The farmers are on the streets. And when the farmers are on the streets, things aren't good. The farmers' complaint can be summed up in one word - the market. Farmers live on an eggshell of precarity. An eggshell which thickens or thins to the rhythm of the market. Not an easy task. There's nothing more annoying than not being in control of your own life. Especially when you are working yourself into the ground for precisely that lack of control.
The farmer hasn't got much imagination, he dreams of living in a stable economy, with stable production, consistent prices and regular income. Just as we all do. There's nothing more agonising than instability. Everybody would like a cushy life, without too many surprises. A comfortable kind of existence, protected from the misery and fear of not knowing what tomorrow will bring. But that's not how the free-market works. The market deals in risk and hazard. The gamble of investing in a business that may be worthless the next day. Risk is Viagra for capitalists. But it is also the hell which the workers and victims of capitalism must endure. Globalist free-marketers want to instill a piratical mentality in us. They want us to be movie buccaneers, amoral, insouciant, spending in one night everything that we've nicked during the day. Jolly, pitiless pirates comfortable in the knowledge that we'll remake our fortune the next day off the backs of our unlucky victims.
Except that farmers are neither pirates nor buccaneers. Actually, when you listen closely to what they want, you realise that they are, without quite realising it, communists. On a reporting trip in Poland, a farmer described to me the shape and rhythm of the peasant life behind the old Iron Curtain. Every week, he went to the train station with his potato crop. There, he was paid a fixed price for his goods. Every farmer's dream. No potato beauty-contest, no undercutting, no speculation, no market. Always the same price. The potatoes were loaded into cargo-wagons that trundled off to Moscow to fill the often-empty stomachs there.
When the farmers are on the street, things aren't going well.
Around that same time on the Ivory Coast, cocoa farmers were submitted to the vagaries of the free-market. Often near penniless, small farmers generally did not have the means to ride out the ups and downs of the markets. In 1960 Houphouët-Boigny† created The Stabilisation Exchange, which bought cocoa, cotton and coffee at a fixed price, ensuring the dearly-held wish of all the world's farmers, stable prices and predictable revenue. His successor, Bedie, a free-marketeer formed by the US, dismantled the Exchange and simply left the planters and farmers to the mercy of the markets.
So, why do I say all that? Well, do you want to live in a market economy or a regulated economy? The French love their farmers but 53% of them also love Mr Macron, our US-style free-marketeer. The French are spending proportionally less and less on food and proportionally more and more on Iphones. If farmers were smart, they'd grow Iphones in their fields and laptops on their trees. French people want supermarkets selling five steaks for the price of two but they can't work out why farmers are killing themselves or burning tires outside supermarkets in protest. French people want everything and its opposite. It is not the EU in Brussels which is strangling French agriculture, it is the French themselves. They want their food free like they want their newspapers free.
Food has been as thoroughly devalued as the press. Outside Metro stations, they give out free papers which always end up in the gutter in almost exactly the same way that supermarkets dump expired food in the car park bins. The only exception to this grim new system are the organic farmers. They can manage. Their produce is a little more expensive because it is better quality.
It's all about being cheap. And things are only cheap when you remove their value. And you do that by lowering quality. Everything is being devalued in agriculture. To begin with, animals are exploited like mere objects, fed and tendered like machines. Then the soil is drenched in endless tons of chemicals. And now it is the farmer's turn to be treated just like his animals and his fields - industrially . Like a worthless object. What's a farmer's life worth? What's a consumer's life worth, for that matter? Those lives are worth less and less. Just like the stuff they grow and eat.
- The whole worker-bee business is the result of a translator's nervous breakdown. There was a great passage about Les Shadoks of which you have never heard. Explaining what it meant would have taken a decade (translation's really hard, you know). You can find them here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Shadoks if you are interested. You might like them. They're cute. And they don't speak French.
- † Félix Houphouët-Boigny was the President of the Ivory Coast from 1960 to 1993.