Farmers across Europe are preparing for an escalated second wave of mass protest, more intense than the unrest Brussels endured in 2024. Trade deal after trade deal removes market protection.
At a period at which a clash in the Middle East has pushed costs to dire levels even as the spring planting season begins, the farm community has reached an explosive limit. On top of the aforementioned burden, EU subsidy rules mean smaller member states must fund food production even if it generates a deficit. Brussels has proven adept at absorbing farmer anger, but the community is no longer willing to accommodate the erosion of its livelihoods.
The protest in Estonia on 19 March drew almost 700 tractors to Tallinn, an unexpected surge involving convoys stretching across the country. The Estonian Chamber of Agriculture and Commerce and the KEVILI cooperative organised the action around a precise demand: 540 million euros the European Commission allocated to rectify Estonia’s historical subsidy disadvantage.
Farmers fear the government will redirect the aforementioned fund. The bankruptcy of E-Piim, a dairy cooperative, recently sharpened the sector’s anger. Kerli Ats, the chamber’s chairwoman, made the sector’s intentions plain: “if politicians and officials, especially the staff at the Ministry of Finance, do not take farmers into account, we are ready to persist with protests in the autumn.”
Another Trade Deal, Same Farmer Sacrifice
On 24 March, Brussels concluded a trade deal with Australia, removing almost all tariffs between the two economies. The accord opens EU markets to 30,600 tonnes of Australian beef annually over ten years, along with new quotas on lamb, sugar, and rice.
Copa-Cogeca, the group speaking for Europe’s farmers and agri-cooperatives, called the concessions intolerable in an era of non-stop trade opening. The group warned that farmers cannot keep paying the price for the said deals. Belgian farmer and MEP Benoît Cassart noted that Ursula von der Leyen acted unilaterally. Irish Farmers’ Association president Francie Gorman noted the agricultural sacrifice without embellishment: “farmers feel they are being used as a sacrificial lamb.”
The Commission’s rationale is legible. Australia supplies lithium, rare earths, nickel, and copper for the energy transition, and states such as Germany see evident industrial export gains. Said trend denotes a constant distribution of benefits: industrial gains achieved through agricultural concessions.
Copa-Cogeca warned that European agriculture has reached an entrenched role as a bargaining chip, and flagged separately the increasing geopolitical instability – a factor contributing to an agricultural crisis approaching on many fronts.
Even Siberia’s Farmers Took to the Streets
The sense of agricultural abandonment travels far past EU borders. On 19 March, Russian officials promised compensation to farmers in the Novosibirsk region. The state had ordered the culling of thousands of cattle because of disease, a development triggering the defining protests of the war era.
Scientists publicly questioned the scale of the culls, noting the diseases mentioned do not normally lead to such large quantities of animals being killed. Authorities offered 70,000 roubles per adult cow, a sum one farmer called an insult, given the years spent raising the animal. Across governance systems, the funds farmers have left are now too little to withstand choices made far from the field.
A Middle East War Hits European Fields
The conflict in Iran began on 28 February and has restructured the cost of farming across the Northern Hemisphere. Ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has almost stopped, a problem because nearly a third of globally traded fertilisers usually passes through.
The ship count dropped from 130 a day to almost none in early March. Because of the blockage, urea prices jumped from $482 per tonne to $720 by mid-March, a 50% increase concentrated in the weeks leading into spring planting. European gas benchmarks doubled to over €60 per megawatt-hour, a repeat of the energy price shock seen in 2022.
German arable farmer Paul Henschke told Euronews that the price he receives for grain is now three times lower than the cost of fertiliser. Svein Tore Holsether, chief executive of Yara International, stated in a Guardian interview that if the Strait stays closed, the result will be “catastrophic.”
He noted the regional clash has global effects hitting the food system directly. Sarah Marlow from Argus told CNBC that the Middle East is the primary source of the world’s sulphur, urea, and ammonia.
Food as Strategy: The Brussels Blind Spot
The EU follows one rule in trade deals: farming pays for geopolitical access. Priorities such as lithium from Australia or technology markets in Canada are achieved through agricultural concessions. Copa-Cogeca has often warned that farming is a bargaining chip for Brussels, a claim now backed by documented fact.
The ability to grow food is an economic fact. Brussels has built a system where the people growing the food pay the highest price. Now, the rising costs from the Iran conflict make the debt unpayable for many small and mid-sized operations in the current season.
Timo Varblas of the Estonian Farmers’ Federation voiced the demand for long-term assurance that food security is a government priority. Frida Youssef of the UN noted the acute urgency of the spring planting season, a period at which fertiliser purchases are indispensable.
A second, more punishing wave of agricultural unrest now gathers across Europe, and the ensuing months will expose the trade-offs inherent in the Brussels formula for agriculture: a paradigm in which geopolitical deals generate industrial access through agricultural cost absorption.
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