Day: April 25, 2025

While the United States continues to fuel geopolitical tensions with the implementation of tariffs which recently led to the protest of American farmers, across the Atlantic, European farmers have protested the elimination of tariffs.

On December 6, 2024, the European Union and Mercosur countries of South America reached a preliminary consensus on a trade cooperation agreement. This deal would eliminate tariffs on over 90% of trade between two of the world’s largest trade blocs, the E.U. and the Mercosur countries of Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. At the time, Uruguay’s President Yamandú Orsi claimed that President Donald Trump’s impending tariff war would only help push the E.U. to ratify the agreement, echoing Brazilian finance minister Fernando Haddad’s suggestion that the E.U.-Mercosur deal should be seen now more than ever for its political potential to provide “an alternative to a bipolar world.”

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

The deal bears political ramifications for farmers across Europe who find themselves increasingly undermined and outsourced. For well over a year now, under the banner of slogans such as “Those who feed you are dying of hunger,” strike teams of discontented farmers in France, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Italy, Spain, and Britain have been staging “tractor-cades” on major roadways, dumping compost in city streets, and pasting government offices with liquid manure.

For the small, biodynamic farmer in France, the political challenge is even closer to home. Those farmers who are just as interested in sustainability as making profits are not only fighting against E.U, policies such as the E.U.-Mercosur deal, but against the agenda of their most powerful farmers’ union too, the National Federation of Agricultural Holders’ Unions, or, in French, the FNSEA.

This union originally formed to help address another “farm problem” over 80 years ago, when, after its formation in 1946, it helped farmers organize to demand state price supports and subsidies. At the same time, FNSEA leaders also sought to shape French agriculture into a model that would increase the landholdings and revenue of large-scale industrial operations such as their own. Today these productivist priorities persist, and many farmers say it can be difficult to balance production with the health of their workers and land.

Read More: Farmers Fear More Pain From Trump’s Trade War

In the years following World War II, French farmers struggled to meet the economic demands elicited by the United States’ Marshall Plan, or European Recovery Program. In return for postwar financial aid, western European countries were expected to become viable U.S. trade partners. To remedy its poor agricultural production, the French state began pushing land consolidation, industrial farm practices, and U.S. tractors.

Postwar France was home to about 2.5 million farms, but only around 25,000 tractors were in use. Spurred by General Charles de Gaulle’s claims that France’s future hinged upon the modernization of its agriculture, figures such as agronomist René Dumont and geographer Maurice Le Lannou helped propagate a campaign to “awaken” a thirst for financial profit and technological progress among the peasantry. Patriotic advertisements soon filled the newspapers and radio, framing expansion, modernization, and the use of pesticides, herbicides, and synthetic fertilizers as promising a better and easier life for the French farmer.

The plan worked: in three years, the number of tractors in France quadrupled, crop yields rose, and hunger levels fell.

But industrializing wasn’t cheap, and farmers took on more and more debt to purchase modern equipment. Still prices of agricultural goods had to remain low to prevent wage inflation in other sectors. In 1953, the average annual income of French farmers was less than half the national average; debt was understood as an obligatory rite of passage into modernized agriculture.

And so, farmers protested. On July 12 of that same year, 30,000 winegrowers gathered in the southern town of Béziers, parking their shiny new tractors right in the middle of major roadways. This historic protest inaugurated a summer of 300 to 500 barricades across France, establishing the tractor blockade as a symbol of agricultural revolt. In April 1954, 50,000 winegrowers took to the town’s streets.

These blockades simultaneously represented the state’s success in modernizing the country’s agriculture, as well as its failure to fulfill its own part of the bargain. Although farmers had been promised higher profits and an easier way of life, the contrary became true for some. The crushing debt they’d taken on in their dutiful purchase of modern machinery wasn’t consistently rewarded with increased revenues but often increased stress and a higher rates of illness and injury.

The FNSEA helped organize many of these protests, acting to mediate between the state and union members. The peasantry made indignant calls for change. “Respect our misery, and we’ll respect you,” they would chant. Yet the FNSEA’s affluent leaders also actively pursued a reconfiguration of agricultural landholdings that undermined most of these very constituents.

Based on a dirigiste model of active state intervention from the Nazi occupation, the FNSEA’s inaugural management team was composed of bourgeois farmers from the Parisian basin and former Vichy administrators. In return for fostering peace, profitability, and efficiency among its members, the FNSEA was given substantial political power.

Since the leaders of the FNSEA tended to already have large-scale, modernized operations, they were the ideal vanguard for leading France out of traditional, biodynamic farming and into industrial productivism. The FNSEA handpicked landholders to sit as municipal agricultural commissioners across the country. These commissioners helped the state facilitate the remembrement, a consolidation of smaller, fragmented land parcels into larger, more efficient farms. But critics say the process created an environmental catastrophe of national scale.

In the decades following the war, 40,000 to 50,000 small farms were consolidated into larger industrial operations every single year. Over the objections ofindependent landowners, a special Government body, called the “Service du Remembrement” transferred land deeds to new ownership according to logics of profit and efficiency. Millions of hedge rows and “low value” orchards were razed to make way for tractors and monoculture. In just a few decades, France’s farming population wentfrom 7 million in 1946 to fewer than 3 million in 1974. Hundreds of thousands of families lost the land they’d farmed for generations as French agriculture was strong-armed into modernity.

Referring to themselves as the voice and “spearhead” of European agriculture, the FNSEA always prioritized exceptional yields. Such yields often came at the expense of sustainability and community, however.

For example, FNSEA leaders recently fought successfully for the use of pesticides in France banned within the EU. FNSEA leaders also fought to prevent the sharing of knowledge that these same pesticides are toxic to farmworkers who handle them, potentially leading to Parkinson’s and Lymphoma.

While modern farmer protests in France may seem to tell the tale of the small-time farmer fighting against the hegemony of global economic growth, history tells us that the situation is far more complicated. The French peasantry has been and still is at risk of being disenfranchised by the very structures claiming to support their prosperity, often at the cost of both their health and land.

Michael Overstreet is a Ph.D. Candidate in French Studies at the University of Virginia where he studies the ethics and aesthetics of ecological transition.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.