ROME — More than 1,000 tractors were massed at the gates of Rome on Friday, preparing to march on the Italian capital, as a wave of demonstrations by agricultural producers spreads across Europe.
While protests have eased in France and Germany, they have been gaining intensity in Italy, even as Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s farmer-friendly government scrambles to appease their demands.
Italy’s farmers have staged blockades across the country in recent weeks, invoking anti-establishment and Euroskeptic tropes about how Brussels plans to force Italians to eat lab-grown meat and insect flour.
As of late Thursday, there were 1,600 tractors parked at protest camps, such as Passo Corese, on the outskirts of Rome, with many expected to arrive by Monday, said Giancarlo Carapellotti, a spokesman for Betrayed Farmers, a movement that is organizing the protests.
Banners at the farmers’ strongholds included “Unfair Market — You Are Taking Away Our Dignity!” and “No Farmers, No Food!”
A demonstration planned in central Rome on Friday was called off at the last minute, but a convoy of four tractors in the red, white and green of the Italian Tricolor trundled toward the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus in the morning, while commuters braced for chaos on Friday night, when hundreds of farmers were due to circle the city’s ring road.
The farmers are demanding a meeting with Meloni or her agriculture minister — and brother-in-law — Francesco Lollobrigida. If not, they have threatened to blockade the capital, drawing critical parallels with Benito Mussolini’s 1922 March on Rome.
‘We are capable of becoming rude’
Dozens of farmers in the north have, meanwhile, converged on the venue of Italy’s iconic music festival in San Remo, after activists from the upstart populist Agricultural Redemption movement were invited — and then uninvited — to air their grievances on stage during the X-Factor style TV show watched by up to 16 million people.
On Thursday a small group of tractors headed to San Remo in the hope of being allowed on stage, before RAI, the state broadcaster staging the competition, said it was “impossible.”
Filippo Goglio, one of the farmers’ spokespeople, told local media: “They have gone back on their word. We want to go on stage one way or another or we will put the festival in serious difficulty. We have always been peaceful, but if we get exasperated, we are capable of becoming rude.” On Friday, the Agricultural Redemption group said it had agreed on a statement to be read on its behalf instead.
As well as the threat from novel foods that they say threaten their livelihoods, farmers are protesting rising taxes, the high cost of diesel, cheap imports, low supermarket prices and restrictions imposed by EU climate change targets.
A list of 10 demands drawn up by the same group called for a rewrite of the EU Green Deal, which it dubbed “environmentalist extremism”; a ban on imports from countries with lax regulations; VAT cuts on food and wine; the containment of fauna such as wild boar; and school programs extolling farmers as the “guardians of the environment” and producers of life.
They have also attacked the biggest farmers’ lobby, Coldiretti — which has remained largely silent during the latest wave of protests — for selling them out in Brussels. Agricultural Redemption said Coldiretti “has defended only and exclusively its own interests in Brussels and masquerades as the only point of reference in the mobilization.”
Defenders of civilization
Since coming to power as Italy’s first minister for food sovereignty and agriculture Lollobrigida has presented farmers as defenders of civilization and tradition, and claimed that farmers and agricultural systems are in sync with the environment as they ensure maintenance of land.
He has seized on novel foods to open a new front in the culture wars, introducing a raft of patriotic measures favoring traditional foods. But the approach seemed to have backfired, with farmers who have drunk the Kool Aid now spooked by the prospect of insect flour pasta and lab-grown meats.
The government banned lab-grown meat last year but it is unclear whether the move complies with European internal market rules.
Inside the ruling coalition, the parties have been playing a blame game, as Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy and its rival, the League, compete for the same wedge of voters ahead of the European election in June.
The government is considering restoring subsidies for diesel and restoring tax breaks for farmers that need support, the finance minister said Thursday. Hoping to gain some points from farmers, Meloni emphasized her role in the EU’s decision this week to abandon efforts to slash pesticide use.
The Chamber of Deputies on Wednesday passed a law recognizing the Italian farmer as “guardian of the environment and the territory” and established a “National Day of Agriculture.”
Yet beyond symbolic gestures, cash-strapped Italy hasn’t yet come up with a real peace offering for its farmers.
Roberts reported from Rome and Ford from Brussels.
