Release the …Bees?!
In this week’s Camino a Ítaca a look at the agricultural protests that have been taking place across Spain and indeed Europe. Swayed by the siren song of the ultra right, farmers just may be delivering themselves into the hands of the very people who support the neoliberal policies that make their lives difficult. Click over to read the original piece in Spanish in the HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF en castellano abajo)
This wasn’t Mr. Burns from
the Simpsons snickering and telling Smithers to release the hounds. Its vibe was
more like something straight out of a 70’s James Bond movie. Except this evil
mastermind wasn’t sitting above a tank full of circling sharks wearing a baby
blue polyester leisure suit in front of a world map.
This would-be-mastermind
had the slicked back longish hair of a bullfighter, black horned rimmed glasses,
the checkered shirt of a secondary school math teacher and wasn’t necessarily
looking for world domination. This headman had more regional designs in mind.
Rather than threatening to
use his new orbiting satellite death ray if his outrageous demands weren’t met,
what this man was menacing the world with was something much more ordinary:
bees. And not killer African bees either, but just your average honeybee.
In a rather surreal press
conference the president of Asaja Extremadura threatened to open up the hives
that they had trucked in from the countryside if the riot police were used to block
them in their ongoing agricultural protests against the government and the EU.
It was as if they had been trained to attack after he gave a secret signal.
Words so utterly bizarre that I was convinced they were from the parody website
El Mundo Today until I realized that they were in fact true.
But the deeper you dig into
these ongoing protests, the more incongruities and outright contradictions you begin
to unearth. Attack bees end up being simply anecdotal in the heady brew of fake
news and globalist conspiracy theories that surround the protests.
In a rural milieu that is
by nature conservative, the ultra-right have seen a large section of
disgruntled voters ripe for the picking. They’ve doubled their efforts to
harness this discontent and have tried to incite them further, using their
dubious explanations for some of the real and justified demands of the farmers.
It’s fertile ground for
their antienvironmental stances, creating strawman arguments against their
loathed 2030 Agenda. All the while placing the blame an overreaching EU for the
problems farmers face. Another of the organizations that the far right also
deeply distrusts and is suspicious of.
The somewhat ironically
green party has also done a complete about-face regarding government subsidies
and grants. They are now calling for increased grants for things like helping
to palliate the effects of the long-standing drought in some parts of the
country. A natural catastrophe caused by something they don’t even believe in,
climate change.
Then
there are the protective measures they are now in favor of. They wave their
made in China national flags and now insist on protectionist measures they
normally abhor to help guarantee food sovereignty, perhaps more because it is a
Muslim majority country that they want protection against rather than their
preferred vulture capital funds listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
Real,
complex problems exist in the agricultural sector but much of these have to do
with the neoliberal policies that the extreme right favor rather than their
fallacious arguments against the 2030 Agenda. Farmers need to be cautious who
they hitch their wagons to or in the end may end up even worse.
