"I am very concerned that it is the last generation of peasant families in the European Union," said Sinn Féin MEP Chris MacManus in EURACTIV, who added that we are "fighting the clock" to take steps to save the EU's family farming model. "They are people who have a family, and for many it is the end of a life that has been taken from generation to generation," he added.

Agricultural Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski has already recently pointed out that 1,000 farmers decide to leave their jobs every day for lack of profitability. Macmanus, in addition to this, believes that understanding his distress in mental health can explain why, for example, in France every two days a farmer commits suicide.

MacManus, present in the European Parliament as a negotiator of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), believes that land concentration is one of the culprits for the disappearance of small family farms, as it is not chronically profitable for small farmers to be forced to leave the land and then bought by large companies.

The COVID-19 crisis has exacerbated the concentration of market power in the sector, MacManus warned, and "the lack of economy of scale and the weight of price wars in supermarkets" have made many farmers unable to move forward. Now, according to MacManus, the crisis is worsening and two factors are being combined: on the one hand, that many farmers sell their products below production costs and, on the other, that they are reducing European Union aid. That is why the EU CAP funds, in the event of credibility, must "open up a safety net so that smaller and medium-sized farms can survive".

To this end, MacManus proposes that when calculating the land of farms that want to buy the CAP funds, the first hectares have higher subsidies and those of a certain number of hectares have less, as this would encourage the farms of small and medium-sized farmers.

He added that in order to control the market it is necessary to further strengthen the new directive on unfair commercial practices, by prohibiting supermarkets throughout the EU from selling farmers’ products at prices below costs, "because if this is not done, the position of small traders is weakened, as is the perception of customers about the real price of one litre of milk or one kilo of calves".

In the calculations of the European coordination of Vía Campesina, between 2005 and 2016, the European Union lost 4.2 million households, which makes up a quarter of all that it had.