Polish farmers, keeping good on their promise to carry out nationwide protests in response to the catastrophic impact of EU ‘green’ policies, have kicked off a month-long strike, blocking roads across the country as well as border crossings with Ukraine.
As has been witnessed in France, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Portugal, and elsewhere in recent days and weeks, columns of slow-moving, horn-honking tractors manned by righteously indignant farmers clogged thoroughfares as they descended on more than 250 locations across Poland on Friday, February 9th.
The Trade Union of Individual Farmers ‘Solidarity,’ Poland’s main farming union, organized the nationwide protests.
Feeling increasingly and unfairly squeezed on all sides, Polish farmers, like their counterparts across Europe, are demanding politicians relax environmental standards—both those already implemented by Brussels and those outlined in the EU’s forthcoming, ideologically driven Green Deal.
The EU’s left-liberal Green Deal, as the Commission describes it, is a “package of policy initiatives, which aims to set the EU on the path to a green transition, with the ultimate goal of reaching climate neutrality by 2050.” Critics, of which there’s no shortage, contend the radical initiative, if implemented as planned, would decimate farmers’ ability to financially sustain themselves by doing what they’ve always done—producing the food we all rely upon not to starve to death.
“They’re talking about climate protection. But why should it be done at farmers’ expense?” Janusz Bialoskorski, a 62-year-old farmer protesting in Poznan, told AFP.
“We do not produce plastics polluting the oceans, we do not build cruise ships that pollute the environment, nor do we fly to Davos on our jets,” Bialoskorski added.
Additionally, like other farmers across Europe, especially those in Central European countries neighboring Ukraine, like Slovakia and Hungary, Poland’s food producers are calling on their government to restrict cheap agricultural imports from Ukraine, which they say are unjustly driving down prices and destroying their livelihoods.
“We have no other choice,” Marcin Wilgos, organizer of the protest in Dorohusk at the border with Ukraine told AFP, as he spoke next to a banner urging Brussels to introduce bans on Ukrainian grain and sugar.
Ukrainian grain along with other agricultural commodities, produced in massive quantities and subject to fewer regulations, is exempt from EU customs duties, making it far cheaper than local production.
“The glut of products from Ukraine, produced not in accordance with EU standards and procedures, is a huge burden for us,” Wilgos, a 40-year-old farmer said.
Last among the Polish farmers’ demands is state subsidies for animal husbandry, which according to them has become increasingly expensive to where it is no longer a profitable endeavor.
On Friday, Polish Agriculture Minister Czeslaw Siekierski of the agrarian Polish People’s Party told state media that farmers had “legitimate expectations and demands” to limit the flood of cheap agricultural imports from Ukraine.
Ukrainian grain imports were banned last fall under the leadership of Poland’s national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party. The new, left-liberal government, led by Donald Tusk, has so far kept the ban in place.
Limits on the importation of sugar and poultry from Ukraine may be needed if the influx is too large, Siekierski said, noting that the Polish government plans to address the matter during discussions with Kyiv.