argia.eus
INPRIMATU
Displacement of rural areas
  • This awakening brings together a number of causes that fully respond to the resilience of the dispersed peoples in the territory. Last Saturday, a massive demonstration was held in Vitoria about these demands. On the street it was once again demonstrated that it is possible to make a common cause, from many social and even ideological spheres, in the face of the threat of losing the property of the land we face. The enemy, powerful and well connected to the institutions, tells us "perroflautes," a term that those fascists and Nazi also use. It is curious that it coincides, because they may, after all, be no more than their thugs.
Rebeka Gonzalez de Alaiza Perez de Villarreal Roberto Ruiz de Arkaute 2024ko ekainaren 07a

In the so-called green revolution, since the tractor first appeared as an emerging phenomenon of agricultural development, the lives of our peoples have undergone a profound transformation linked to the changes that progress has imposed on them. In the first place, the parcels gathered and, in addition to transforming what was subsistence agriculture into a market agriculture, promoted monoculture, the displacement of indigenous seeds and the contempt for the practices of knowledge of the peasants heirs of the observation and experimentation of the natural terrestrial cycles they demanded. The unavoidable obligation to use fossil fuels, fertilizers and synthetic biocides to dominate the agricultural soil became necessary in order to live peacefully from agricultural practice. People who did not adapt to these changes had to look for another form of complementary subsistence or simply disappeared.

These radical transformations in the rural environment, in addition to breaking the circularity of the agricultural processes, generated a total external dependence of the new owners of seeds, producers and sellers of nitrates, phosphates and pesticides. At the same time, people working in rural areas are forced to acquire increasingly specialised and disproportionate machinery and are in debt throughout their lives, avoiding the transition to other models adapted to territorial capacities. More and more farmland is needed to make an agricultural unit economically viable. Farmers who switch to forms of production for organic farming have difficulty surviving, not least because they run counter to the trend towards centralisation and appropriation of land, which are the models that receive public subsidies.

All governments, slaves of mercantilist interest, are pushing for the same policies that deepen the disgust that shakes rural areas. Examples of this are, among others, the Free Trade Agreements, the lack of regulation on the increase in the price index at source and in destination, which favors the income of large commercial areas; the lack of involvement in the ease of access to land for new generations of farmers and farmers; the suffocating regulation on local sales markets; the suppression of scarce medical services and school systems...

These major trends in global food control of MNCs managed by investment funds are weakening the right to food for maximum yield. Along with the disappearance of the illusion of producing cheap food for workers, the depletion of the fertility of the earth is a direct and disturbing consequence of this subordinate relationship to commodification. Along with the decline of a model that leads to the agricultural and livestock abyss, rooted in the territory, now the energy oligopoly companies are forcing the field to expropriate a large number of agricultural farms and communal mountains. Plundering and expolio are the new niche of business, capable of restructuring market relations in a world that faces the scarcity of energy sources that have served to reproduce.

"The far-right is always attentive to what can come out of the street backdrop. Try to get into the demands of people living in the countryside"

There is no shortage of reasons for mobilisation. And the far-right is always attentive to what you can get out of the street unintentionally, because it's no small thing. Try to enter the demands made by people who live or feel in the countryside. These people have no interest in agriculture, livestock farming, territorial balance and the conservation of natural and rural ecosystems. This area is totally alien, that is to say the rural area, and other types of areas are much closer, but that is from the other cuba.

The ability of this capitalist trend to capture the support and anger of some street protests may be the symptom of the loathlessness that these demands are suffering in the parliamentary sphere, from progressism to the most obsolete conservatism, incapable of giving an alternative answer from the left in the established institutional political framework. Given the lack of sufficient resources to distribute among the workers, the aggression of capital that is seeking more benefits, the right wants to become aware, in all its forms, of the radicality of the responses that are exerting more and more pressure on the sectors of the dependent classes and that are emerging spontaneously. The institutional response to these demands shows as alternatives the same solutions according to the established order, decorated with small changes that are not decisive for the radical transition. At the same time, in the case of some decisive agents in the struggle of the past, one can see the impossibility of assuming the necessary emancipatory transformations that lay the foundations of the paradigm shift based on the universal management of the common.

However, there are still some movements that continue to face the current situation of precariousness. And they're not few. They join the Earth and root the hope associated with the flows of nature. They defend the survival of the territory as a transformative alternative.

Today, therefore, we only want to denounce the Biscayan arribism of these fascists and Nazis, because they shake the street with hatred and want to appropriate the legitimate demands that some representatives of the people are making.

"The enemy, powerful and well connected to the institutions, tells us "perroflautes," a term that those fascists and Nazi also use. It's curious that they match."

Last Saturday, a massive demonstration was held in Vitoria about these demands. On the street it was once again demonstrated that it is possible to make a common cause, from many social and even ideological spheres, in the face of the threat of losing the property of the land we face. The enemy, powerful and well connected to the institutions, tells us "perroflautes," a term that those fascists and Nazi also use. It is curious that it coincides, because they may, after all, be no more than their thugs.

When we demand respect for the rural world and the non-transformation of it into a sacrificial territory, we are convinced that the rural environment must not be in a position of inferiority to the urban world. We need a well-preserved rural environment and a well-protected natural environment. It's the heritage of all people, and what the new paradigm of capitalism has called "green transition" cannot destroy it. We therefore consider it essential that these demands be binding and considered as a strategic activity of the primary sector and that the natural environment be genuinely respected.

The claim that was heard on Saturday in the streets of Vitoria was "So no," it became clear. But there was another slogan that more strongly reflected opposition to this persecution and demolition for the benefit of big business: "Capitalist energy will never be sustainable."

It is therefore clear what the demands are and what are the general principles that unite us: respect, mutual care and transversality. These fascists and Nazis are not there and are not expected, who not long ago made the slopes and corners of our rural environment a place of shame and dishonor.