Reading by Enzo Séchaud. Ending music : Mille-et-cent, du groupe Ciac Boum.
First, while browsing the library shelves, I stumbled upon a tractor on the front page of Le Figaro. I opened the paper, because I like tractors, and I still have this vague feeling of being involved when it comes to the agricultural world. Surprisingly, the article was rather supportive of protests and blockades, actions that this friendly newspaper’s editorial line usually condemns firmly.
Then, a few days ago, someone assured me in passing during a conversation of all possible sympathy, because current events were being discussed. I was asked if my parents were busy blocking the highway with a tractor, like all those of their socioeconomic group who were making headlines at the time, whom people were surprised to rediscover alive, although few, to the sound of their demands.
I said that my parents would never even block a bike lane alongside the FNSEA.
Yet there exists, at the end of the void, a karst plateau that has become a bastion and symbol of an intersectional, ecological, and peasant struggle. And on this Larzac where I grew up tending sheep, I memorized the history of those legendary fights and that we belong to this nature we are destroying. That we are life in crisis. That living “with our feet in the earth” means knowing how to rise with it, not immobilize and constrain it…
Why does agricultural activism always seem to lean right when, last I checked, the Peasant Confederation still exists? When was it our idea in the first place to have sheep on the Champ de Mars and in the Rodez courthouse?
So here it is.
I fled the stinking tractors, the fences in the blazing sun for hours, the chainsaws that bend backs irreversibly.
And I crossed to the other side of the mirror.
And on the other side, the reflection of the peasant world is a little blurry.
It evokes a partial imagery, ranging, depending on the interlocutor, from white-painted fences around a little house on the prairie to big, hairy bears who pour NPK into their coffee and whose only goal is to annihilate biodiversity with hefty doses of glyphosate. And who, of course, are all hunters.
The reflection of this cliché on the small screen is no less romantic.
The media peasant is poor.
He earns a miserable salary and works an overwhelming number of hours.
He loves his country and is drowning in debt.
He suffers from the hardships of labor. [Squeak]
His foremost representative is a millionaire agro-industrialist, who owns, among other things, a farming business. But no one seems to suffer from this paradox, which is quite easily accepted.
And so, the media peasant, at the start of my story, is protesting.
So, naturally, I didn’t recognize him right away. Because at home, no one fits that description.
Even seeing them on strike felt odd, as it’s not the kind of activity that usually takes place in the fields or barns I’m familiar with. Truth be told, it wouldn’t make a huge impact to harvest with banners saying, “We feed you and are dying from it,” since, of course, we don’t see the harvesters.
I said it, I’m naive.
So at first, I wanted to tell the story.
To say it’s not this. To say it’s more like that. To say, look at them. To say, “Let me show you.” But I don’t understand anything, really. Between the beliefs instilled in me as a child and the media portrayal of the situation, I don’t see the connection.
Why is the representative of small farmers a man in a suit? For whom and for what is a union led by an employer fighting?
Suddenly, I feel like agriculture is bad, like we’re all going to die, but somehow it’s my fault, my parents’ fault, the fault of my friends’ parents.
Because now that I live in the city, I no longer keep my eyes fixed on a small plot of stony land; I see the large-scale farmers. I learn the figures. There’s the one I knew: a farmer commits suicide every two days. There’s the one I wouldn’t have believed: a quarter of them have incomes approaching 100,000 euros per year.
So what is a farmer?
An empty word covering a bunch of people with no connection to each other, to make them all disappear.
Making small farmers disappear (the periodic suicides) when “farmers” are granted accommodations that only benefit the big ones.
Making millionaires disappear who hide behind their agricultural corporate status, owning multinationals and close ties with power, by spreading images of tractors and (usually) men in dirty pants.
Returning to those highway blockages that earned me the curious sympathy of city-dwellers in search of exoticism. One has to admit that these events are shrouded in mystery, often causing total confusion.
But who are these people?
What kind of life is theirs that resembles nothing I can imagine?
What are those tractors doing on the highway?
And how am I supposed to do my shopping?
But why don’t the cops beat them up when they got us with military weapons at St. Soline?
Who initiated the agricultural uprising in March?
Some almost anonymous, even the Peasant Confederation, which ranks even lower on the recognition and political weight scale.
But as for who claimed it, who led the negotiations, and who won, it’s the FNSEA.
The FNSEA, that’s the National Federation of Farmers’ Unions. Above all, it’s a political force, closely tied to the Chamber of Agriculture, which means they wield influence, for example, on startup subsidies. So these are people you’d better have on your side. For me, the FNSEA has always existed. Yet it isn’t very present. It’s as if, as farmers, we should know they’re the largest agricultural union. But in practice, it doesn’t feel like it’s us, the FNSEA. I’m not even sure I know anyone in it. Certainly, no one who claims to be, anyway.
But then, if those who revolt and those who win aren’t the same people… What cause are we talking about?
The small farmers rise up because the environmental standards and banning of red diesel are going to throw them into monumental trouble. So they say they want a salary, that the price of their products should be protected and not set on the global market in competition with products that have lower production costs, and/or support to leave agro-industrial productivism, to go organic, and yes, go without pesticides.
(It’s not always phrased like that, sometimes it’s even quite different, but that’s still a fair summary of their demands.) And more importantly, they ask, they demand, with manure in hand, to stop being taken for fools.
And then the FNSEA shows up. It’s the federation of agricultural unions. The unions are on strike. So they’re on strike.
They say so.
We, the FNSEA, are blocking the highway. And we have demands.
Their demands aren’t quite the same as those who were angry in the first place. They want to stop the Ecophyto plan because they want to keep doing global trade at lower costs for shareholders’ profit.
So the government, which isn’t bothered at all by shareholder profit, agrees. The farmers have won. The government hasn’t lost. More importantly, shareholders and lobbyists are fine.
And the idea of a genuinely rebellious uprising advocating for the end of productivism, of our disconnected existences, and of widespread ecocide — an idea that exists because it’s how I was raised, because I see it every day around me, including among farmers — well, that idea was smothered in the battle.
But then why wasn’t the same possible at St. Soline? What differs in our social organization when it comes to peasants? The difference between the demands of eco-activists (who more or less aim to challenge the system) and those of the FNSEA, which has no intention of challenging the system, is understandable. What’s less clear is how all dissenting voices can disappear without a trace. Where are all the farmers whose demands differ from those of the dominant union? Even with the ecologists, we can’t deny their existence…
There’s one point that unites nearly all farmers, a point that gives some meaning to this word. It’s that their existence maintains relations with living beings that place them almost under a different ontological paradigm.
And it’s this experience, the dialogue with these populations, that could make it possible to achieve a transition to a viable system, even though it’s really getting hot. That’s why it’s essential for the guardians of the current system to make all farmers with ecological or anti-capitalist concerns invisible.
Why do these people, geographically close, seem so distant to us, why does this ontological variation separate us irrevocably?
We have an image of those we call farmers that pushes them to the margins of our democratic space. We have erased from our everyday landscapes any trace of those who work the land daily to feed us, not only on the other side of the world but also in mainland France. Farmers have become the inhabitants of these obscure, invisible places, extracted from our comprehension.
What are shadow places?
Shadow places, in the sense of Val Plumwood, are all the places on which the material conditions of our lives rest, all the places we depend on and affect but neglect and overlook. For instance, the massive open dumps that receive the unfathomable waste of Western technology in Africa.
It’s as if we only see the submerged part of the iceberg, meaning the vast majority of people who aren’t farmers, even though the world’s balance depends on food. Our gaze should be fixed on those who produce it.
So either we’re victims of an illusion, an inversion of the physical laws that make icebergs float.
Or we’re already underwater.
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