This edition of State of the Union focuses on the future of agriculture in the EU, the situation in the Middle East, the first plans of the new French government and a pumpkin ripe for the Guinness Book of Records.
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.”
France’s tax hikes
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.
Number of small farms decreasing across EU
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 where we have farms on average having 300 hectares per farm, we’re going to empty rural areas. And this is something that will clearly have negative impacts in terms of social and economic realities on the ground.
Euronews: Let’s talk about this impact. What are the consequences of this development for the farming business, for consumers and for us as society?
Contiero: The problem is that we’ve been treating farmers as if they were one single entity. We clearly show with this report that there are a majority of rather small-scale family farms which are struggling economically, which in many cases are actually getting out of business. And there is a very minority of large-scale farms that have seen their profits increasing. So there is this gap massively increasing and we need to come out with policy solutions to stop this gap from widening and to start helping smaller family farms, farmers and businesses that have to be helped because they are victims of a system.
Euronews: And finally, what would you tell young people who consider a professional life in farming? Would you support them or rather discourage them?
Contiero: I want to be able to encourage them to get into farming because this will clearly provide a very good outcome. The problem we are facing in the farming sector is that there is a major population, the average age of farmers is below 57, and we absolutely need a generational renewal. But for this generational renewal to happen, we need to provide young farmers entering the business with a lot of potential success. Right now, for them, it is extremely difficult because land prices are very up. They have been driven up also by the Common Agricultural Policy, paying farmers on the basis of the land they own or they work. And we need to transition towards a system where we reward farmers who do the right thing in order to bring them to a position where they can make a fair amount of money out of their business.
Pumpkin record
Speaking of agriculture. Twin brothers from Britain, Stuart and Ian Paton, have been trying to grow the world’s largest pumpkin.
And this year they think they might have cracked it.
The brothers – who have four pumpkins growing for the challenge – say their produce is increasing by an average of 30 kilogrammes a day and requires hundreds of litres of water.
To grow them this big it only takes one seed, but this pumpkin is being fed by 2,500 roots that the twin growers have been monitoring every day since April.
They’re expected to reach 1,500 kilogrammes each – the pumpkins, not the growers.
If this gives you any ideas, the world record for the heaviest pumpkin to beat is 1,246.9 kilos, set just last year, according to the Guinness Book.
