for this area – there is a forest. A real forest, not the usual ornamental rows of trees found at roundabouts. It seems almost out of place in this endless plain, where trees are seen as intruders, obstacles to be removed. Other farmers would probably have cut it down, ploughed it, levelled it, perhaps planted maize right up to the edge. Instead, he takes care of that wood. He enters it slowly, as if entering a church. “There are badgers, wild rabbits…” he says. “There’s even a pair of little bitterns.” 

“Little bitterns?” I ask.  

“Go and see what they are on the internet”, he replies like someone keeping a secret.  

There is no glyphosate at the edges of his fields. There is no catalogue perfection. There are weeds, but there are also wings: wings that migrate, return and nest. There are frogs, salamanders, sounds that are no longer heard in the neighbouring fields due to everything being perfectly weeded. Smooth. Silent. Odourless. 

We walk between the furrows and see other farmers on their tractors. Engines running, they sow in dry conditions, on well-ploughed fields. It is fast, efficient and clean. Giuseppe watches them without judgement. “If you intensify, you work less,” he says. “But I want to leave my son land that is at least as fertile as the land my father left me. I may be old-fashioned, but conservation farming is the one for me.” 

Giuseppe lets wild grasses grow along the edges of his fields, he uses groundwater and tends to a forest that he sees not as a hindrance but as a treasure. He wants his farm to remain a living ecosystem, not a sterile expanse governed solely by the logic of yield. This is a way of doing things he learned from his father, and which he instinctively carries on. For Giuseppe, cultivating the land also means protecting it.   

“Do you earn any more with conservation farming?” I ask. 

“Zero. Not a single penny.” No one pays him for his services to the ecosystem: the biodiversity he protects, the aquifer he cares for, the soil he regenerates. He could request subsidies from the European Union, as part of the so-called environmental eco-schemes. “But there’s too much paperwork, and besides, I think this way of farming should be part of our job. We should just do it. The gentlemen in Brussels don’t have to tell us.” 

Like all tractor drivers, Giuseppe hates the European Union. He says that every year there is a new acronym to learn, a new form to fill in, a map to redraw. He argues that the suits who work for the Commission have no idea how to cultivate the land, and that the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) – the subsidy mechanism through which the EU supports agriculture – is a flawed system that should be dismantled. 

Giuseppe does not call himself an agricultural business-owner, but rather a direct grower. He doesn’t run a business with operating margins, business plans or three-year projections. Every year, he does his accounting his own way, by simply looking at his bank statement. That’s where he finds the numbers that really matter. “When things go well, I take home twenty thousand euro,” he says without any sign of resentment. That is the economic value of his work: twenty thousand euro for 365 days of work, on a farm of over one hundred hectares. 

Giuseppe’s rice – grown in spring water, cultivated with minimal chemicals and a great deal of patience – is not worth much on the market. Not because it is not high quality, but because the price is set by others. The arrival of Asian rice, which costs significantly less, has lowered the bar, and then there are the rice mills and large retailers, which squeeze margins to the bone. 

“Once upon a time,” recalls Giuseppe, “it was divided up like this: one third went to the producer, one third to the industrial processor, one third to the distributor.” Today, the producer is left with barely 10 per cent: enough to cover sowing, fuel and maintenance. His existence is a searing paradox: it is not the fruits of Giuseppe’s labour that keep him going, but European subsidies. He detests the EU, but survives thanks to the CAP, which guarantees him around 300 euro per hectare through so-called direct payments. 

For Giuseppe, it’s all wrong: “We’ve created a world of freeloaders who produce no value and try to grab subsidies in whatever way they can.” And so agriculture is on its knees. Only the largest farms survive, those that can manage economies of scale. Since the CAP pays by area, the more hectares you have, the more money you have. And the more money you have, the more chance you have of buying more land.  

Giuseppe is a rare breed, and he knows it. He continues to grow rice the way it was done in the old days, even though it pays very little. But around him and throughout the plain, the landscape is changing. Small and medium-sized farmers are disappearing. Many are giving up, selling to large businesses or energy multinationals that replace agricultural fields with expanses of solar panels. According to the latest census data, the number of farms in Italy has more than halved in the last twenty years. This is a generalised change in the country’s landscape, more marked in the hills and mountains, but now also affecting the most productive areas of the plains.  

The responsibility of the CAP 

“At the root of this development lies a history of poor choices,” declares Franco Sotte, a professor of agricultural economics who has devoted his life to studying the CAP. Since retiring, he has lived in a small villa on the outskirts of Pesaro, where he cultivates a small orchard in his garden: ancient apple varieties, forgotten pears, cherry trees saved from oblivion.  

Walking among the trees, which he describes with such affection that they might be his children, he reconstructs the history of the Common Agricultural Policy. “The CAP played a fundamental role in the birth and consolidation of the European Union. For decades, it was the only truly common policy. And its merits are undeniable: in just a few years, it guaranteed food security for a continent emerging from war and famine.” Then, over time, it changed. What was supposed to be a lifeline turned into a tool of standardisation, rewarding quantity over quality, land area over history, large farms over small ones.  

The hardest hit is the kind of agriculture that concentrates more labour into smaller plots, producing high-quality, high added value goods. This is what is happening in Italy, a country that carries little weight in Europe in terms of hectares, but leads in agricultural employment and value created per unit of land. “One study has estimated that if funds were allocated not just based on hectares but also employment and the number of farms, Italy should have received – and should still receive – about 46 per cent more resources.” 

The result, Sotte notes, is a system that has prompted many to “cultivate the subsidy” rather than the field. “The truth is that CAP subsidies are like a drug,” he says. “Especially when taken for many years, they are addictive and dampen the entrepreneurial spirit. Instead of innovating, diversifying and upgrading, people grow accustomed to receiving support.” 

“We tried to become the Holland, Germany, or France of wheat and milk,” Sotte adds, “forgotting that we were the country of a thousand vegetable gardens, vineyards climbing the hills, figs, aubergines, basil and oil. A fragile but precious mosaic, which over the years has been levelled and converted into an open-air assembly line.” 

Sotte insists that agriculture isn’t just about production; it’s also about preserving landscapes, biodiversity, and communities. “We’ve abandoned the hinterlands and prioritised vast expanses.” 

Today, the system is showing cracks even in its beating heart, the Po Valley. Not only because CAP subsidies are dwindling, but because that agricultural model, built on the idea of maximum productivity, is now hitting its structural limits. 

Climate hotspot 

Agriculture in this region also has to contend with an increasingly unstable climate. The Po Valley, a naturally flood-prone plain, is particularly vulnerable to atmospheric shocks. Sudden hailstorms destroy crops, while invasive insects attack plants that are already weakened. Drought alternates with torrential rains that wipe out weeks of work in a matter of hours. In Emilia-Romagna, the pear sector, which was once the pride of the region, has dwindled to the bare minimum: production has fallen by 70 per cent in ten years. Peaches have suffered the same fate. 

Since 2021, the region has experienced two years of intense drought and several floods, including those that devastated Romagna in May 2023. 

From her farm in Boncellino, in the province of Ravenna, Maria Gordini experienced the disaster first-hand. Just turned 70, she recounts what happened by her orchard, which is still buried in mud. “At first, it seemed like a normal storm. We’re used to them here. When it rains, we stay inside and wait.” But this time it was different. The Lamone River, flowing just a hundred metres away, burst its banks. The water rose quickly. Maria and her husband helped their son and daughter-in-law, who live with them, get the children to the upper floor. Rescue services were already tied up: in Ravenna, Faenza, all of Romagna. They waited for four long hours, which they spent playing games and drawing to keep the children from panicking. Finally, a small motorboat – “the swamp boat,” Maria calls it – took them to safety. Her son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren chose to relocate, and never returned. Maria and her husband stayed. 

In the months that followed, they were hit by two more floods: another cyclone just two weeks later, and then again in October 2024. On both occasions, they managed to escape in time; the warning system had worked. When they returned, however, they found their house gutted and the fields covered in mud. Maria shows us her devastated orchard: fallen tree trunks, brushwood everywhere. Maria tells us of her apple trees, planted one by one, supported by old wooden poles, and uprooted by the fury of the deluge.  

Common Agricultural Policy (2021 – 2027): main beneficiaries.

Today, Maria is still here, removing the mud by hand, waiting for a clean-up that she cannot afford and that should be the state’s responsibility. Maria doesn’t cry when she talks about the destruction, but she comes close when I ask her if she has the strength to replant. She insists that she does, but the fatigue, the weight of age, is evident. 

Maria is one among thousands: one voice among many, symbolising a wider tragedy. The flood that submerged Romagna destroyed crops, fields and lives. It caused fourteen deaths, and it reminded us that, under the blows of climate change, those with fewer resources pay the highest price. 

The ugliest landscape in the world 

Floods and droughts don’t come out of the blue. Arriving from afar, driven by a changing climate, they find a vulnerable body here in the Po valley, an organism with no defences. “We’ve made fields as sterile as sheet metal, all identical, incapable of retaining, breathing, or mediating between heaven and earth,” says Duccio Caccioni, agronomist and director of marketing and quality at the Bologna Agri-Food Centre (CAAB). “We’ve transformed the Po Valley into the ugliest landscape in the world.” 

Today, the Po Valley – which was once a succession of marshes, floodplain forests, rice fields and canals – increasingly resembles a mechanical desert, where water, when it arrives, finds nothing to welcome it. It flows, it destroys, and it overwhelms. Or it simply does not arrive, in which case everything crumbles, stops and becomes barren. 

Caccioni rattles off figures that clearly illustrate the process. “Over the last sixty years, Italy has not only lost many hectares of cultivated land: it has lost its landscape. In 1960, crops covered 20.9 million hectares; today, only 12.4 million remain. Eight and a half million hectares have disappeared, representing an area equal to Lombardy, Piedmont and Sicily combined. Of these, 1.3 million – the size of the whole of Campania – have literally been covered with concrete.”  

Behind these figures lies the metamorphosis of a space. The plains have been invaded by urban sprawl: following the US model, city suburbs have stretched into the countryside, and industrial warehouses, shopping centres and logistics hubs have colonised every free space. Meanwhile, agricultural spaces have become standardised: the lowlands have been turned into large monocultures of maize to feed the intensive livestock farming system. Land on mountains and hills has been gradually abandoned. “Today, Italy seems to move along two parallel planes. Below: overpopulated, polluted, chaotic territories; and above: depopulated mountains and hills, uncultivated fields, abandoned villages.” And this abandonment leads to fragility. “Inexorably, those unguarded mountains, those neglected territories, are collapsing. There’s an urgent need to repopulate them, to ensure that CAP subsidies do not reward large surfaces at the expense of the heroic agriculture of the mountain areas, the small farmers who guard the territory.” 

Beer against hornets 

Gianni Fagnoli is one of these mountain heroes, and one of the few who remain. Wearing a Metallica T-shirt, walking slowly, with a calm gaze, he is not a hermit, but a man who has chosen solitude as a matter of consistency. For years he worked as a porter, living in a warehouse and waking up at dawn. In 2015, he decided to leave everything behind. He found refuge in Rocca San Casciano, in the Apennines, an hour’s drive along winding roads from Forlì. 

It may be only three hectares, but Gianni treats it like a sacred garden. Hundreds of trees of ancient varieties, protected using traditional methods, such as bottles filled with beer hung from the branches to attract and stun hornets. A small but loyal clientele supports his work, attracted by his radical vision: “My fruit is not just zero kilometre, but zero day. You receive it on the same day I pick it.” 

Gianni gradually built up his business, and things were beginning to take off until the flood hit in 2023. Non-stop rain, landslides, streams bursting their banks. For two weeks, he couldn’t even get out to the field. When he was finally able to reach it, there was nothing left: his little Eden was buried in mud. But he didn’t give up: using his hands and a wheelbarrow, he replanted and rebuilt. Two years later, the trees are slowly starting to bloom again. But around him, the hills are emptying. Houses are closing, fields are being abandoned, friends are leaving. After the flood, a colleague from a nearby farm gave up everything and started working as a street cleaner. Gianni persevered, but he did so alone. 

The state provided no assistance: no compensation, no reimbursement. He received nothing from AgriCat, the national mutual fund created to compensate farmers affected by catastrophes. Satellites detected no standing water on his sloping land and rejected his request, as if there had been no flood. Gianni could only rebuild thanks to donations from his most loyal customers. And what about Europe? “Yeah,” he says with a bitter smile. “I get 1200 euros a year from the CAP. Plus 128 euros in compensation.” 

The paradox is striking. Gianni conserves biodiversity, supports a territory, and propagates agricultural knowledge that is at risk of extinction, and yet he receives a paltry sum from the Common Agricultural Policy. This is a concrete example of what Professor Franco Sotte had told me: the CAP has become a mechanism that rewards land area rather than values. It favours those with large areas of land and penalises those who work on a few hectares and produce quality products. 

Gianni is the living embodiment of a stronghold, one that holds firm against landslides, market pressures, and the indifference of institutions. Through stubborn determination, one farmer shows just how fragile – yet vital – the agriculture sidelined by the CAP truly is. 

In this plain that was once productive and is now gasping for breath, the Common Agricultural Policy is showing cracks. European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen announced in Brussels a 20 per cent reduction in overall funding for the CAP for 2028-2034. There is also the intention to give national governments more leeway to decide on the disbursement of funds.

In this plain that was once productive and is now gasping for breath, the Common Agricultural Policy is showing cracks. There is talk of reducing it by 20 per cent, and having national governments manage it. “This would be a disaster,” Sotte explains. “We would have 27 different agricultural systems competing with each other. But there’s no doubt the CAP needs reform, and the current model isn’t working. It’s crumbling due to its inability to keep up with the times and the inadequacy of the institutions and organisations tasked with implementing it.” 

The CAP, with its 386.6 billion euros for the 2021-2027 period, represents 29 per cent of the European budget. But the distribution of subsidies is highly unfair: 20 per cent of beneficiaries currently receive 80 per cent of the contributions. Those with more land receive more funds. This encourages land concentration, with large farms swallowing up small ones. Across Europe, and in Italy too. According to data from the National Institute of Statistics, the number of agricultural holdings in Italy halved from 2000 to 2020. 

As Brussels debates the future of European agriculture, the Po Valley remains immense yet weary. On the surface, it may appear eternal, but inside it bears the marks of disease: farms closing, orchards swept away by water, the desertion of the surrounding hills. Yet, amidst this wounded landscape, there are still men and women who resist: Giuseppe with his flooded fields sown as they were in the old days; Maria defending the memory of her submerged orchard; Gianni rebuilding his hill piece by piece. 

They make no fuss, they have no lobbies, they have no electoral influence; but they show that another kind of agriculture is possible, with the right support. But without an adequate political framework, these are likely to remain isolated stories. 

“We are hearing the last warning cry of a farming culture that is dying out,” says agronomist Duccio Caccioni. For Caccioni, the crisis is not cyclical, but systemic: “A change of direction is essential, otherwise the loss will be twofold: cultural and environmental wealth on the one hand, and our food sovereignty on the other.” 

So the question remains: will the CAP of the future open its eyes to this crisis and change course, or will it continue to support a model that risks engulfing itself?  

Stefano Liberti is a 2025 Bertha Challenge Fellow. This is the third article in a four-part investigation coordinated by Internazionale with the support of the Bertha Challenge fellowship. The Italian version of this article is published by Internazionale. 

 Translated by Ciaran Lawless | Voxeurop 

In recent years, the European Union and its member states have introduced measures to protect farmers from the unfair practices of large-scale retailers. But in Italy, as in the rest of the European single market, the reality remains one of reckless bargaining and a value chain that funnels wealth upwards, leaving exploited farmers scrambling to stay afloat.

In the back of a large agricultural warehouse, amidst loaded pallets, moving forklifts and empty crates stacked against the walls, Carmine* receives us in a small, bare-walled office lit by a cold neon light. Carmine is the chief operating officer of a company that produces and markets fruit and vegetables. As we talk, he opens a drawer and pulls out a thick folder full of papers and contracts.

“In here we have the framework agreement that we signed with a large retail chain,” he says, flipping through the pages from memory, like one who knows every comma of every clause. He stops at a line highlighted in yellow. “See, 10 per cent invoice discount. It’s there in black and white.”

He says this with a tone that wavers between resignation and matter-of-factness. The figure, he explains, is the “ristorno”, or rebate: a portion of the turnover that agricultural suppliers have to return to the large-scale retail trade (Grande Distribuzione Organizzata, GDO) at the end of the year. Officially, the rebate is justified as a contribution for flyers, advertising, logistical support, or the opening of new stores. But for people in the industry the meaning is far more straightforward: “that 10 per cent is the tribute you pay to work with them. To get access to their shelves. If you don’t accept it, you’re out.”

This practice is not the exception, but rather the firmly established rule, which everyone knows about but never openly denounces. “On average it’s 10 per cent, but there are chains that demand 12, 13, even 14 per cent. It depends on your bargaining power.”

The ristorno is the hidden margin deducted by the large-scale retail trade at the end of the season. And it’s only the tip of the iceberg. What Carmine shows us is the hidden face of the relationship between large retail chains and those who work the land: an opaque system consisting of forced discounts, unilaterally determined scrap rates, digital bargaining systems to get the lowest price, impossible delivery schedules, and relentless inspections that can invalidate entire shipments for the most trivial reasons.

The result is that farms are now on their last legs. Margins are shrinking, costs are rising, and in many areas – even those that have always been highly suited to agriculture – farms are starting to close down. This investigation is the result of months of work that included dozens of interviews conducted throughout the Po Valley, in particular the large fruit and vegetable district of Emilia-Romagna and Veneto, where there are producers and cooperatives that also buy produce from other parts of Italy, and sign contracts with retail chains.

Today, in these once fruitful lands, the climate has changed. Not just because of the increasingly extreme weather, but also because the numbers have stopped adding up. Many younger people have given up on taking over the family business. Others resist, but they often find themselves at a crossroads. “Sometimes you ask yourself if it wouldn’t be better to just leave the fruit on the tree rather than harvest it at a loss”, confides a producer with 40 years of farming behind him. 

Everyone talks in whispers. Everyone requests anonymity. Obtaining interviews, in this environment, means first and foremost listening and reassuring. Confidentiality is a necessary condition. It’s not just fear: it’s a question of survival. In a system where a simple email can be enough to lose a contract, raising your voice can put you out of business.

Structural windfall

Behind the orderly crates of peaches and courgettes, behind the neat and tidy supermarket shelves, there hides a reality of uneven bargaining, forced compromise and slashed margins, where those who work the land are often the lowest link in a chain that only moves wealth upwards.

Not even the consumer benefits from this tight and often cut-throat bargaining. The so-called ristorno gives them no advantage. The price at which the product is sold comes from a given price list, and is not the producer’s discounted price. The citizen, in short, pays as if there were no discount. And so the circle is closed. The producer, already beaten down by rising costs and suffocating demands, accepts the discount to avoid being locked out of the system. The consumer, ignorant of these dynamics, continues to pay the full price. And at the top, large-scale retailers earn a net profit, which many in the sector do not hesitate to define as a “structural windfall” – a systematic gain created from a power imbalance.

“It’s a system that only moves value upwards”, says Carmine, closing the folder. “The agricultural side of things has become an accounting anomaly, an underpaid supplier who is always under pressure. But as long as the fruit arrives and looks good on the shelves, no one asks any questions.” 

Millions changing pockets

Carmine’s company draws a six-figure turnover with large-scale retail trade. Applying the 10 per cent rebate to this sum, as well as the turnover of thousands of other suppliers, a mountain of money passes every year from the pockets of the producers to those of the retail chains. 

This is not some marginal deviation or aggressive commercial strategy practiced by only the most unscrupulous chains. The “entry tax” for a seat with the major distributors is the general rule, grudgingly accepted by all the producers interviewed. Every contract we had a chance to view included it, from low-cost chains like Eurospin and MD, to more traditional chains like Conad and Carrefour.

“The rebate is not up for discussion”, confirm all the operators. “At most you might manage to negotiate one or two percentage points, but all the brands use it,” says Carmine. “We always have to take into account this 10 per cent deducted at the end of the year. And the numbers don’t always add up.”

A law with no teeth 

Carmine’s claims are backed up by a recent report by Italy’s Institute of Services for the Agricultural and Food Market (ISMEA), the public body that monitors the prices of agricultural products. According to the report, out of every 100 euro spent by the consumer, only 7 end up in the hands of the farmer as net profit. “Logistics and distributors now take the largest cut of the final value”, the ISMEA report states. “The agricultural stage, on the other hand, continues to be penalised.”   

Precisely in order to rebalance this distortion in the market, in 2019 the European Union approved a directive against unfair commercial practices in the agri-food sector. The directive introduced two lists: a black list, which bans certain practices outright, and a grey list, which allows specific practices only when formalised in writing. Among the practices that are banned outright are last-minute cancellations of orders of perishable goods, and the unilateral modification of contracts. However, many of the most common demands of the large-scale retail trade are greylisted, and these are now legal when formally recognised. And thus the mechanism continues to function as before.   

In 2021, Italy implemented the European directive with law 198, and took it even further: the law bans electronic reverse auctions and below-cost sales, and entrusts the supervision of compliance to the Central Inspectorate of Quality Protection and Fraud Repression (ICQRF), a body of the Ministry of Agriculture, which can also receive anonymous complaints. Progress, in theory, but an illusion in practice.

“The devil is in the details,” declares the director of another fruit and vegetable company. “These practices that increase our hardship, such as the ristorno or compulsory promotions, are on the grey list. So for now we are not only forced to accept them, but we also have to sign contracts that enshrine their legitimacy. It’s even worse than that: we are self-certifying the reduction of our profits.”

The disproportionate relationship between the damage incurred by agriculture and the efficacy of the regulatory response can also be seen in the numbers. Lawyer Gualtiero Roveda, an expert in agri-food law, puts it in severe terms: “the European directive and law 198 that implements it are a band-aid for the mortally wounded.” You only have to look at the numbers: according to ICQRF data, between 2023 and 2024 the penalties imposed for unfair practices amounted to a total of just 665,000 euros. “A laughable figure”, says the lawyer, “when compared to losses estimated at more than 350 million euros per year for the entire Italian agricultural and food supply chain.”

Speaking of the mortally wounded, agricultural businesses are gasping for breath. Sometimes they change crops, and sometimes they simply shut down. “Every year hundreds of farmers decide to give up because they’re in the red,” explains Roveda. According to an investigation conducted among farmers by Agri 2000 Net, an agricultural services company, 30,000 farms are at risk of closure in Emilia-Romagna alone. The majority of those surveyed said that poor profitability was the reason they would consider shutting down.

“To break this vicious circle, there needs to be intervention in the asymmetrical relationship between agriculture and retail distribution,”continues Roveda. “Those who produce are in a position of weakness. They are fragmented, and often have little voice in the capital. The retail chains are in a position to impose one-sided conditions. And now they can do it with perfectly legal practices.”

Retail chains are in a position to impose one-sided conditions. And now they can do it with perfectly legal practices.

A silent bloodbath

In the silence of his office, amidst files and folders full of documents, Mirko – director of a large fruit and vegetable company – greets us with a dry gesture and shows us a chart. It is a simple but ruthless diagram illustrating the development of peach and nectarine production between 2006 and 2024.

“Look here”, he says, pointing to the figures. “In Emilia-Romagna we’ve lost 70 per cent of the cultivated land and 69 per cent of the quantity produced. In Veneto it’s even worse: minus 73 per cent of the cultivated land, and minus 69 per cent of the quantity produced.” He rests his head against the back of his chair, as if to catch his breath. “There was a silent bloodbath. And there was just one reason: we couldn’t get adequate prices. In the end, many ended up ditching the farm because they couldn’t make a living.”

Mirko takes a blank sheet of paper and draws a kind of freehand profit and loss table. “Let’s say that in the supermarket a peach is sold for two euros per kilo. At that point I have to set a selling price of one euro per kilo. But that euro is the gross price, from which I have to subtract everything: transport, processing, packaging. And also the compulsory 10 per cent ristorno for the GDO.” Then he stops and lowers his gaze. “At the end of the chain, if all goes well, the farmer is left with 30 cents. From two euros.” Finally, he adds, almost to himself: “and with those 30 cents we have to run a farm.”

Global market, local losses

When we buy a peach, a head of lettuce, or a bunch of grapes at the supermarket, we rarely ask ourselves where it comes from, who grew it, picked it, sorted it, and with what margins. The agri-food supply chain is long and fragmented, with several invisible but crucial steps. The product starts in the field and arrives, in most cases, at a cooperative or producers’ organisation. There it is packaged, selected for size and quality, and finally offered to large retailers. It is the cooperative or producers’ organisation that sits at the negotiating table with the GDO.

“Price negotiation takes place online, and sometimes it is settled by phone,” says Guido, director of a large cooperative in the Emilia-Romagna region. “There are several levels: first there are negotiations with the national retail chains, then the regional buyers may want to reopen negotiations. It is a process of continual renegotiation.” The price lists are normally weekly, but they can also change three times in a single week, depending on the season and product line. “The price is determined by the market,” he adds. “But in this market, those who sell are almost always in a position of weakness. Especially when it’s fresh products that perish quickly. Those who have the power to stock or reject these goods also have the power to dictate conditions.”

The “market”, moreover, has to be understood in the global sense, because Italian supermarkets don’t only buy from Italian producers. “Sometimes they can call us to say that the Spanish product costs less. Or the Greeks are offering a consignment at a lower price. The message is clear: either you accept these conditions, or you’re off the shelf.” It’s a subtle but continual form of pressure, which fundamentally undermines the principle of reciprocity that should regulate commercial relations.

Dumping on the European scale

In some cases, the game is even more sophisticated. A legal but economically and socially devastating international dumping mechanism is created. “An Italian brand might call a Spanish supplier for a promotion on peaches,” Mirko explains. “The Spaniard gladly accepts, because an increase in demand in Italy allows him to raise prices on the German or French markets. The price in Italy, on the other hand, goes down.” The result? The Italian producer, who in theory should be favoured in the domestic market, finds himself out of the game. Or he is forced to agree to prices that don’t even cover production costs.

“It’s all perfectly legal, even if deeply immoral”, he adds, showing a photo of a Eurospin fruit stand where Spanish peaches are being sold for 1.69 euros per kilo, exactly half the price of Italian peaches in the same supermarket. “The supply chain has become a European battlefield, but without any common rules. There are no limitations to cross-border procurement, nor instruments that offer genuine protection to producers.”

Thus, beneath the reassuring surface of shiny fruit displayed on supermarket stands, there hides a silent war made up of pressures, implicit extortion, and unequal negotiation. And those who grow the food we eat are often the weakest link in a chain that keeps getting longer, more complex, and more opaque.

Those who grow the food we eat are often the weakest link in a chain that keeps getting longer, more complex, and more opaque.

An overcrowded supply chain

“The disparity is in the numbers. For the 7000 people selling fruit and vegetables to the GDO, we have 25 retail chains. As a sector, we have our responsibilities too”, concludes Mirko. “If we were able to join up, to really come together, we would clearly have more contractual strength.”

But hyper-fragmentation also exists upstream. The retail chains also suffer from it, though in a different way. “There are too many points of sale,” says Mario Gasbarrino, the managing director of the Decò group, with years of experience with the upper echelons of large-scale retail trade. “In my view, at least 3000 supermarkets ought to close.”

Gasbarrino is not looking for shortcuts. He recognises the distortions in the supply chain, the questionable mechanisms, the continual pressures. The ristorno, he explains, “has always existed” in purchasing dynamics. Paradoxically, however, the practice has been dwindling for all products except fruit and vegetables, where it continues to grow. Gasbarrino also admits that the negotiations are often “muscular”. But the point, he says, is even larger. “We are in a deep crisis. Sales are falling, wages are stagnant. In this context, it’s a continual war, all against all. And when the horse won’t drink, there is nothing that can be done. It’s kill or be killed.” 

A brutal snapshot, but one that does not apply to everyone equally. Some large-scale retail chains are floundering: the French multinational Carrefour, after years in the red, is considering pulling out of Italy. Auchan, also a French company, left in 2019. Overall, however, the sector is holding strong, and even growing. This is confirmed by an analysis conducted by Area Studi Mediobanca: between 2019 and 2023, the largest retail chains recorded billions in profits. Eurospin leads the ranks with 1.56 billion euros, followed by VéGé (1.33 billion) and Selex (1.28 billion).

At this point, an unavoidable question arises: how much of these profits are derived from what Gasbarrino calls “muscular negotiations” with suppliers? How much extra margin has been snatched from an agricultural supply chain that is in increasingly dire condition, especially when it comes to perishable goods? On this point, Gasbarrino is clear. “Fresh fruit and vegetables are the most critical sector, and yet it’s all topsy-turvy. You plan promotions two months in advance, when you don’t even know if the products will be there. It’s absurd. Fresh products, by their very nature, should not be part of such promotional logic.” 

Promotions: a lose-lose game

“The promotions are a real disgrace”, confirms Walter from the other side of the barricade. Walter is a farmer in the Emilia-Romagna region with 30 years of experience and owner of a major fruit and vegetable company in the region. Sales, he explains, have become one of the most insidious traps in the supply chain. “They are no longer intended to get rid of excess produce, as they used to be. Now they are run by the supermarkets according to a logic of pure marketing, rather than agricultural considerations. They are only used to attract clients to the point of sale. And it’s us who pay the price.”

The concept of promotion has been turned on its head: from an instrument that supports the producer in times of surplus, it has become a commercial mechanism that serves the interests of the retailers. “If the retail chain decides that the apricots should go on sale for 1.29 euros per kilo, then you just have to accept it. And often you will have to sell below cost. No one asks about your margin. They only ask if you can deliver. And the response has to be yes.”

In the large warehouse of his farm, where the summer fruit season has just started, Walter moves between machines and automated production lines. The fruits are calibrated one by one, passing on rollers that measure their diameter to the last millimetre. “Each retail chain has its own specifications: there are those that only want peaches from 65 to 72 millimetres. 64 or 73 are no good. The market doesn’t want them. Even if they are perfect, even if they taste the same.”

After calibration, the fruits are sorted manually. Female workers watch the fruit pass one by one: one small blemish, one crack, and the fruit is rejected. “It’s called commercial waste, but in many cases it’s still good fruit. And it’s up to us to find a place for it elsewhere, perhaps in industry, at ridiculously low prices. Or just throw it away.”

But the real paradox, says Walter, comes later, at the packaging stage. “We can’t even choose who we work with. They impose their own choice of firms that we have to buy our trays, labels, and cartons from, even if they cost more than the market price, even if we pay them more than we’d pay if we arranged it all ourselves. It’s all imposed on us. And we know that a cut of these costs end up in the coffers of the retail chain, as a kind of guaranteed percentage.”

It’s a subtle but pervasive form of control. “We’ve become packers for third parties. They provide the specifications, choose the materials, dictate the schedule. Our autonomy stops at the orchard.”

And yet, Walter points out, all of this happens in total silence. “The consumer doesn’t know. All they see is a nice price. They don’t imagine that behind the 1.29-euro tray there are hours of work, kilos of discarded fruit, imposed materials, hidden mark-ups, and an agriculture sector that is increasingly struggling to survive.”

And so the producers continue to suffer in silence, hoping that circumstances in the market might swing to their favour. “If by chance there’s a shortage of produce, prices go up. At that point we too can adapt: we sink the knife into the butter. But we only get to handle this knife one week a year, if we’re lucky,” says Walter.

The non-compliance trick

Different area, same script. We are in the Bologna province, amid greenhouses and industrial warehouses converted for agricultural logistics. Corrado has been growing vegetables for three generations. His warehouse is abuzz: he is preparing pallets of lettuce to be loaded onto a truck bound for a large retailer. “90 per cent of my turnover depends on large-scale retail trade,” he says in a neutral tone, as if it were a simple fact and not some kind of complaint.

For Corrado too, the main problem is the asymmetry in the balance of power. “When we sign an agreement, for us it is law. For them, it’s a reversible option.” Corrado recounts a recent episode involving a contract that was closed through his cooperative with a large national retailer for 10 pallets of aubergines, with an agreed price of 60 cents per kilo. Nothing out of the ordinary. Until the buyer found another supplier willing to sell for 50 cents. “At that point he decided he no longer needed my product.”

And the contract? “He sent back seven pallets, on the grounds of non-compliance. It was just a pretext. The produce was perfect, we all knew it. But they can afford to behave like that. And we cannot.”

This behaviour is in fact one of the commercial practices blacklisted by law 198, which implements the European directive on unfair practices. In theory, Corrado was entitled to report everything to the ICQRF. But he didn’t do so. He didn’t even give it much thought.

“Do you remember Peron?” he asks, crossing his arms. Fortunato Peron, a well-known pear seller from the Cesena province, a few years ago reported the supermarket chain Coop Italia to the Antitrust Authority for breach of contract. He won. But after that, no one ever called him. “He went out of business. Cancelled. Our sector has a long memory and thin skin. If you go against the retailers, you’re finished.”

The paradox of the agri-food supply chain is this: those who grow the food, those who harvest it by hand, are the ones who earn the least. At the bottom of the chain, agricultural producers have become the weak link, crushed between rising costs and prices imposed from above. And so the system fuels a war between the lower ranks: the large cooperatives and producers’ organisations, under pressure from retailers, end up shifting the burden onto individual farmers, especially the smallest ones, who have no voice or bargaining power. Rebates, extra costs, lost earnings: it all flows downstream, where there’s no room to plan ahead. Then there’s the fact that accounts, in most cases, are settled at the end of the year, when it’s already too late.

If the producer falls, so does everything else.

The disaster accountant

We are in the middle of Romagna: the acrid smell of cut grass mingles with the sweeter smell of freshly picked peaches. Andrea is a young farmer, in his early thirties. After studying agriculture he chose to stay on the farm with his father. “I didn’t want to be a technician, I wanted to be a farmer. But today, more than a farmer, I’m a disaster accountant.”

He speaks calmly, with a firm voice, without a hint of self-pity. Like a man who realised long ago that the rules of the game are not his to design. “The problem is always this: the price. Every week the cooperative sends us the price list. And we accept it. There’s no alternative. What can we do, stop harvesting? The fruit ripens, and if it’s not picked it has to be tossed out. And tossing it out hurts even more.”

Of the large retailers, he knows only their reflection. “I’ve never seen a buyer. I don’t even know what they look like. We bring the products, they tell us if it’s alright. And then we wait for the transfer. And the rebate, which arrives later, is like a deferred tax. Sometimes they deduct the only margin we thought we had. It’s not a surprise any more, it’s a sentence foretold.”

When asked if he has ever thought of quitting, Andrea thinks for a moment. “I’ve never thought of giving up, but I have stopped fooling myself. My grandfather used to say that the land gives you everything you need. Today it only gives you survival. And without another income in the family, or a little luck, you go under.”

Then there’s a word that is often repeated among the producers: dignity. They hardly ever talk about profits, growth, or operating margins. They talk about staying afloat, about being able to work without being subjected to a fresh imposition every day. “All we ask is to be treated as a part of the supply chain, not as its servants”, says Andrea. “Because if the producer falls, so does everything else.”

*All the names of the agricultural producers interviewed have been changed at their request, and all identifying details have been omitted.

Stefano Liberti is a 2025 Bertha Challenge Fellow. This is the second article in a four-part investigation coordinated by Internazionale with the support of the Bertha Challenge fellowship. The Italian version of this article is published by Internazionale.

Translated by Ciarán Lawless | Voxeurop

One December morning in 2024, Bruno Carnevali received a registered letter from the representative of a Milan-based company he had never heard of. After introducing the company as “a leading operator in the renewable energy sector,” the letter stated that “through some property records research, we were able to verify that you own several plots totalling approximately 11,646 square meters listed in the land registry of the municipality of Rubiera,” in the province of Reggio Emilia. “These properties,” the text continued, “may be of interest to us, and we would therefore like the opportunity to contact you to discuss and evaluate a possible real estate transaction.” An email address and phone number were provided at the end of the letter.

Though he had no intention of selling the land on which his family had cultivated grapes for three generations, Carnevali was curious enough to call the mobile number included in the letter. An exceedingly polite representative confirmed that they were interested in buying his fields situated close to the motorway, in order to substitute the crops for solar panels. He also provided a price estimate. “We pay between 40 and 60 per cent more than the agricultural value. So we can guarantee a much higher profit than some other farmer or agricultural enterprise could offer you.” The vineyard, the representative explained, would have to be uprooted. Once permission had been obtained from the Ministry of Environment and Energy Security (MASE), the company would finalise the deed of sale, acquire the land, and install the panels.

Standing before his vines, where the first fruits are starting to appear, Carnevali is absolute. “The proposal is appealing from the economic point of view, but utterly unacceptable. You think I’d sell my land to some unknown company in Milan who would turn it into a solar farm? In my opinion, there’s a plan to convert the countryside into an expanse of panels controlled by big business. They profit from the agricultural crisis to empty the land of farmers.”

It’s difficult to say whether there’s any such plan or not. But what is certain is that there is indeed a rush to acquire or lease land for the installation of renewable energy plants. The rush is driven by the European Union’s decarbonisation goals – it requires 42.5 per cent of the bloc’s energy to be from renewable sources by 2030, and the EU to reach climate neutrality by 2050 – as well as the chance to earn generous revenues. After sweeping through southern Italy, the ground-mounted renewable energy boom is now spreading to the Po Valley, the vast, fertile plain in northern Italy where Carnevali’s vineyard is located. Various groups are on the hunt for land where they can substitute or supplement agricultural operations with energy production. 

“There are procurers working for companies that are set up overnight, who try to convince the farmers here to sell their land or grant a so-called surface right, namely using the field for the installation of panels,” says lawyer Meri Baraldi, who is handling some of these cases in the province of Modena, and working to defend farmers. “Often they sign contracts that are preliminaries of preliminaries, used only for presenting the request to the ministry. In many cases, these are intermediary companies, formed with the sole purpose of acquiring land and authorisation to then sell it to the big companies behind them.”

On the telephone with Carnevali, the company manager insisted that they “are not procurers” and that his company is the same one that will effectively construct the plant, indirectly confirming what the lawyer Baraldi had said. In response to the farmer’s question concerning the type of land they are looking for, the manager said: “Five hectares minimum. No maximum: the bigger the better.”

Energy by decree

The rush to place renewables on agricultural land began on a precise date: 8 November 2021, when the Draghi government issued the so-called energy decree, a piece of legislation designed to stimulate renewable energy production and meet the targets established by the European Commission. The decree establishes a set of subsidies for the construction of renewable energy production plants and gives the green light to a simplified authorisation procedure. It also declares that within 180 days from the decree’s approval, there would be “homogeneous principles and criteria for identifying eligible surfaces and areas for the installation of renewable energy plants.” 

The decree hit the bullseye: immediately after publication, requests to the Ministry of Environment multiplied. Energy transition had indeed been stimulated by the government. This political action caused a variety of actors to emerge, from traditional players in the energy sector to a plethora of companies created ad hoc to take advantage of the new golden goose. The result: as of today, the website of Terna (the system operator responsible for transmitting electricity across Italy) shows connection requests for new renewable energy plants totalling 355 gigawatts, more than four times the amount outlined in the Draghi decree based on European targets (which set a goal of 80 gigawatts by 2030). 

The greatest numbers are in regions like Sardinia, Sicily, and Puglia. But more recently, requests have also been growing in the Po Valley, especially in Emilia-Romagna, where planned connections stand at 10 gigawatts. In the province of Ferrara alone, there are requests for 4.55 gigawatts. And in the middle of this vast reclamation area stretching from the city to the sea, there is one municipality that appears to be the heart of this new solar boom: Argenta. 

“We have a record number of requests,” declares Andrea Panizza, president and founder of the TerrArgenta association, which was created with the intention of stimulating critical discussion around the development of land-based renewables in the municipality. “From the ministry website we can see that there are authorisation measures for 1000 hectares of land. The whole landscape is going to change.” Panizza recalls how he discovered by chance that for various plots of land, including one in front of a country house he had just purchased, there was interest in developing solar energy plants. “I found out from an article published in La Nuova Ferrara in March 2024. Immediately after reading it, I called the journalist and tried to get more information.” Together with other members of the association, Panizza created a map of plants that are authorised or in the process of being authorised, while also trying to expose the business interests behind those plants. “We are convinced that renewable energy is a major challenge for the future. But it has to be managed according to criteria that respect the environmental equilibrium, without compromising agricultural land use,” says Panizza.

The municipality of Argenta seems to have all its papers in order to become a veritable renewables hub: there is an enormous expanse of land and well-placed electrical substations, which means that plants can be developed at lower costs. It is no coincidence that there are 16 requests for as many plants spread across the municipality.

And it cannot be said that these requests won’t keep increasing. “My main worry each morning when I arrive at the town hall is whether new requests have appeared overnight,” says the mayor Andrea Baldini. Once the infrastructure for managing the energy is created, with a purpose-built electrical substation, as one of these projects envisions, it will be easier to install new plants, in a sort of cumulative process. 

Alarmed by the effects that expanses of panels could have on the landscape, Baldini joined a group of around 200 mayors who went as a delegation to Rome to request more power for local bodies to intervene. “The municipalities can share their assessments or negative opinions, but these are not binding,” he said In order to speed up procedures, the energy decree centralised the authorisation process, but also gave each region a mandate to define the so-called eligible areas. Yet the regions have not acted in a uniform manner: some have never ruled on the issue, while others have established restrictive regulations. Sardinia, for example, limited the eligible areas for wind and solar to one per cent of the regional territory. The Emilia-Romagna regional government gave its first approval of its own regulation on 13 May, providing an evaluation mechanism for the cumulative environmental impacts. The following day, however, the Regional Administrative Court of Lazio annulled the decree giving regions the power to identify eligible areas, claiming that it left them with excessive room for discretion. 

“The truth is that we as municipalities are swamped with requests and can do very little,” says Baldini. “We can ask for more compensation, but there is always a certain limit. And, even when we decide to oppose a certain plant that we judge will have an excessive impact, we do not have the financial resources to take legal action.”  

Land of conquest

But who is behind the boom? The majority of projects that are approved or under consideration in Argenta have been proposed by three large companies. A series of requests has been presented by the Enfinity group, which heads the US multinational Enfinity Global, headquartered in Miami. From its financial statements it emerges that the Italian subsidiary Enfinity Solare is wholly owned by EG Europe Holco BV, a company headquartered in the Netherlands which also appears to be linked to Enfinity Global.

Enfinity Solare has set up a series of Special Purpose Vehicles with which it has presented an array of requests for approval of renewable energy projects to MASE. That brings the total number of requests by the company in Italy to 84. In the territory of Argenta and in the neighbouring municipality of Portomaggiore it has launched seven projects, totalling 203 megawatts. Six of these have already been approved, while the authorisation of the seventh is pending with the ministry. As the company website declares, Italy is one of the key countries for Enfinity’s strategy. The company has just announced the issuance of bonds and the placement of a bond loan of up to 100 million euros through the French investment group Eiffel. These bonds follow in the wake of financing obtained in 2024 from banking institutions and other investment funds.

The second company is called Wood Italiana S.R.L. In Argenta this company has presented three projects through three Special Purpose Vehicles, for a total of 472 hectares. The headquarters of Wood Italiana are located in Corsico, in the province of Milan. It is linked to John Wood Group PLC, headquartered in Aberdeen, Scotland, and is described as a global company of engineers and consultants “on a mission to design the future of energy and materials.” The group is listed on the London Stock Exchange, where it has recently seen a considerable drop in value, falling from 200 pence to around 20. The cause appears to be an independent audit, following which the company expressed the need to make “significant changes to the balance sheets and profits of the last three financial years.” According to the company’s own announcement, negotiations are underway for its acquisition by Sidara, an engineering and project-design company headquartered in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.

According to a Chamber of Commerce certificate, Wood Italiana is in fact the property of FW Investment Holding S.A.R.L., an investment fund based in Luxembourg. Wood Italiana has a variety of projects underway in Italy, whether in solar or wind power. In Argenta, it has an approved project for 168 megawatts and another for 68 megawatts pending approval with the ministry. It has also presented a third project involving a 57-megawatt plant on 116 hectares in the locality of Consandolo, just behind a residential area, through a Special Purpose Vehicle called Newagro. In September 2024, however, it sold the project to another company, Exus Italia SRL. 

Exus is the third major company active in Argenta. Besides the Consandolo plant, it has presented a 24-megawatt project, paired with a 12-megawatt battery energy storage system (BESS). The latter seems to be the primary sector of Exus in Italy: the company has concluded agreements to build 800 megawatts of BESS in Puglia. Exus Italia S.R.L. is wholly owned by a company headquartered in Spain called Exus Renewable S.R.L. This group in turn is owned by the investment fund Partners Group, headquartered in Switzerland, with a portfolio of assets under management worth 152 billion US dollars.

“We have become a land of conquest for foreign investment funds,” comments Panizza. “We are surrendering our land, without a worry for the medium-term consequences.”

But why are multinationals and foreign investment funds so keen to invest in this sector? While these investments may guarantee very high returns, they require a sizable initial capital injection and therefore cannot be made by just anyone. For every megawatt of power, 700,000 euros is required. Thus, each of these plants requires many millions of euros. It’s all worth it in the end, however: at current energy prices, the initial investment is paid back within four or five years, while the plants last for at least 20 years. If you consider that each megawatt can also guarantee profits of 150,000 euros per year, and that the average power in projects presented to MASE is several dozen megawatts, you understand why these big financial players have jumped into the gold rush.

An emptier fruit basket

Was the Draghi decree of 2021 the only viable path to stimulate the much-needed energy transition? Paolo Pileri, professor of environmental planning at Milan Polytechnic, thinks otherwise. “Instead of encouraging the use of derelict, unused and abandoned areas to produce renewable energy, it was decided to favour the financial investors and their desire to produce energy while minimising costs and maximising profits,” he says. According to the professor, this will have a lasting and detrimental consequence: it will lead to further land consumption in a country that already holds the European record. “Not to mention another far from minor aspect: we are entrusting everything to the private sector. We have abandoned the idea that energy production could be publicly owned.”

Standing amidst the evocative frescoes of the council room of the Palazzo Naselli Crispi, a stone’s throw from the Castello Estense and the headquarters of the Consorzio di Bonifica Pianura di Ferrara (Ferrara Plain Reclamation Consortium, the body that supervises the management of water for agricultural use in the province), Stefano Calderoni is of the same opinion. President of the Consortium, and an agricultural business owner himself, Calderoni is also concerned by the rapid advance of these multinational energy companies. “By delegating a matter of public interest like energy to private entities, a significant speculative spiral has been created,” he says. The consequences could irreversibly aggravate an already severe agricultural crisis. “Today, we have actors that have caused such a significant distortion in the market that land is now inaccessible to anyone wishing to farm, particularly young people.”

The rush to acquire land for developing open-field renewables is facilitated precisely by this factor: the profitability crisis in agriculture. The offer received by Carnevali over the phone is not an exception: the purchase or lease prices offered by energy companies are considerably higher than market rates. This represents a significant incentive across Italy, even in a traditionally productive area like the Po Valley.

But this is precisely the point: here the land is not as productive as it once was. In Emilia-Romagna, once the heart of European fruit production, the crisis has been hitting hard for years. Climate instability, together with the arrival of new and aggressive parasites such as the brown marmorated stink bug, have led to a collapse in production: according to data presented by CSO Italy, an association of supply-chain stakeholders, between 2013 and 2024 the hectares of cultivated pears in Emilia-Romagna were practically halved, falling from 21,300 to 11,300. In the province of Ferrara alone, in the last five years the number fell from 8000 to 4000 hectares. The numbers are equally dramatic for peaches and nectarines. The vertical drop is caused not just by a consistent decrease in production, but also by the low prices paid by organised large-scale distribution.

Massimo Fabbri knows this all too well. His orchard is one of the few that remain in Argenta. His field, which encircles the house where he lives, is at risk of becoming like Asterix’s village. If a project presented by Enfinity receives the green light, the field will be completely surrounded by panels. “They also came to me to see if I was interested in giving up my land. But I have no intention of doing so.” Fabbri has managed to secure profits by changing his business model: he sells his own fruit directly to clients, without going through cooperatives or supermarkets. But he remains the only one in the area. Around him, there are swathes of arable land that will soon host large fields of solar panels.  

It is a kind of vicious circle: with agriculture generating barely any profit, farmers are pushed to give up their land to energy companies who create a land market bubble that renders agricultural work even less profitable. “Today the price of land is kept high precisely by this energy speculation,” explains Calderoni.

Agrivoltaics: A viable solution? 

In order to remedy this problem and lessen the potential competition between food and energy, in May 2024 the Italian government intervened with a regulation that bans ground-mounted photovoltaics in agricultural areas. In the so-called Agriculture Decree, it is established that panels cannot be placed on the ground unless they are positioned at a distance of less than 500 metres from an industrial area or 300 metres from a motorway. Otherwise, they must be placed in an elevated position so that agricultural activity can continue on the ground below. All the projects presented after the approval of the Agriculture Decree must be of the “agrivoltaic” type.

The intention is to create a “positive synergy” between energy and food production, as was emphasised in a meeting held in Ferrara on 19 May 2025 by Legambiente and the Navarra Foundation. “We must produce renewable energy in a significant way to combat climate change,” declared Angelo Gentili, national agriculture manager of the environmental association. “Not to mention that agrivoltaics can provide income support to an agriculture sector on its knees.”

The observation is not far-fetched: energy production can effectively guarantee profits for agricultural business owners in difficulty. But it is only fair to ask: is this genuine synergy? 

Given that so few plants have been built so far, it is difficult to understand how much farming activity can continue below the panels, and what kind of yields that activity might have. Studies produced by the Navarra Foundation, which is at the forefront of supporting developments in this direction, claim that agrivoltaics can also provide protection against elevated summer temperatures and hailstorms. 

But not everyone agrees with this analysis. “We should be more honest and simply say: in one part of the field I produce energy and in another I produce food,” says a farmer from the province of Pavia, who has requested authorisation to install a plant on his land. “Now the new legislation forces me to make it agrivoltaic, with an increase in costs. But I don’t really care about growing underneath. In the area where I put the panels, my business is energy.” The business owner prefers not to be named because “the topic is controversial and I don’t want to provoke any unwanted attention before concluding the authorisation process.” But he too poses the key question: “When my crops no longer guarantee an adequate income, what is the harm in producing energy instead of food?”

A few hundred kilometres away, on his farm right next to the motorway, Bruno Carnevali has a different view. As he walks around his vineyard and evaluates the grapes, which “started late this year due to frost,” he continues to shake his head. “I don’t want to see the Po Valley transformed into an expanse of panels. We have a duty: produce food and be custodians of the land. If we hand over our land to produce energy, what will we eat in the end?” 

Stefano Liberti is a 2025 Bertha Challenge Fellow. This is the first article in a four-part investigation coordinated by Internazionale with the support of the Bertha Challenge fellowship. 

The Italian version of this article is published by Internazionale.

Translated by Ciarán Lawless | Voxeurop

Declining crop yields due to climate change, economic hardship, bureaucratic hurdles – the material challenges European farmers face are well known. Yet the mental health toll of this state of uncertainty has so far remained largely overlooked. A cross-country investigation reveals the far-reaching nature of this mental health crisis and governments’ failure to address it. 

Tangled irrigation hoses stuck in the mud form a shapeless mass in some fields, others are strewn with stones. A heavy smell emanates from the canal. A goat carcass hangs from a tree. Everything looks out of place. 

“I’m in the worst psychological state I’ve ever been in. I feel insecure, and I have debts,” says 30-year-old Maria Vardouli, one of a handful of female farmers in Thessaly, central Greece, known as the country’s “breadbasket”. 

Vardouli hasn’t always been a farmer. She switched from physiotherapy in 2019, and has since been cultivating her father’s land, producing everything from legumes to spinach, industrial tomato, and cotton. Through a European program, she secured funding to invest in her business, on the condition that she must be employed exclusively in agriculture until 2027. 

What she couldn’t foresee was how last year would turn out. 

In September 2023, torrential rains hit central Greece, causing major flooding that submerged entire villages and destroyed crops and farm equipment. Almost 50,000 hectares have remained underwater since. Five months later, Vardouli’s fields were still covered in mud and debris.  

After the floods, she experienced extreme stress and psychosomatic disorders. She is not alone. Insomnia, nightmares involving water and rain, and a feeling of despair were reported by most interviewed farmers following the floods. 

Farms managed a little less than half (46.4 per cent) of the total land area of the EU in 2020, Eurostat says. As the impacts of climate change intensify across Europe, farmers are feeling the consequences.  

For eight months, a team of six journalists delved into the impacts of climate change on farmers’ mental health in Greece, Spain, Romania, Czechia, and Poland, countries facing heightened vulnerability to environmental shifts. Compared to their counterparts in Western and Northern Europe, these countries are less equipped to handle the growing challenges of climate change. 

Through interviews with over 50 farmers, as well as with mental health experts, climate specialists, and policymakers at both national and EU levels, and by analysing available data, the journalists pieced together a comprehensive picture. Their investigation unveiled a troubling reality: extreme weather patterns are taking a particularly devastating toll on farmers in Europe’s most vulnerable countries.  

And national governments seem unwilling to address this troubling reality.  

“Nobody can sustain this” 

The man strikes the tree hard with a stick while a machine shakes it, causing olives to fall onto a net spread on the ground. “It’s good for stress,” he says when he’s done.  

Ignacio Rojas, Nacho to friends, is a 46-year-old olive oil, cereal, and pistachio producer in Jaén, Andalusia. He manages Jaén’s international projects for COAG, the oldest professional agricultural organisation in Spain, and is a father to a seven-year-old.  

Surrounded by olive trees in the farm his family bought some eighty years ago, under an imposing sun that makes the autumn morning temperature reach 16 degrees Celsius, Ignacio explains the severe impact of dry winters over the past five years.  

Not being able to foresee what is going to happen can lead to frustration, ‘learned helplessness’, and depression in anyone.

“This year, I harvested only a third of my usual yield, which makes me anxious. I’ve tried to reduce water usage and mitigate bad harvests. So far, bank financing has helped, but I can’t endure another year like this.” 

He says that climate change is the cherry on top of the cake, “because it adds uncertainty to an already uncertain financial situation.” It made “something that we had already been suffering from into a structural issue,” he adds.  

“As olive growers, we have always dealt with a good harvest, followed by no harvest. Now, it turns out that we can’t produce for two years in a row, and it could soon be three. Nobody can sustain this,” says Ignacio.  

Spain’s useful agricultural surface (SAU) represents almost half of the territory. But 75 per cent of the country’s land is at risk of desertification due to a combination of irregular rains, a significant increase in temperature, and mistreatment of soils and forests. Many regions of Spain are also suffering from “water stress”. Together with Catalonia, the southern region of Andalusia is the one most affected by drought.  

Vanesa Pérez is a rural psychologist from Beas de Segura, also in Andalusia. She comes from a family of farmers, and so do most of her patients. She explains that, for them, no harvest or a storm can be an important stressor “that can enhance and accentuate the appearance of a mental disorder, an addiction.” 

“They feel useless, and incapable of supporting their family. Not being able to foresee what is going to happen can lead to frustration, ‘learned helplessness’, and depression in anyone,” underlines Pérez.  

Diana Ürge-Vorsatz, a professor of Environmental Science and Policy at Central European University (CEU) and Vice Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), confirms that worldwide the Mediterranean “is one of the biggest losers when it comes to climate change.” 

According to reports, the frequency and intensity of extreme phenomena in the region will increase the severity of mental issues. 

Not just the Mediterranean 

Across the five countries examined for this investigation, economic strains compounded by stringent EU regulations already have farmers living on a knife’s edge. The intensifying impacts of climate change arrive as a further burden, but it is farmers on the edges of Europe who are suffering the most. 

Together, the five countries included in the investigation account for over half the gross value of the EU’s agricultural industry, yet they are the most vulnerable to climate change, and the effects it has on farmer mental health. 

According to the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative, which addresses 40 core indicators, these five countries rank among the worst in Europe in terms of vulnerability to climate change and readiness to improve resilience. Romania, for example, is classified as critically vulnerable in terms of fresh water supplies, ranking among the last countries in Europe; Greece’s government readiness ranks as the second-lowest in the EU, showing inertia on the side of authorities to prepare the country for climate calamity. 

Farmers in the countries surveyed also have to deal with a critical lack of mental health support. In high-income European areas, researchers have documented the increased suicide risk among farmers, but this risk is often overlooked elsewhere in Europe.  

In none of the countries studied was there government data available documenting psychological health in farming communities, nor were there specific programmes tailored to addressing their mental wellbeing. Reporters tried to interview labour, health, environment, and agriculture ministries in the countries of the investigation but had no success. 

Interviewed farmers describe a world in which conversations around mental health are still taboo and support is found in the family, or in the broader community. But loosening ties due to migration from rural areas is putting them under increasing pressure. And nobody is stepping in to help. 

According to the 2023 Synthesis Report by the IPCC, “climate change impacts on health are mediated through natural and human systems, including economic and social conditions and disruptions.”  

Ürge-Vorsatz explains: “The impacts of climate change on our health, including our mental health, are mitigated by many things in between. For example, if you have access to subsidies or other economic support systems, then you will be less affected by extreme weather events, and so will your mental health. If you have a good healthcare system, this helps reduce the mental health impacts of climate change.” 

“The droughts came one after another” 

“I’ve been a farmer since the 1990s, but I can’t plant the land anymore. Last year, I told myself I can’t continue like this,” lamented 54-year-old Daniela Dîrîngă during farmer protests that took place throughout January 2024 in Afumati, near Bucharest.  

The rallying cry of farmers stated: “The future of our children depends on our actions”. Farmers protest against climate change and what they see as a lack of support from the Romanian government and the EU. 

In Romania, rural development favours urban-adjacent and already well-developed areas, neglecting poorer regions with significant agricultural potential.

In Romania, interviewed farmers said they face extreme droughts, delayed subsidies, high input costs, and collapsing grain prices due to liberalised imports from Ukraine. Dîrîngă and her sister Nicoleta Iancu cultivate 700 hectares with maize, wheat, sunflower seeds, and rapeseed in the south-eastern Romanian village of Ianca, Brăila County. They are among the large producers (owning more than 100 hectares) who control 48 per cent of the country’s farmland. 

Romania’s agricultural output makes the country a major EU producer. But even large-scale farmers like Dîrîngă are now struggling under debt. Dănuț Andruș, a crop farmer and leader of the protests in Afumati, claimed that 30,000 farmers are facing bankruptcy in Romania. 

Romania has 2.8 million farmers. Most live in poverty, with over half of poor households engaged in farming – a higher percentage than in any other EU country. 

Recent years have been unbearable, recounts Daniela Dîrîngă. “The droughts came one after another. I reached my limit and fell into depression,” she says. She feels compelled to continue farming and hopes to be able to upgrade the irrigation system but faces challenges accessing EU rural development funds.  

In Romania, rural development favours urban-adjacent and already well-developed areas, neglecting poorer regions with significant agricultural potential. Only 2.26 per cent of farmers obtained such funds in the last financial period. 

In the -9 degrees Celsius of a Romanian winter day, it is not the cold that makes Daniela Dîrîngă’s hands shake as she recalls the devastation of seeing her crops wither in the 2022 summer heat: “I remember losing my breath. It’s like seeing your house burned to the ground.” 

More stress caused by the EU? 

Farmers interviewed in the five countries attributed their increased levels of stress to bureaucracy and stringent controls linked to accessing EU subsidies. They saw bureaucracy-related issues as detrimental to their mental health, and complained of more economic pressures brought on by climate regulations under the EU Green Deal. 

The European Commission capitulated in March and announced it’s going to roll back some of the environmental objectives of the 2023-2027 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).  

The Commission introduced derogations to environmental standards that apply to farmers who receive agricultural subsidies under the CAP. Small farmers (two-thirds of all subsidy beneficiaries across the continent work on less than 10 hectares) will be exempted from controls and penalties.  

The Commission’s decision came days after the European Environment Agency published its first climate risk assessment report, which states Europe “is the fastest-warming continent in the world.” The report notes that “climate risks are driven not only by increases in climate hazards but also by how prepared societies are for them” and declares that neither climate risks nor adaptation needs are adequately addressed by the EU’s policies related to food production, namely the CAP. 

“Will I make it, will I cope?”  

If it’s not outward devastation, it is the chaos of variable policies, climate patterns, and economic instability that dovetail to put increased pressure on farmers. 

“I’ve already had one nervous breakdown,” says Maciej Mojzesowicz. “There are too many things happening at once.” 

Mojzesowicz grows rapeseed, wheat, and beetroot on 130 hectares near Bydgoszcz, in northern Poland. He has grappled with deep depressive spells for the last decade after over-investing in a farm that has not always delivered. 

Although he loves working the land – the smell of the dirt, the wheat, and the coming spring – he says that the variable climate and economy have made things impossible to manage. The well he had used to water his fields for 25 years is bone dry. In March, his wife threw a stone into it and it ricocheted off the bottom. A few years earlier, the same fields were flooded. 

“We always had ups and downs, but eventually, we would come out on top. But now I have this nagging feeling: will I make it, will I cope? It’s like watching the needles tracing your heart rate going up and down.”  

In 2023, his beetroot evaporated into a “pillow-like” consistency. Ninety per cent of wheat crops in his region failed because of the heat and lack of water. Then the glut of wheat and vegetable imports coming from a beleaguered Ukraine made it hard to get a good price for what was left of his crop.  

According to Statistics Poland, the average price of wheat dropped by 28.5 per cent from 2022 to 2023. For Mojzesowicz, the drop was even bigger. “Usually, I get 280 euros per ton of wheat. Last year, I got 145 euros, while fertiliser costs 375 euros a ton. I am already 420,000 euros in debt. It’s one big sinusoid, all these variables. I can’t plan for anything,” laments Mojzesowicz. 

“I haven’t burned out yet” 

Looking out the car window, it looks more like spring than mid-winter in South Moravia.  

“Formerly known as the most fertile region in Czechia, this place is changing beyond recognition. In terms of weather, every year we see events that were rarely experienced in the past two centuries,” says Professor Miroslav Trnka, leader of the Institute of Global Change Research at the Czech Academy of Sciences and professor at Mendel University in Brno. “In the past, we considered it virtually impossible to have 30 to 45 tropical days per year. Nowadays, this is the norm in the region,” adds Trnka.  

“My mind is flooded with thoughts about all the things I have to do, what the weather will be like tomorrow, what can kill my crops. I can’t fall asleep.”

Libor Kožnar, a 40-year-old organic farmer, works here – the most endangered agricultural region of Czechia. He started farming in 2017 after his mother’s passing made him decide to return home after a career in the United States. His 11-hectare property is a semi-subsistence farm. There are many farmers like Kožnar in Czechia. Though 86 per cent of the country’s farmland is owned by large agribusinesses, more than 55 per cent of the farmers are small-scale.  

Moreover, according to Eurostat data, organic farms in the Czech Republic are on the rise. In 2022, they accounted for almost 16 per cent of the total number of farms. 

All of Libor Kožnar’s work revolves around organic farming, and the emphasis on sustainability is key for him. Still, he sees the bureaucracy associated to receiving subsidies as “terribly inconvenient and extremely stressful.” Kožnar says he suffers from anxiety and fear because any mistake on his part could cost him access to the subsidies, and without them, his farm would not be able to operate. 

Meanwhile, the land is quickly changing right before his eyes, bringing new challenges. But he is not giving up.  

Kožnar wakes up at six in the morning, gets right on the computer, and checks his emails, he says. By seven, he’s in the field. He works sixteen hours a day, every day. When he comes back from the fields, he buries himself under contracts and documents needed to access subsidies. He goes to bed at midnight.  

“But my mind is flooded with thoughts about all the things I have to do, what the weather will be like tomorrow, what can kill my crops. I can’t fall asleep. Usually, I have to go take a pill.” In his busy daily routine, the farmer can’t find time to maintain any social life, he claims. He lives alone. “But I haven’t burned out yet,” he adds proudly. 

Farmers endure by building resilience 

Just like Libor Kožnar and Greek physiotherapist-turned-farmer Maria Vardouli, Spanish olive oil producer Ignacio Rojas was active in a different field before taking over his family agriculture business. Until fourteen years ago, he was living in Madrid, working in the strategy department of a telecommunications company. Then his father got ill, and he decided to go back to his hometown and take over the family’s farm. 

In the beginning, he dealt with some of the most common risk factors that farmers experience in terms of wellbeing: isolation and loneliness. For years, he faced sleep issues, digestion problems, and mood swings.  

His personal experience, shared by farmers across Europe, pushed him to address these issues through FARMRes (Farmers Assistance Resources for Mental Resilience), an EU-funded project aiming to raise awareness of mental health issues among farmers and their families.   

In Czechia, Libor Kožnar has found solace in sharing his concerns and solutions with other organic farmers. He emphasises the therapeutic benefits of community-supported agriculture, which involves urban consumers pre-paying for seasonal organic produce and sharing with the farmers both the harvest and challenges brought on by the climate. 

He says that despite occasional stress about meeting expectations, he values the solidarity and community involvement it fosters. 

This investigation is supported by Journalismfund Europe. 

Unrestrained concentration in the agricultural commodity market has allowed a handful of companies to maximise profits during a global food crisis. European regulators should step up their efforts to rein in harmful market dominance, but only wider reform can address the problems our economic system has produced.

Over the past decade, we have witnessed an extraordinary expansion of market concentration across most sectors of the economy. The top four companies in any given sector now hold a larger market share than 10 years ago. This sharp rise in market concentration is driving a broad range of harms, from negative impacts on consumers to corporate capture of regulators and small suppliers forced into debt or foreclosure. Despite these issues making headlines, public and policy attention to the structural nature of the market concentration problem remains limited. The food inflation crisis of recent years is a case in point.

In 2022, roughly one in ten people went to bed hungry, and the absolute number of people with hunger increased by 40 million. In the same year, the profits of the five biggest traders in agricultural commodities tripled compared to the average for the 2016-2020 period.

The “Big Five” dominate the global agricultural commodity market, collectively holding a monopoly for staples like grain, corn, soy, and sugar. The strategies through which they attained and now maintain their dominant position, including mergers and acquisitions, vertical integration, and joint ventures and investments, are likely what allowed them to increase their profit margins so dramatically during a global food crisis.

Despite the fact that billions were impacted by the steep rise in food prices, these companies and their market power received little attention. The role – or failure – of competition policy and regulatory action in relation to the food crisis has barely been scrutinised, yet competition laws and agencies are central players in this story. They had (and still have) the potential to prevent excessive market concentration and challenge companies that abuse their dominant position. It is potential that has been largely unrealised.

The competition policy toolkit is notably under-utilised. Take the EU for example: since the enactment of the EU Merger Regulation in 1990, only 88 out of 9243 notified mergers (i.e., less than 1 per cent) have been prevented.¹ Sixty of the merger and acquisition (M&A) cases that European regulators considered – and approved – involved the “Big Five” agricultural commodity traders.² As this article was being written, the EU approved yet another – the 34-billion-dollar deal between agricultural giants Bunge and Viterra.

The mechanics of market concentration and dominance in agricultural commodity trading show that competition authorities, in the EU and elsewhere, must fundamentally change their approach to address the damaging impacts on society of concentrated corporate power.

The players and their role

Five large multinationals dominate the agricultural value chain: Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Bunge, Cargill, China Oil and Foodstuffs Corporation (COFCO) and Louis Dreyfus Company (LDC). The “Big Five” are collectively referred to as the ABCCDs.

Although most agricultural products are traded within domestic markets, ABCCDs also play a crucial role in connecting countries. They link surplus production markets with countries where there is demand or insufficient domestic food production.³ Agricultural commodity traders traditionally focus on grains (wheat, maize, rice, and corn), oilseeds (palm kernel and soybean), and other commodities such as sugar, citrus juice, cocoa, coffee, and cotton.⁴ Over the last few decades, ABCCDs have come to dominate the global trade in these foodstuffs. The Big Five control between 70 and 90 per cent of the global trade in commercial grains.

In Europe, the traders’ dominance comes to the forefront in relation to the import of soy. Bunge and Cargill alone are responsible for more than 30 per cent of all soy exports from Brazil to Europe and dominate the French soybean meal market.⁵ Moreover, Bunge has a clear monopolistic position in some markets. It is, for example, responsible for 90-100 per cent of crude soybean oil sales in Portugal, while ADM operates the largest oilseed processing and refining complex in Europe.

All of the five ABCCD agricultural commodity traders achieved historically high profits during the 2021-2022 period, when consumers globally were facing soaring food prices. Compared to the average for the 2016-2020 period, during which food prices were relatively stable, net profits in 2021 rose between 75 per cent and 260 per cent for all agricultural commodity traders. In 2022, the net profits of the ABCCDs were 200 to 300 per cent higher compared to the stable period.

The high profits of the commodity traders have a clear link with agricultural commodity prices. These have increased substantially since 2021 – and particularly in 2022 – due to the reaction of the futures market to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The price of wheat rose by close to 50 per cent in the two weeks following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, followed by palm oil (close to 25 per cent), corn (10 per cent ), and soybean oil (10 per cent).

The chart above shows the evolution of food prices and the average net profits of the food commodity traders. Both follow an almost identical trend. From the onset of 2020, both increase strongly, indicating a possible correlation. Most food commodity traders explain ballooning profits in non-specific terms such as “strong demand”, “tight supplies” or “high prices.”⁶

Where high profits on the part of these commodity traders could simply reflect increased trade volumes, their increased profit margins show that the ABCCDs increased their capacity to generate profits from their operations. All agricultural commodity trading companies achieved a much higher net profit margin for the years 2021-2022 in comparison to the preceding years. Some even more than doubled their net profit margin.

Research in 2023 on food inflation in the EU found some inflation was “unexplained”. The same research noted that reductions in commodity prices had not helped lessen food price stress in Europe and that in April 2023, “most food commodities [were] trading at levels close to or slightly above those of 2021.”

This observation is in line with the phenomenon of seller’s inflation,⁷ where companies across various sectors used their market power to increase prices following the Covid-19 pandemic and the Ukraine crisis – not to cover their costs but to increase their profit margins. The 2022 UNCTAD Trade and Development report noted that “[e]nergy and food markets are complex, highly concentrated, and prone to anti-competitive practices such as abuse of market power by dominant firms or oligopolistic price fixing, which can cause higher prices and lower service”.

The market power to which UNCTAD refers has been amassed through deliberate strategic actions of the ABCCDs, actions which have largely gone unchecked by government regulatory bodies, including those tasked with addressing anti-competitive practices.

Strategies for amassing market power

Research by Maarten Hietland and SOMO identified three strategies used by the ABCCDs that have enabled them to amass such vast market power and acquire a position that allows them to thrive from higher and more volatile agricultural commodity prices.

Market consolidation (mergers and acquisitions)

One of the strategies to increase market concentration is through mergers and acquisitions. M&As allow companies to eat up their competition and expand their business to gain control over numerous variables in the value chain, and the ABCCDs have carried out many mergers and acquisitions throughout the last decades.⁸

Although the deals have been scrutinised, for example, by the competition regulators of the EU, there has been almost no intervention to prevent consolidation. The EU competition regulators have assessed a total of 60 cases of mergers and acquisitions related to the ABCCDs since 1990⁹, all but one of which were approved unconditionally. These include the approval of inter-ABCCD transactions such as the unconditional approval of Bunge’s acquisition of two European oilseed processing facilities from Cargill.¹⁰

At the core of the EU’s failure is, ironically, a narrow focus on consumer prices as the main “harm” or risk of mergers and acquisitions. Looking narrowly at the scope of individual deals, the regulators approve mergers that do not appear to have immediate negative impacts on consumers (or which can be presented as likely to have positive impacts).

The larger harms to society of intensified corporate power are not considered as part of the regulatory process.¹¹ As the EU’s Directorate General for Competition (DG COMP) underlined in the Bayer/Monsanto merger, while wider, global concerns are of great importance in competition cases, “they cannot form the basis of a merger assessment.” This means that even the risks to consumers are not adequately addressed because the cumulative impacts of concentration of power in a sector, such as agricultural commodities, are not always determining factors in M&A decisions.

The EU is far from the only regulator that has, over the past decades, been asleep at the wheel as the ABCCDs have “merged and acquisitioned” their way to market dominance. While US policymakers have taken a somewhat different approach recently, they and anti-trust agencies in many regions have tended to assess the M&As in front of them without adequately considering wider factors. In particular, there is a lack of monitoring of agricultural commodity traders on a global level, something which was also noticed by Abdolreza Abbassian, a former senior economist at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation.

Market consolidation works together with other strategies to build market dominance. Mergers and acquisitions enable horizontal integration (when companies acquire other similar businesses), and are also one of the main mechanisms used to expand vertical integration (when a company gains control over multiple, or all, parts of its value chain).

The EU is not only regulator that has been asleep as the ABCCDs have ‘merged and acquisitioned’ their way to market dominance.

Vertical integration

The ABCCDs dominate large parts of the value chain, from supplying farmers with loans, seeds, fertilisers and pesticides to storing, processing and transporting food commodities. Due to their size and their involvement at various stages of the production process, these companies have expanded their influence and control over actors in the value chain. Farmers – even when technically independent from the multinational companies – are increasingly beholden to and dependent on them to plant and sell crops or rear livestock.

For example, the acquisition of Monsanto by Bayer created, in the words of DG COMP, “the largest global integrated seed and pesticide player”. The Bayer/Monsanto deal was, again in DG COMP’s words, “the third in a row in the seeds and pesticides sector” following the Dow/DuPont and ChemChina/Syngenta mergers.¹² European regulators see the problem yet appear blind to the implications.

The reality of vertically integrated trading houses is a trend confirmed by the sector itself. According to Sucafina, a Swiss-based coffee trader: “If we were content to stay at this size and we weren’t vertically integrated, we would eventually get acquired by someone. (…) The trade house of the future will be more vertically integrated, and a big part of that’s going to have to come from the farming side.”

Interconnectedness

The five agricultural commodity traders compete with each other for market shares in certain regions. They focus on the same commodities and serve, to some extent, the same customers. At the same time, they also operate as business partners through joint ventures, joint investments, and industry-wide cooperation.

There are many joint ventures between ADM, Bunge, Cargill and LDC. For example, LDC’s 2022 Annual Report lists joint ventures with Cargill in port terminals for grain and sugar export.¹³ They also have joint investments. Both ADM and Cargill have a strategic investment in the French biotechnology company InnovaFeed SAS, for example.

The ABCCDs also work together to develop and adopt new technologies, such as blockchain. All ABCCD companies have a stake in the blockchain platform Covantis. The goal of the platform is to improve communication between agricultural commodity traders in order to improve logistic processes.

This interconnectedness and cooperation allow for more vertical integration and broad control over all facets of the market, and it can enable price setting, anti-competitive behaviour and cartel formation. There is a basis to take such risks seriously when considering the cumulative impact of the strategies described above and the consumer price outcomes witnessed in 2021-2022.

Risk of abuse of dominance: red flags

The ABCCDs have expanded to achieve positions of market dominance. While regulators have mostly allowed this to happen, there have been cases taken against most ABCCDs for anti-competitive behaviour. These cases, even though isolated and insufficient to address the development of the companies’ excessive market power, provide red flags for regulators regarding the ability (and willingness) of the ABCCDs to abuse their power. 

In the US, ADM was accused of price-fixing in the peanut sector and paid a settlement of 5 million dollars in 2021. Bunge has been under investigation since March 2023 by the Romanian authorities over possible collusion on the sunflower oil market. Cargill was accused in 2022 of violating antitrust law by improperly communicating with other companies in the poultry sector about worker wages and benefits. Together with two other companies, Cargill negotiated with the US Justice Department and ultimately paid 84.4 million dollars to settle the allegations. Cargill has also been accused of price fixing in South Korea and the US.

Notably, these cases are all relatively recent, and there are very few examples within the EU. Insofar as the EU has begun to consider market dominance, it has tended to focus on the tech sector. However, further action may be forthcoming. In March 2023, the European Commission announced it would develop new abuse of dominance guidelines by 2025.

Considering the dominant market power of the agricultural commodity traders and the evidence of anti-competitive behaviour, the extraordinary profits of 2021-2022 should have been anticipated. According to a study by insurance company Allianz, up to 20 per cent of food inflation can be attributed to profiteering. Profiteering for agricultural commodity trading companies is even higher than for oil companies due to more predominant concentration.

The ABCCDs’ monopolistic hold on the food supply chain enables them to influence pricing and costs. Their role in speculation on the food commodity markets has been exposed by several researchers. Anna Kolesnichenko of the Foundation for European Progressive Studies noted that, in Europe, most food commodity derivatives trading (95 per cent) takes place over the counter, meaning it is largely unregulated.

In addition to their sheer size and the power that comes with vertical integration, the ABCCDs possess immense storage capacity for grains, allowing them to store food when prices are low and sell as they go up. The control the ABCCDs exert on different parts of the food supply chains allows them to be well-informed on when and where food shortages can be expected. In 2022, the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES) noted that agricultural commodity traders hold significant grain reserves and observed that this capacity creates an incentive for these traders to “hold stocks back until prices are perceived to have peaked”.

All in all, each element of the ABCCDs’ strategies for acquiring dominant positions intersects to make abuse of dominance easier.

Cumulative impacts

The societal harms caused by concentrated market power are not due to any one merger, acquisition, or joint venture. The dangers are due to the cumulative buildup of market power.

The failures of competition policy to prevent and address the situation described above reflect a longstanding narrow approach to this policy domain. But even now, when the consumer welfare line is crossed, there are other factors that drive the failure to adequately address massive market concentration and power.

Geopolitical competition between nations to assert economic dominance and to emerge as winners in the green transition has given corporate narratives about the risks of over-regulation even more weight with policymakers, many of whom are inculcated in neoliberal economic logic. The recently passed EU Critical Raw Materials Act is an example of this. Corporate narratives framing regulation as an impediment to European energy security and jobs led to clauses allowing regulatory exemptions for strategic mineral projects, compromising environmental safeguards.

Having allowed companies to become so big, and states to become so reliant on them, has further strengthened the hand of corporate power. Across the EU policymakers listen to the very actors they should oversee and have internalised their narratives.

Yet there is also an opportunity to address the problems, particularly where competition regulators are seeing the harms and waking up to the latent potential of competition and anti-trust tools to combat outsized corporate power. The food and inflation crisis has been a clarion call to look not just at consumer prices, but the cumulative and global picture of market dominance and corporate power. Will this call be heeded, or will the very corporate power that competition authorities should control be the tool used against them?

A key test was on the table as this article was being drafted – a merger between agricultural commodity giants Viterra and Bunge. The deal is unprecedented in size in the global agriculture sector and will move the new company closer to the size of ADM and Cargill. It will further strengthen the ABCCDs’ dominant market position.

In April, the Competition Bureau of Canada said the merger is likely to result in substantial anti-competitive effects in agricultural markets in Canada. Despite these concerns, Viterra and Bunge were confident that the deal would go through.

The European Commission received notification of the merger on 14 June. On 1 August, the Commission gave its assent without initiating a deeper investigation. Given the risks and civil society’s public concerns about the deal, the failure of the Commission to delve deeper was a significant disappointment. It was, however, not unexpected. The proportion of in-depth investigations established by the EU regulator after it has been notified of a proposed merger has declined, from over 9 per cent in the 1990s to less than 2 per cent by 2023.

The merger now needs to be approved by Canadian and Chinese authorities. While there is little known about the situation in China, farmers’ associations in Canada have been heavily protesting the deal. Nonetheless, current indications are that the merger will go ahead.

Across the EU policymakers listen to the very actors they should oversee and have internalised their narratives.

A different economy

After the lessons of 2021-2022, the Bunge-Viterra case emphatically underlines the failure of piecemeal competition policy approaches to global corporate power challenges.

To meaningfully address the situation, we need a paradigm shift. More forceful enforcement of competition and anti-trust laws can go a long way – certainly, far further than is currently the case. The narrow focus currently being used to assess M&As and scrutinise abuse of dominance cases should be reconsidered. There is ample evidence of cumulative and broad societal harms that extend beyond individual jurisdictions, sufficient to justify more robust action and, where needed, amendments to competition guidance and law.

But in the end, more is needed. Competition law, however well enforced, cannot solve the problem entirely. The concentration of corporate power has expanded dramatically over the past few decades and needs to be unwound through deliberate legal action. We must also dismantle the structures and incentives that drive market concentration in the first place. “Growth at all costs” is a fundamental belief of most multinationals, and in service of this belief, they have promoted an edifice of tax, investment, and trade laws, all of which – whether it was the intention of governments or not – promote growth and concentration (of profit, shareholder value, and power).

Robust guardrails can limit corporate power, but not the pressures towards its creation. Containment cannot be the only strategy. In order to truly address the problems our economic system has produced, we must look at wider reforms of the whole system. An economy based on principles of degrowth and decolonisation is, ultimately, the antidote to concentrated, inequality-driving corporate power.

1. This includes mergers prohibited by the European Commission (33) and mergers withdrawn by the merging parties after the European Commission opened a detailed (Phase II) investigation (55). European Commission (2024). Statistics on Merger Cases (up to 31 May 2024). Available at <https://bit.ly/46TyAmu> ︎
2. The “Big Five” are also known as the ABCCDs, as explained later in this article. The 60 mergers approved involved Archer Daniels Midland, 22; Bunge, 10; Cargill, 25; Cargill, China Oil and Foodstuffs Corporation, 2; Louis Dreyfus Company, 6. European Commission (2024). Competition Policy.  See <https://bit.ly/3T1AMmb> ︎
3. Jonathan C. Kingsman (2017). Commodity Conversations: An Introduction to Trading in Agricultural Commodities California: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. ︎
4. Sophia Murphy, David Burch & Jennifer Clapp (2012).  Cereal Secrets: The World’s Largest Grain Traders and Global Agriculture. Oxfam International. Available at < https://bit.ly/3TlujTx>. ︎
5. European Commission (2017). Case M.8199 – Bunge / European Oilseed Processing Facilities. Available at <https://bit.ly/3MbVLPo>. ︎
6. See, for example, research by Groundwork Collaborative. Retrieved December 18, 2023, from <https://endcorporateprofiteering.org/latest-research>. ︎
7. See, for example, Isabella M. Weber & Evan Wasner (2023). “Sellers’ Inflation, Profits and Conflict: Why can Large Firms Hike Prices in an Emergency?” Economic Department Working Paper Series. Available at <https://bit.ly/3Mg39cx>. ︎
8. Joseph Baines & Sandy Brian Hager (2023). “Commodity Traders in a Storm: Financialization: Corporate Power and Ecological Crisis”. Available at <https://bit.ly/4dUTfsA>. ︎
9. ADM 22; Bunge 10; Cargill 25; COFCO 2; LDC 6. Available at <https://competition-cases.ec.europa.eu/search>. ︎
10. European Commission (2017). Case M.8199 – Bunge / European Oilseed Processing Facilities. Available at < https://bit.ly/3MbVLPo>. ︎
11. There is considerable debate in EU competition policy circles about theories of harm, types of harm and how competition law does/does not relate to them. See <https://bit.ly/3MhRfPj>. ︎
12. See European Commission (2018). Case M.8084 – Bayer / Monsanto. Available at <https://bit.ly/3WZPLyk> ︎
13. Louis Dreyfus Company (2022). 2022 Annual Report. Rotterdam: Louis Dreyfus Company. Available at <https://www.ldc.com/annual-report-2022>. ︎

Tracing responsibility for honeybee losses in rural Ukraine points to farmers and pesticide-treated rapeseed fields. But whose practices really lie behind the short-term bid to increase crop productivity? And what do the historic uses of agrochemicals tell us about their current weaponisation? 

A non-event, a continuity: growing rapeseed in Ukraine. For the most part, it’s an unsensational succession of seasonal repetitions: hybridised seeds are sown late summer into nitrogen-treated soil; phosphorus fertilizer is added in autumn to strengthen roots; the plants mature in spring, absorbing another dose of nitrogen; four-petalled yellow flowers, blooming late spring into summer, are sprayed with insecticide; once the plant has dried out and the seeds have darkened, the crop is harvested – shortly before the growing season restarts. The war has disrupted some of this, but farming rapeseed in Ukraine is on the rise again. The agricultural cycle rolls on, creeping slowly earlier into the year due to climate change. 

Amidst the seemingly monotonous rapeseed production process, incidents happen. In early May 2024, a disconcerting story emerged: in the recently liberated northern-Ukrainian Chernihiv Oblast, beekeeper Serhii Reutskyi reported a “plague on bees”: “I went to close the bee hives. But there were piles of bees at the bottom and in front of the hives.”¹ Reutskyi’s bees died in the village of Nekhaivka, the morning after nearby farmers had sprayed their rapeseed fields with insecticide, he points out. He called other nearby beekeepers who confirmed the death of their colonies too. Although the story doesn’t discuss the crop other than in passing, I am suspicious that the rapeseed fields constitute evidence. Is the blurred, yellow background, an essential clue or a false lead for locating responsibility behind the loss of life and damage brought to people involved? 

What counts of crime and who is counting? 

Documenting war damage has been a major focus for journalists, human and environmental rights activists, researchers and the government of Ukraine itself since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. This makes perfect sense. When it’s all over, evidence will be vital for trials, as holding someone accountable requires proof of harm. This is being gathered. But exonerating evidence is also being gathered. Defendants will be innocent until proven guilty, even though we know, they know, we know that they know, they know that we know, everyone knows – but this won’t matter to the prosecutor. The defendant may or may not transform into the accused. Proof may be exchanged for a guilty verdict, followed by a sentence, followed by reparations. None are necessarily equivalent to restoring justice per se, but it’s the best we’ve got. 

Mass bee deaths appear to be the next logical event in the process of securing crop yield. 

Acts of war are events – events that we’ve come to understand as criminal, at least on the Ukrainian side of the border. The need for evidence-gathering has become indisputable. But when it comes to tracing agroecological damage, things are more complicated. With war, harm is the point – or maybe victory (whatever that means) – inflicting damage, a tactic to achieve the goal. With monoculture, in which rapeseed is complicit, any associated harm is merely a “by-product”, an “unintended consequence” of producing trade commodities sold at international markets, something to be dealt with via administrative law, if it comes to it. 

The aftermath, here and elsewhere 

The news article about the bees and their keeper is not an investigation. If anything, it’s an incident report, an essential piece of data for those trying to understand casualties in the world of monoculture. And yet it does narrate blame and responsibility. For the most part, it identifies the main actors at a local level: the beekeepers, the agronomists employed at rapeseed fields, the anonymous “them”, who Reutskyi says “won’t be found guilty”. 

Another article, commenting on the incident for the agricultural portal Kurkul, states: “The season of spraying rapeseed crops with insecticides has begun, and, accordingly, the season of poisoning bees with them.” “Accordingly” is doing a lot of work in the statement. Mass bee deaths appear to be the next logical event in the process of securing crop yield. 

Reutskyi, citing “information from the Internet”, notes that Biscaya 240 OD, sprayed the previous night, “shouldn’t cause such mass bee deaths”. The beekeeper may have picked this up from Superagronom, an agricultural information portal, that states, “Biscaya is nontoxic to bees and bumblebees”. But this is false information – an accidental or deliberate “mistake”, obscuring cause and effect. 

The way we understand causality of harm and tell stories of toxicity matters for our ability to hold a guilty party accountable and achieve at least some form of reconciliation. Yet the reporting focuses on the “facts”, whether true or false, as said, without providing further context. The active ingredient is “missing” from both the product description and the news reports despite being the substance that does the “work” of killing insects and obstructing the media. 

Thiacloprid, an odourless, yellowish, crystalline liquid, is the lethal core of Biscaya 240 OD. Perhaps, understandably, Reutskyi didn’t have the time to interrogate the accuracy of the statement that this product is non-toxic to bees. Just a click away from the website he cites would have brought him here: “Chemicals containing the active ingredient thiacloprid are considered a level 3 hazard for bees”. Although the website provides no reference to which classification it uses, the statement matches Ukraine’s State sanitary rules and hygienic norms “Hygienic classification of pesticides according to hazard level”, placing Biscaya 240 OD into the category of “moderately dangerous” for pollinators. Recent research by a state agency in Ukraine found that half of over 80 cases of mass bee deaths they investigated involved pesticides. Bees are seen as “non-target species” in agrochemical jargon, but thiacloprid doesn’t know it wasn’t intended to harm bees, and so it doesn’t discern. 

Insecticide of this kind is pernicious beyond causing mass bee deaths. It can stay in the ground long after its application, altering organisms living in the soil and accumulating in the bodies of plants that grow on the margins of arable fields. These in turn will pass on the toxicity they absorb to birds, rodents and other animals. It is also highly toxic to aquatic life. And once in water, neonicotinoids can further mutate to form chemicals that are a hundred times more toxic than the original. Biscaya 240 OD is dangerous for us humans too. The manufacturer’s safety data sheet admits it is suspected of causing cancer, may damage fertility and the unborn child. But this toxicity – that does, may, will damage – is insufficient to stop its use. Someone’s death or deteriorating health is the “non-target damage” in the name of greater yield. 

Spray to yield 

Reutskyi is not alone in living and working near rapeseed fields. The largely export crop’s presence has been steadily growing for the past 20 years in Ukraine. In 2022, despite the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Ukraine sold 3.5 million tons worth 1.55 billion dollars, making it the world’s third-largest rapeseed exporter. In 2023, the largest area to date was sown with rapeseed: 1.4 million hectares, and nearly all of it (94 per cent of the total area) was covered with 1.8 million kilograms of pesticides, insecticides and herbicides. The scale is no surprise. Large monoculture production is entirely reliant on the intensive use of pesticides and fertilizers to maintain record yields and profits – regardless of war and climate change. According to Ukraine’s State Register of Pesticides and Agrochemicals, of the 3,500 varieties of insecticides, fungicides and herbicides, more than 700 are used on rapeseed. Thiacloprid is in the top 16 of the most heavily applied, alongside four other chemicals illegal in the EU.² Geographer Annie Shattuck reminds us that pesticides became essential “not for producing enough food to feed the population, but for the survival of a particular form of political economy”. 

Large monoculture production is entirely reliant on the intensive use of pesticides and fertilizers to maintain record yields and profits – regardless of war and climate change.

Biscaya 240 OD is also not unique. As a neonicotinoid, it belongs to a group of synthetic, neuro-active chemicals, developed by Shell and Bayer in the 1980s, proven to be toxic to pollinators. It may be common knowledge in the EU, but despite their widespread usage and high toxicity, neonicotinoids have received very little attention outside of specialised media in Ukraine. The effect of neonicotinoids on bees is akin to nicotine’s effect on humans, albeit more acute. “Neuro-active” means their way of killing is cruel, causing death through paralysis of the nervous system. Nearly 50 years after their invention, neonicotinoids have become the most widely used group of insecticides globally, despite prolific evidence of their harm to soil life, insects, birds and mammals living in and around the fields where it is applied. 

If Ukraine was part of the EU, the incident with bee deaths reported in Nekhaivka would breach the law, not in just one but three ways: aerial spraying of pesticides; spraying pesticides in close proximity to residential areas; and using banned pesticides. But Ukraine isn’t part of the EU. Of the 87 pesticides banned for use in agriculture in Ukraine, there seems to be only one neonicotinoid. Many others are being freely disseminated in legal and illegal circulation above and below ground. And, in the glaring absence of serious environmental regulations and weak enforcement of those that do exist, parts of the country’s land, which isn’t occupied or under attack from the north, south and east by Russia, are offered in service of a less discernible expansion of the West’s capital and that of domestic agro-oligarchs, who dominate industrial, agrochemical-reliant, export-oriented monocrop farming, such as rapeseed. 

Within the EU’s borders, the story of neonicotinoid use is only marginally less tragic. In 2018 they were banned in all member states, following pressure from environmental groups and civil society. Yet legislative workarounds make neonicotinoid use possible despite the ban. Authorisation can be given for the use of neonicotinoids in “ emergency situations”. But what counts as an “emergency” is not specified. Two years after the law took effect, 67 emergency authorisations were issued. Some pesticide concessions for rapeseed production were cleared without any justification other than the crop’s significance to the country’s economy. 

In Ukraine, since Biscaya 240 OD is legal and its usage makes perfect economic sense, farmers don’t even need to apply for authorisation. They simply spray it, and if they’re courteous enough, let the neighbouring beekeepers know in advance. 

The state, the civic, the capital, the criminal 

I think again of what holding those causing harm through agri-logistics responsible would require and how different it is, really, from responsibility for any other kind of harm. I wonder if we might start with looking at those who make toxic agrochemical production and distribution possible – a complex and ever-changing constellation of state-private-criminal networks. 

The European Union remains the largest supplier of insecticides to Ukraine, including those it has banned internally.

People who love bees celebrated what they considered was the end of neonicotinoid use within EU member states – reportedly a story of responsibility, assumed, finally, by institutions. “Banning these toxic pesticides is a beacon of hope for bees”, said a spokesperson from Avaaz, a campaign advocating the ban. Although well intentioned, the campaign’s tactic comes from a naive imaginary of a world in which the state has total control, where the legal prohibition to use something will end toxic practices. The state of course still plays a role via regulations, policy and licensing, determining acceptable degrees of toxicity to various bodies – and allowing, or not, to push the degradation elsewhere, both in place and time. 

Rather than eliminating harm, the ban has relocated the problem, creating new toxicity movement routes, reshuffling the constellation of producers, distributors, traders, blurring the lines of responsibility within agro-supply chains. An investigation by Unearthed and Public Eye revealed that the EU – led by France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Hungary, Germany and Spain – exports more than 10,000 tonnes of neonicotinoids to poorer countries, with Brazil as its top destination. The Union remains the largest supplier of insecticides to Ukraine, including those it has banned internally. As of 2022 just over 50 per cent of all pesticides in Ukraine came from the EU and 35 per cent from China. A large amount of pesticides banned in the EU is regularly found in traces of imported food and industrial crops, both before and during the full-scale invasion – Fortress Europe’s walls leaking in the harm it attempted to export elsewhere. “Toxicity is an ouroboros; none of us are free until all of us are free” is more than a political slogan – it’s a fact. 

Reutskyi mentions that the agronomist from one of the fields was open to speaking to him and readily shared information about their use of Biscaya 240 OD. However, employees of the other nearby agricultural enterprise, who were reportedly preparing to apply Acetochlor (another chemical banned in the EU) and Glyphosate, refused to show him the canisters or provide any information on the active substances. His concern, shared by environmental groups and organic farmers, is that the application of many pesticides in Ukraine contravenes manufacturer safety guidelines: namely, exceeding the recommended dose and frequency of application, resulting in more pollution remaining in the soil and water for years to come. 

Whilst we are yet to see if the EU’s forthcoming Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive will limit the harm proliferating across agricultural supply chains, groups like the Argentinian Beekeeper Society make it clear that selling toxic chemicals in itself is “an act of aggression, of ecocide, and a violation of human rights”. Under the capital-driven agricultural production model, it will never suffice to simply ban pesticide use. Localised restrictions create superficial success stories for privileged people and bees. As long as producers make and sell toxicity, capital-creating loopholes will keep enabling profit at the cost of “non-target” lives and liveliness elsewhere. 

Another key player in the pesticide-spread constellation is Bayer, one of the largest EU neonicotinoid producers and its main exporter. It may have been local farm employees, who sprayed the Biscaya 240 OD in nearby rapeseed fields, but it is Bayer who sold it. The thiacloprid-based product sits in row 1,815 of the State Agrochemical Register, neatly in between other Bayer-produced pesticides, class 2 hazardous overall – in other words, dangerous. However, when I search for neonicotinoids in the masses of Excel data from the Ukrainian state register, it renders no results. Understanding toxicity requires an understanding of specificity: the kinds of active ingredients that belong to the toxic neonicotinoid family, in this case. The opaqueness of tracing toxicity adds to the problem: clues scattered across various spreadsheets, statistical publications and industry reports do not lend themselves well to easily discerning what is hazardous from what is safe. 

In its 2024 neonicotinoid report, a master work of performative, at most restrained repentance, Bayer concedes to “a few reports of incidents where the use of neonicotinoid products was associated with negative effects on non-target insects”, meaning honeybees. It goes on to suggest solutions: innovation, labelling, training for the farmers in poor countries on how to use deadly chemicals safely. This is nothing new. In 2008, ten years before the EU ban, when clothianidin, another Bayer-produced neonicotinoid, was found to have caused mass bee deaths in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, the agrochemical giant “blamed the seed companies that had processed Poncho Pro”, stating that “clothianidin is safe for bees, the environment, users and consumers “if used properly”.³ But “Poncho, suggestive in name of a protective blanket for both farmer and crop,” writes Sarah Waring, “was revealing itself to be more of a poisonous drape”: loose dust from pesticide-coated corn seed had dispersed on sowing over nearby rapeseed fields and wildflowers, affecting 12,174 colonies.⁴ Bayer’s solution on this occasion included “a swift, out-of-court settlement of 2.25 million euros to local beekeepers.”⁵ The lack of another solution – namely, phasing out neonicotinoid production entirely – is astonishing yet unsurprising in both cases. Harm to life is merely collateral damage. 

It takes the bodies of others, elsewhere, to produce toxicity and turn mass murder into a profitable venture. 

Bayer is practised in weaponising air to kill. During World War II, Degesch – a subsidiary of the IG Farben conglomerate that Bayer was bought into – was a major supplier of Zyklon B. This hydrogen cyanide-based gas was used in the gas chambers of Nazi concentration camps in Germany and Poland to murder over one million people during the Holocaust. The company’s business strategy relied on testing drugs on people, who were imprisoned and used as forced labour, in camps like Auschwitz, where the gas was later applied. It takes the bodies of others, elsewhere, to produce toxicity and turn mass murder into a profitable venture. 

Although disproportionate, some accountability followed: IG Farben’s senior managers received prison sentences of up to eight years. Some, such as Otto Ambros, head of the chemical warfare committee at the war ministry, were acquitted. Released after serving only a few years, Ambros continued his career advising within the agrochemical industry and politics – all the while remaining a convicted Nazi war criminal guilty of crimes against humanity. Imagining both accountability for Russia’s ongoing war crimes in Ukraine and large-scale agriculture’s long-term exhaustion of the soil in this light looks if not entirely hopeless, then bleak. What’s more, the knowledge of chemical use for military purposes lends itself well to agricultural and political ends: the knowledge accumulated within chemical company production was readily applied within the growing post-WWII agricultural industry. BASF, for example, a company that divested itself from IG Farben conglomerate following the Nuremberg trials became one world’s largest chemicals producers, sales amounting to 68.9 billion euros in 2023. 

Clandestine technology 

The spread of toxic agrochemicals goes further than the visible, seemingly legitimate procedures administered by state and private entities. Beyond accounted for and legally sold pesticides, no matter how toxic in themselves, counterfeit pesticides, distributed through organised clandestine networks both within Ukraine and internationally, are even more perilous. The flow of this forged toxicity has all-too-real effects, as outlined in the 2020 OECD report: a Russian intermediary company orders chemicals used in the production of pesticides from China; the chemicals are then shipped to Slovenia and driven by truck into Ukraine; there, pesticides are manufactured, labelled and packaged for distribution across the EU. 

Both the original and counterfeit pesticides share one challenge: when unused, they have nowhere to go. There are no pesticide destruction facilities in Ukraine and the majority of warehouses storing highly toxic pesticides are located in the active war zones in southern and eastern Ukraine – some of which have already been deliberately targeted by Russia. Recent reports show that Russia has destroyed at least 1,433 industrial and infrastructure facilities since February 2022. When Russia hits agriculture storage facilities, not only grain and other food produce might be destroyed but toxic chemicals too. Pesticides and fertilizers spill into the environment; Russia’s long-distance precision missiles are turning Ukraine’s agricultural storage facilities into chemical weapons. 

Monoculture tends to come with mono(polised) profits and a mono-narrative of its essential role. But what of poly-damage all around?

If we learn to see pesticides as a destructive technology of the monoculture industry, we might also see that, as with any other technology designed to impact harm, it could never have been contained solely within its original purpose, mutating across fields of application. In analysing technology in relation to how pollution spreads, Ukrainian cyberwar and infrastructure scholar Svitlana Matviyenko writes that the Russian colonial project “wields pollution as a weapon of war”. Indeed, technology, understood as means to conquer, be it on the battlefield or agricultural field, shapeshifts the production of different kinds of violence: synthetic chemicals developed for warfare to achieve aims on the battlefield, making their way to serve as synthetic productivity enhancers on the agriculture field and back to uncanny war technology. The feral, non-linear, deliberate and incidental, unpredictable, opaque and quiet harms, here and there, are leaking all around. 

P.S.: mono, poly, legal, moral 

Intent to do harm matters within the law – at least in the Western Christianity-based legal system, which has a peculiar perspective on sin, shame, repentance and indulgence. I am less sure how much the supposedly unintentional act of killing bees would have mattered to Reutskyi. But what is at stake here is no legal matter alone. In fact, there’s an unfortunate but very real possibility that spraying Biscaya 240 OD over the field of rapeseed in Nekhaivka was a completely legal act. What is legal and what is moral, however, are not always the same thing. And what journalists, researchers and campaigners omit from or include in the story can either obscure toxicity further into unaccountability or render it visible. 

Monoculture tends to come with mono(polised) profits and a mono-narrative of its essential role. But what of poly-damage all around? This requires telling more complex stories, as it is not only the consequences of war that will determine the health of environments and people in them but also every decision made on land currently designated for agriculture. Land has never been a rural issue alone, after all. 

This article was written during a fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM). The author would like to thank Angelika Adensamer and Nicole Buxeda for their advice on legal matters, and Sarah Waring for her thoughtful editing and invaluable bee expertise. This article was originally published in Eurozine. It is republished here with permission.  

1. Translated from Ukrainian by the author. ︎
2. According to the EU Pesticides Database and State Statistic Service of Ukraine, these are chlorpyrifos, carbendazim, dimethoate and diquat.  ︎
3. R. Schmuck, “Bayer CropScience: Der Wirkstoff Clothianidin ist bei Sachgerechter Anwendung sicher für Bienen (Active compound clothianidin is safe for bees when properly applied)”, Karlsruhe, 20 June 2008, in S. Waring, Farming for the Landless: New perspectives on the cultivation of our honeybee, Platin Press, 2015, p. 60.  ︎
4. S. Waring, Farming for the Landless: New perspectives on the cultivation of our honeybee, p. 63. ︎
5. Baden-Württemberg Ministerium für Ernährung und Ländlichen Raum (Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Food and Rural Areas), “Abschlussbericht Beizung und Bienenschäden” (Final report: Seed dressing and bee losses), Stuttgart, 17 December 2008, p. 6, in S. Waring, Farming for the Landless: New perspectives on the cultivation of our honeybee, p.60. ︎

A small agricultural revolution is underway in Sicily, where farmers are taking advantage of warming temperatures to bring new fruits to market. But will this be enough to turn the fortunes of southern Italian farming, which is increasingly grappling with droughts and other climate impacts?

“When I started, no one believed in me,” says Pietro Cuccio, holding a perfectly ripe mango in his hand. The 70-year-old former architect is a pioneer: more than 20 years ago, he had the idea of planting tropical fruit trees in Sicily, becoming the first person to do so. Now he grows mango, avocado, lychee, and passion fruit at the headquarters of his company, Cupitur, in Caronia, on the island’s northern coast. Cupitur has been producing these exotic fruits since 2000. They grow in the shadow of the Nebrodi mountains that slope wildly towards the sea, and are sold throughout Europe. 

The main markets for his produce are Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. But the hunger for these crops is also growing among Italians, so much so that Istat, the country’s national statistics institute, includes mango and avocado in the consumer price index basket. The price is excellent for producers, and the income opportunities are compelling. “I sell mangoes for 3 to 5 euros per kilo, depending on the variety, quality and appearance,” Cuccio says. “If you consider that lemons have reached 20 cents, you understand that the price of tropical fruit can be a driving force for a more profitable agriculture.”

Cuccio lived in the United States for 30 years, first in Los Angeles, then in Hawaii, where he began to dedicate himself to the production of mango. Then, at the beginning of the 2000s, he returned to Sicily to cultivate the same fruit with which he had made his fortune on the other side of the world. “At first they thought I was crazy,” he says of his fellow farmers. “But now I can say that my intuition was right.”

With the help of agronomists from the University of Palermo, he found suitable soil and experimented with multiple varieties, planting different species and studying their adaptation to the territory. Eventually he won his bet: today he produces 20,000 kilos of mango, 12,000 kilos of lychee, and 10,000 kilos of avocado annually. While Cuccio works with a trusted agronomist, as well as a handful of workers assigned to harvesting, he controls everything himself. He follows the progress of the plants, the degree of maturation, fertilisation, and biological control techniques. “We have few problems with birds and parasites,” he notes. “As our fruits are non-native, animals don’t recognise them.”

The mango trees grow lush behind a system of nets that protects them from the wind. The plants are not stacked close together as in Italian apple, pear, and peach orchards. They are left to grow at a distance, each with their own space. Cuccio enjoys talking about the different varieties and the multiplicity of fruit he grows, their ripening periods and organoleptic characteristics. There is Tommy Atkins, with his purple skin, Keitt, with a very sweet pulp and no fibre, and juicy Maya. Then there is Kensington Pride, the original creature, the one with which the experiment in Sicily began. Seventeen different types of mango are being grown here, and the team at Cupitur are experimenting with others.

Wager won 

Cuccio’s success paved the way for others who realised that there was a potential market and optimal climatic conditions. His company is now the object of pilgrimages: dozens of farmers come to meet him and visit his fields. They ask for advice and information as to how they might also enter the business. The example of Cupitur, and the dozens of other agricultural companies that have followed it, is an emblematic case of agricultural adaptation to climate change. Being at the centre of the Mediterranean region, where the effects of global warming manifest themselves most visibly, Sicily and southern Italy are experiencing new temperature records every year. In the summer of 2021, the Siracusa province in southeastern Sicily saw temperatures reach 48.8 degrees Celsius – the highest ever recorded in Europe. But it is the mild winters, with temperatures never dropping below zero, that make conditions ideal for growing tropical crops. 

“Today the climate helps,” says Cuccio. “Mango plants suffer when it gets close to zero; they die if it drops to minus four. However, they grow well in sunny and very hot spring times and summers. Let’s say that the current temperatures are particularly favourable, and it is likely that they will be increasingly so.” 

Cuccio and the entrepreneurs who have followed his lead have found a way to transform a problem into an opportunity, becoming the vanguard of an agricultural boom. Since 2004, the number of hectares cultivated with mangoes and avocados in Italy have risen from just 10 to 1200, according to estimates by Coldiretti, Italy’s main agricultural organisation.

Shrinking pears

This growth counterbalances the collapse of other fruit and vegetable harvests in Italy. The droughts, prolonged heatwaves, and the increase in extreme weather events that have affected the peninsula and the Mediterranean area in recent years are having a devastating impact on Italian agricultural production.

According to data from the European Severe Weather Database (ESWD), there were 3,468 extreme weather events in Italy in 2023, or almost 10 per day. The hailstorms, torrential rains, and 80 kilometre-per-hour winds that hit Italy last year caused extensive damage. The general trends are worrying: the production of pears experienced a 75 per cent drop in 2023 compared to 2018; cultivated hectares of kiwis, of which Italy is the world’s second-largest producer after New Zealand, have decreased by 50 per cent in the last 10 years. 

Medium-term forecasts from the European Environment Agency are equally discouraging: a report published in 2019 predicted a collapse in the productivity of agricultural land in southern Europe, with the potential for crops such as wheat, corn, and beet to decline by 50 per cent. Coldiretti puts the damage to Italy’s agricultural sector caused by climate change over the past year at 6 billion euros.

Can these losses be compensated by growth in tropical fruit production? Is Italy destined to change its agricultural model and replace traditional crops, such as citrus fruits, tomatoes and cereals, with mango and avocado plantations?

“I wouldn’t talk about replacement, rather about rediscovering a vocation,” says Andrea Passanisi. “This is precisely what we are doing. We have introduced something new, thanks to a terrain that allows us to do so, without denying our traditions.”

Going big

If Cuccio is the pioneer, Passanisi is the main proponent in Sicily today of developing tropical fruit production. Several years ago, the farmer, who hails from Giarre, a town on the slopes of Mount Etna, began producing Hass avocados – the popular supermarket shelf variety whose skin blackens when the fruit ripens. The 39-year-old entrepreneur says that the idea came to him during a trip to Brazil 10 years ago, when he saw and tasted the lush tropical fruits. Upon returning to Sicily, he asked his grandfather if he could carry out some experiments on the family land, and discovered that avocados grew very well. 

Since then, his business, which markets a “zero kilometre” avocado, has expanded. Today, Passanisi manages “Sicilia Avocado”, a consortium of 43 companies that grow avocado, mango, passion fruit, lychee, and papaya on 188 hectares of land between Giarre and Acireale. Each year the consortium produces some 1400 tonnes of tropical fruit. It works regularly with some of the main Italian large-scale retail chains, as well as with foreign retailers, and has an online shop that boasts 70,000 active users. He recently experimented with a new production: avocado oil, which he produces in a local mill.

Passanisi has exploited the shift in weather conditions in southern Europe, and says that climate change partly favours exotic fruit production. But not all that glitters is gold. “Of course, the temperatures are higher and the plants don’t freeze. But we too are subject to frequent extreme events that can damage the trees.”

Avocado fever

If hectares increase and production grows, it’ll be because demand is on the up – nationally, as well as across Europe, and even globally. According to a study carried out by CSO Italy, a research centre created by farmer organisations in northern Italy, avocado purchases grew eightfold from 2012 to 2022 in Italy. “Over the last five years, the volume of avocados that Italian families bring into their homes has more than tripled and even quadrupled in terms of expenditure,” says Daria Lodi, who led the study. 

The vast majority of avocados purchased in Europe come from South America, especially Peru, Chile, and Colombia. But their significant water needs mean that cultivation of avocados has had an adverse effect on ecosystems in those countries. In Chile, which is affected by persistent drought, the impact of avocado farming on water reserves has come to the attention of the United Nations. The UN’s 2014-2020 special envoy for the right to water, Léo Heller, asked the Chilean government to clarify its position regarding the intensive cultivation of fruit in the central region of Valparaíso, where plantations are depriving residents of drinking water. 

Italian producers have developed a communication strategy that focuses on localism. “From the end of October to May/June we offer fruit with a precise identity, Sicilian but also Italian, a local product … enhanced also with quality, because what comes from abroad is still an excellent product,” says Passanisi. 

But the number of avocados produced in Sicily are not even close to covering national demand. Compared to the 47 million kilos imported into Italy in 2022, local production stands at between 1 and 2 million (there are no official figures, only estimates made by sector operators). 

Uncertain future

“I still estimate seven to eight years of growth in production, driven by good prices and market demand,” continues Passanisi. “But there is a limit: avocado can only be grown in suitable areas, where there is a certain type of soil and an abundance of water, such as the one on the slopes of Etna where we are.”

In the meantime, other regions of southern Italy, from Calabria to Puglia, are taking up avocado production. And other types of tropical crops are being experimented with. Palermo, for instance, is testing the production of bananas and coffee.  

There is no certainty that these other products will take hold, nor that the slopes of Etna and elsewhere will be able to produce continually high yields of avocados and other tropical fruits. But if climate trends continue as they are, this land of citrus fruits could, in the near or far future, be one of bananas, mangoes, and other once-exotic imports.

Text by Stefano Liberti, photos by Francesco Bellina.

While farming and nature are inextricably bound together, political bargaining often sets the two in opposition. Recent protests across Europe and worldwide show growing frustration among farmers. The European Commission is responding with row-backs on environmental standards. Could farmers be brought back onside with a Common Agricultural Policy U-turn on trade?

Imagine a job where you never get a day off. Where your work, providing an essential public service, requires you to take on hundreds of thousands of euros in debt over decades. Where you never know how much you’ll get for what you sell. Where mainstream media either ignores or vilifies you. Where your health is at risk from prevailing practices. Where you don’t earn enough to retire with a pension. Where, once you do retire, no new generation is willing to take up the reins because the quality of life is considered low. Welcome to today’s farming in Europe. And not just in Europe but worldwide. 

It’s not hard to see why recent weeks have witnessed waves of European farmers’ protests from Brussels to Madrid and Warsaw. Headlines have been filled with images of tractors blocking motorways and city centres, slurry dumped at supermarkets, police being sprayed with manure and pelted with eggs. Farmers are vociferously raising their voices demanding dignity, support for their livelihoods, viability of small farms, a future: “No farmers, no food!”  

In Brussels, many of those on the streets have been demonstrating against the free trade agreements that undercut their prices and livelihoods. In Poland, Germany, and Romania, farmers are rejecting the influx of cheap Ukrainian grain and its impact on their livelihoods. In India, farmers are once again out on the streets, resisting the latest attempts to dismantle commodity price support policies, without which their already-strained livelihoods will be even further devalued.  

These protests are not isolated incidents but rather a global expression of frustration and disillusionment with a system that prioritises profit and global competition over people. They are stirring up important debates about regulation, fair prices, trade agreements, and the future of our food. In Europe, the negotiations for a deal with the Mercosur trade bloc loom large, threatening to undercut local producers and exacerbate the challenges they face. 

These protests are not isolated incidents but rather a global expression of frustration and disillusionment with a system that prioritises profit and global competition over people.

Yet, as these protests unfold, panic-stricken politicians – in the heat of a “mega” election year – seem more inclined to throw environmental protection under the bus than address the legitimate grievances of those who feed us. The European Commission has already unscrupulously junked plans to cut pesticide use, scrapped a strategy on sustainable food systems, and loosened environmental and labour requirements that farmers must respect to access farming subsidies under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). 

Missing the point 

In the scheme of farmers’ struggles, the Commission’s response completely misses the point. Many farmers are fighting against deregulation: namely, free trade agreements that set unequal competition, the dumping of cheap produce on their markets, and the dismantling of market support. Scrapping green protections won’t help farmers tackle soaring input and land costs, falling farmgate prices, cut-price competition, a subsidy system that favours the big players, the debt and uncertainty suffocating farmers, nor the outsized power of retail and food giants who profit from their labour. In the European Union, farmer incomes are around 40 per cent lower than non-agricultural incomes. Postponing urgent and necessary action to protect the ecosystems on which farmers depend also panders to far-right agendas, and validates a false narrative of a war between farmers and climate action.  

It cannot be denied that some farming groups have voiced opposition to environmental regulations – raising uncomfortable questions for green movements. Flaws have been identified in the Commission’s initial efforts to promote the European Green Deal, indicating that a change of approach is needed if we are to bring farmers on board for a more sustainable food and farming model.  

All the same, the interests of farmers and the environment coincide. Farmers and farmworkers are the first-level, silent victims of polluting, industrialised food systems: the severe health impacts of occupational exposure to pesticides – too often ignored or concealed – correlate with the development of a wide variety of diseases ranging from respiratory effects to various types of cancer. They would be the first to benefit from phasing out harmful pesticide use. Also, when it comes to climate impacts, farmers are among the first casualties. For example, floods, droughts, and storms wiped out some 10 per cent of Italian farmers’ production in 2022, driving 6 billion euros in losses. No farmers, no environmental transition!  

Farmers’ interests are not fundamentally opposed to the Green Deal, the Farm To Fork Strategy, or a future CAP that supports a green transition. This misconception is often peddled by big agri-food lobbies and political parties seeking to exploit current tensions – lazily parroted by some media outlets.  

What is unsustainable is environmental and climate rules that leave farmers unable to compete on a level playing field, struggling to make ends meet amidst unfair competition and floods of cheap imports. Too often, the costs of environmental regulation are imposed on farmers while the benefits flow to the rest of society. In short, a transition that is not a just transition will fail. Farmers aren’t asking for handouts but for recognition of their essential role in society – and they deserve nothing less. 

Dialogue  

There is huge scope to bring farmers back onside. Fair and just transition plans decided between farmers and the many who sympathise with their plight are a must. To move forward, we must acknowledge the inherent injustices and power imbalances within our food systems. Instead of pitting farmers against environmentalists or consumers, we must work together to build a food system that pays a decent wage, is resilient, and is respectful of our planet’s limits.  

This means implementing policies that address the uneven playing field created by international trade agreements and corporate greed. The right kind of support and processes, co-constructed with farmers and citizens, bring economic benefits for farmers transitioning towards sustainable food and agricultural systems. Studies conducted in France, for example, show that agroecological farms generally have better medium-term economic results than conventional practices.  

Instead of pitting farmers against environmentalists or consumers, we must work together to build a food system that pays a decent wage, is resilient, and is respectful of our planet’s limits.

Belatedly realising the extent of farmer anger, the Commission has convened a series of farmer and civil society dialogues. These could be a useful forum to begin the conversations needed to rebuild trust. But they will only be effective if the Commission genuinely listens to the concerns of farmers, regardless of the size and location of their holdings, as partners in crafting solutions – not just listening to the influential few. Acknowledging uncomfortable home truths about free trade agreements and corporate price-gouging, addressing the marginalisation of small-scale farmers in the decisions that directly affect them, recognising farmers’ knowledge, and decentralising decision-making processes, methods, and funds to take decisions and plan transformations of territories at a local level are all necessary.  

Through dialogue and deep collaboration between farmers, farmworkers, rural communities, and citizens it will be possible to create common visions, and co-design pathways towards a fair and sustainable food system – to bring farmers off the streets and back behind a Green Deal, which is, first and foremost, a fair deal.  

Two long-standing challenges must be tackled head-on. Firstly, instead of U-turns on environmental measures, the Commission must be willing to change course on trade. Secondly, reimagining the CAP is essential – prioritising not commodity production but environmental sustainability, equity, and economic viability for all farmers. 

Fair trade 

For decades, the EU’s liberalisation of agricultural markets and pursuit of bilateral trade agreements has left farmers increasingly exposed to unfair competition. Food is unlike any other economic sector. It is a basic human need and it should be treated as such. 

From the start, the Achilles’ heel of the Farm To Fork Strategy and the Green Deal was the external dimension. The Commission willed an environmental transition that didn’t affect its trade policy. But this is not tenable and is why recent calls for a “Global Green Deal” should now be heard.  

A Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism – essentially, a carbon tax applied to imported products – has been introduced in some sectors of production that are particularly carbon-intensive, including cement, electricity, aluminium, fertilisers, and fossil energies. But, so far, the mechanism hasn’t been applied to agriculture, unprotected from environmental dumping. The Farm To Fork strategy has remained vague and toothless on this point. For all the talk of mirror clauses, sustainability chapters, and levelling up, substandard imports continue to undercut the products of European farmers. This has left farmers vulnerable to market disruption – as experienced with the importation of cheap grain from Ukraine.  

A fair and green deal for farmers must consider a carbon border adjustment for agriculture. It requires a complete rethink of the trade deal with Mercosur – or the suspension of negotiations altogether. Cracking down on price-gouging by fertiliser giants and input suppliers is also a must. As is taking action throughout the food supply chain to ensure fair prices that reflect the cost of sustainable production, including much tougher action on unfair trading practices, corporate abuses of power, and cut-price supermarket buyers squeezing farmers to the bone – taking inspiration from Spain, where selling below the price of production has been prohibited.   

Reimagining CAP 

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is in dire need of a reformation to address the disparities, poverty, and environmental harm that continue to plague European farmers.  

A cornerstone of EU policy since its inception in the 1960s, the CAP has significantly transformed both Europe’s socio-economic and environmental landscapes. Originally conceived as a response to food shortages following World War II, the CAP aimed to increase food security, production, and incomes. It focused primarily on price support mechanisms, and subsidies for key commodities such as grains, dairy, and sugar. While these policies initially achieved their objectives, they led to overproduction, environmental degradation, and unfair dumping of surpluses on Global South markets.  

The Common Agricultural Policy is in dire need of a reformation to address the disparities, poverty, and environmental harm that continue to plague European farmers.  

Over the decades, to achieve greater “market orientation”, the CAP has shifted to awarding farmers a flat-rate subsidy based on the hectares of land they farm – thus privileging large-scale operations. A smaller pot has also been available to fund rural development and conditional “greening” measures. Today, the EU’s biggest budget line disproportionately benefits the largest farms specialised in industrial agriculture and livestock production, leaving small-scale and family-owned farms struggling to compete. 80 per cent of subsidies flow to just 20 per cent of farmers. 

Now, the challenges posed by ecological crises, the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the cost of living crisis, the prospective accession of agricultural powerhouse Ukraine into the EU, and today’s farmer protests are calling the entire model into question.  

In this context, the stop-start implementation of the Green Deal has failed to change the shape of the CAP or to shift the fundamentals of EU agriculture, while adding a sense of complexity. Lobbying by big economic interests has contributed to curtailing reforms and rising uncertainty. Only large farms can afford to cover the bureaucratic costs tied to the current system and compete in the low-cost mass production model, which rewards economies of scale and capital-intensive forms of production. The current absence of “vision” (in the words of the former Agriculture Commissioner) risks ceding ground to those vested interests who have captured the bulk of CAP funds to date, ignoring the threats to farmer livelihoods from trade and deregulation. 

The Commission is threatening to water down green requirements in the CAP by making them only voluntary, which would be an abdication of leadership. The Commission should urgently accelerate its thinking about the next CAP reforms to envision a bold and positive future for EU farmers, and a just transition – rather than clinging to the same old failed recipe. This means moving beyond the simple idea of innovation, digitalisation, and ever-larger farms as silver bullets to modernise agriculture. Europe’s investment in CAP must be to guarantee fair prices for farmers’ produce, transparent supply chains, healthy food, and support for agroecological farming – rewarding farmers, small and big, not for land ownership but for their environmental stewardship. 

This must go hand in hand with a broader strategy to re-envision Europe’s food systems from the ground up, with social justice, environmental transition, and health at its core. The Farm to Fork Strategy needs to go back to its origins, returning to a truly integrated and comprehensive food policy for Europe, with joined-up steps to promote just and sustainable food systems in Europe and globally, with the right governance structures for an integrated food system policy. 

Farmers’ protests have been a long time in the making. They are a wake-up call for policymakers to rethink our approach to food systems, and to prioritise the well-being of farmers and rural communities alongside the resilience of our farming and our environment. As we stand on the cusp of major European elections, the choices we make will shape the future of our food system for generations to come. Let’s choose solidarity over scapegoating, cooperation over culture wars, and a future where farmers can thrive alongside the communities they live in and the land they steward.