Italian, Spanish farmers have been holding peaceful actions for days to express their discontent.
The protests are known to have taken place across the bloc in recent weeks. Farmers complain that the 27 EU countries’ policies on the environment and other issues are fiscally unfair and make their produce more expensive than imports from non-EU countries.
It was previously thought that the protests had not reached the southern part of Europe, but now farmer protests are taking place in Spain, Italy in the same way as in Germany, France, Poland.
On Friday, for example, a small column of tractors moved through Rome’s historic centre towards the Colosseum, accompanied by police patrols.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has repeatedly said her government has already met some of the farmers’ key demands, but many feel neglected. In addition, she has emphasised that her government has already allocated an additional €3 billion from the Italian part of the EU’s pandemic recovery funds, bringing the total allocated to the agricultural sector to €8 billion. The Italian PM on Friday afternoon at a roundtable with her ministers and some delegates of the main agricultural associations also agreed to extend the income tax exemption for farmers in force since 2017, but only for low-income earners.
Several representatives of the protesters met separately with Agriculture Minister Francesco Lollobrigida, but that did not stop a new column of hundreds of tractors from starting to march along Rome’s main ring road.
An identical situation is taking place in Spain. Farmers in Spain held similar protests for the fourth day in a row. Protests took place in Oviedo, Pamplona and Zaragoza, and tractors clogged several city streets and suburban roads.
The complaints of Spain’s farmers – in addition to dissatisfaction with EU policies – are that a law that implies a fair price for supermarkets for bulk purchases is not being enforced, while consumer prices are rising sharply.
There were also calls for farmers to move on Madrid at midnight for a Saturday protest outside the headquarters of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s Socialist Party.
Demonstrations are expected to continue over the coming weeks, with a major protest in the capital on 21 February.
