Debate: The severe impact of the recent spring frost on fruit and wine growers
Date: THURSDAY, 20 MAY 2021
Speaker: Mick Wallace
Political group: The Left
Country: Germany
Language: EN

I grow a little wine in Piemonte and I’ve been familiar with the frost for a few years, believe it or not. I’ve built and operated Italian wine bars in Dublin, and so I have a lot of contacts with producers in Italy. Speaking to some of these producers, there is a shared understanding about the problems. Obviously, it’s hard to find consensus on the way forward. There are many problems facing the wine industry and agriculture, in general. Some are connected to global warming, others are connected to privatisation and the neo—liberalisation of the agricultural sector. The fact of the matter is that the neo—liberal ideology not only drives us faster towards climate systems breakdown, but compounds the disastrous effects of the ravages of climate change. We are generally talking about Southern Europe in the debate, but the trend is global. It’s impossible to talk about just one sector of agriculture, because it’s all connected. Some sectors of agriculture, like dairy and beef, are contributing to climate catastrophe. Some forms of agriculture are helping to make other forms of agriculture precarious. The world over, intensive big—input farming has made deserts out of perfectly decent arable land. Millions have been displaced and often there are secondary displacements as conflicts over reduced access to essential resources flare up. This is the context of global warming: the violent and forced suppression and control of the global south, which is used as a site of resource extraction to feed the perpetual growth of the global north as it continues to billow out carbon emissions and speed along climate disaster. Not only does the EU help destroy the environment where it extracts its raw material from, it ensures that these areas of extraction do not have the resources available to mitigate and implement the most basic mechanisms to protect their own populations from destruction. Now European agriculture is suffering from the effects of global warming that the developed world’s capitalist system helped bring about. The spring frosts and extreme weather events have become part of everyday life, and even if the global north were to take real action to deal with climate change, which means degrowth, it would take many years before we would start seeing signs of improvement, but start we must. The producers that I have spoken to have all said that the best thing for them as farmers would be for the EU to engage in real climate action. Bruno Rivetti, a producer in Neive in Piemonte said to me: these increasingly frequent and intense frost waves are the consequences of climate change due both to pollution and to the exploitation of the land and natural resources. He says we must learn to rethink our earth and the planet we live on as a precious asset, not only for us, but above all for our children and for the generations to come. There are also calls for investment in research into mitigation practices and so on, but the fact of the matter is, the best defence against a late frost at the moment is pruning later in the year. Now this means the pruning process will have to take place much more quickly for vineyards of any size and this means investment in expensive equipment that can automate a part of the pruning process. This leads us to another problem: the bureaucracy involved at all levels of wine production and agriculture in general has become unworkable. There are ever more private intermediaries between the farmer and his or her local organisation and the grant money available. I spoke to a producer in Lazio, Marco Marocco, and he said: I don’t know if Europe can help us. The biggest problem we have in Italy that perhaps Europe can help us with, is to solve our bureaucratic problem, even to have access to the old European fund. Many vintners that I know, they renounce to participate, to ask for European funds because they’re terrified by the quantity of bureaucracy that we have to face, because here in Italy it’s a crazy situation. It’s a crazy situation, he says and it’s a huge problem. He said: I applied for a European fund five years ago. I had an answer after five years. They just let me know that I was not in because they’d finished the money. After five years, you know. I could even be dead after five years. It’s all connected. And unless you see that colonialism, wars, capitalism, privatisation and endless growth are leading to destructive spring frosts in Europe, we are condemning all farmers everywhere to increased devastation of their livelihoods. We have a responsibility to protect food producers and, sadly, the last CAP and the new one are still giving 80% of the money to the 20% richest farmers. We are still giving the money to the farmers that don’t need it. The money has to go to the farmers that need it if we want them to survive, if we want to help them to move away from chemical fertilisers and pesticides. This can’t happen unless we help them. But we’re not doing it, we’re still giving the money away to those with the most power and the most money.