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Saving seeds and preserving genetic resources goes hand in hand with the crucial question of legacy. In March, Seeds4All visited Welsh farmer, grain lover and peer educator Gerald Miles. Adèle Pautrat reports. […] -
Quite quickly, Ireland has seen the kind of land concentration more familiar in other parts of Europe. Various pressures are coming to bare on access to land, including the desires of the very wealthy to build up an asset bank. Daniel Long is a young dairy farmer from south Tipperary, which has seen hugely inflated prices paid by billionaires for land. What impact does this have, including on how young people and their future in farming? Long also outlines the beginnings of a campaign to draw attention to this issue, while making the case for a Land Observatory in Ireland. […] -
The ongoing farmer protests are the longest and most impactful of all the farmer protests in the history of the European Union and have led to dangerous changes in EU environmental policy and triggered a new rise of far-right political groups across the EU. In this interview, Natalia Mamonova talks about the limits of neoliberalism, the current state of farmer protests, changes in EU policy and the alarming forecast for the upcoming EU parliamentary elections in June. […] -
The European Parliament has officially backed plans to fast-track changes to the EU’s farming subsidy programme which dismantles its environmental requirements in the process. However civil society is not ready to let the decision go down without a fight, with lawyers gearing up to challenge the move. Natasha Foote reports. […] -
Local communities in rural and urban areas can be powerful changemakers when it comes to food system transformation, even when national and EU policies fall way short. At Feeding Ourselves 2024, a roundtable on Bottom-Up Approaches to Sustainable Food Systems brought together actors engaged in the development of fair & ecological food systems in Germany, France and Ireland. ARC2020 was joined by Ann-Marie Weber of kollektiv von MORGEN (DE), Henrik Maas of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft bäuerliche Landwirtschaft (DE), Thierry Lohr, elected representative in the Municipality of Plessé (FR), and Fergal Anderson of Talamh Beo (IE). […] -
Under pressure from farmer protests, upcoming elections and its own cowardice in the face of climate and biodiversity collapse, the political establishment in Brussels and beyond is fast-tracking the evisceration of CAP’s environmental elements. This rush job began on 15th March with a proposal from the Commission, and will likely end Thursday 25th when the last full plenary of the Parliament rubber stamps the proposed regulation. The latest piece of sequencing was confidential legal advice given to the European Parliament on the process. In part one Natasha Foote outlined the proposal and the legal advice. Here Oliver Moore applies a critical analysis to shortcomings therein. […] -
When the Commission proposed re-opening the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy in efforts to placate protesting farmers, stakeholders were quick to question the legitimacy of the process, with some even labelling the move “unlawful”. Now, the European Parliament’s legal service has weighed in on the process. So what is the verdict? And what does it mean for the future direction of the policy process? Natasha Foote digs in. […]
