State of the Union: Greenpeace warns of disappearing family-run farms in EU
04.10.2024 - 22:09
/ euronews.com
The situation in Europe’s southeastern neighbourhood escalated dramatically over the past week.
Following two weeks of Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon and the killing of the leader of Iran-backed political party and militant group Hezbollah, Tehran hit back.
At least 180 missiles were fired at Tel Aviv and other Israeli locations, causing only minor damage.
The reason is that most of the missiles were intercepted by Israel’s air defence and US and British forces operating in the region.
International observers are now worried that future strikes could push the region closer to the brink.
Even before the Iranian attack, the EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell called upon the parties concerned to avoid further bloodshed.
"Rockets and other projectiles into Israel territory have to stop. The sovereignty of both Israel and Lebanon has to be guaranteed. And any further military intervention could dramatically aggravate the situation and it has to be avoided.”
On the other side of the Mediterranean, Michel Barnier finally revealed his cards.
The new French prime minister delivered his first political address to the National Assembly, announcing further belt-tightening and further taxes to reverse spiraling debts.
Barnier asked the wealthiest individuals and large companies to pay their fair share of taxes.
“The situation of our accounts today requires a targeted effort, time-limited, a shared effort with a demand for tax justice. This sharing of the effort will lead us to ask large and very large companies that make significant profits to participate in the collective recovery.”
Despite Barnier’s making the case of tax justice, many ordinary French fear that, in the end, they will have to foot the bill.
French unions took to the streets to put social demands at the heart of the political debate.
Their message to Barnier was: We are watching you!
One group always creating headaches for French governments are farmers.
In his speech, Barnier promised further aid to farmers, but the situation requires a fundamental rethinking of the way agriculture is run in Europe, not only in France.
Nobody has forgotten yet the massive farmers protest across Europe at the beginning of the year.
To go deeper on this issue, we spoke to Marco Contiero, EU agriculture policy director at Greenpeace.
Euronews: So, Greenpeace is out with a new report warning that there are fewer and fewer family-run farms and much larger so-called “mega farms”. Why is that a bad thing?
Contiero: Well, the concern is that if we want to maintain rural areas filled with farms where there are rural jobs, specifically agricultural workers and with rural communities that live around these farms, we need to maintain farmers on the ground. If we go towards US models