Release the ...Bees?!

In this week's Camino a Ítaca a look at the agricultural protests that have been taking place across Spain and indeed Europe. Swayed by the siren song of the ultra right, farmers just may be delivering themselves into the hands of the very people who support the neoliberal policies that make their lives difficult. Click over to read the original piece in Spanish in the HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

This wasn’t Mr. Burns from the Simpsons snickering and telling Smithers to release the hounds. Its vibe was more like something straight out of a 70’s James Bond movie. Except this evil mastermind wasn’t sitting above a tank full of circling sharks wearing a baby blue polyester leisure suit in front of a world map.

This would-be-mastermind had the slicked back longish hair of a bullfighter, black horned rimmed glasses, the checkered shirt of a secondary school math teacher and wasn’t necessarily looking for world domination. This headman had more regional designs in mind.

Rather than threatening to use his new orbiting satellite death ray if his outrageous demands weren’t met, what this man was menacing the world with was something much more ordinary: bees. And not killer African bees either, but just your average honeybee.

In a rather surreal press conference the president of Asaja Extremadura threatened to open up the hives that they had trucked in from the countryside if the riot police were used to block them in their ongoing agricultural protests against the government and the EU. It was as if they had been trained to attack after he gave a secret signal. Words so utterly bizarre that I was convinced they were from the parody website El Mundo Today until I realized that they were in fact true.

But the deeper you dig into these ongoing protests, the more incongruities and outright contradictions you begin to unearth. Attack bees end up being simply anecdotal in the heady brew of fake news and globalist conspiracy theories that surround the protests.

In a rural milieu that is by nature conservative, the ultra-right have seen a large section of disgruntled voters ripe for the picking. They’ve doubled their efforts to harness this discontent and have tried to incite them further, using their dubious explanations for some of the real and justified demands of the farmers.

It’s fertile ground for their antienvironmental stances, creating strawman arguments against their loathed 2030 Agenda. All the while placing the blame an overreaching EU for the problems farmers face. Another of the organizations that the far right also deeply distrusts and is suspicious of.

The somewhat ironically green party has also done a complete about-face regarding government subsidies and grants. They are now calling for increased grants for things like helping to palliate the effects of the long-standing drought in some parts of the country. A natural catastrophe caused by something they don’t even believe in, climate change.

Then there are the protective measures they are now in favor of. They wave their made in China national flags and now insist on protectionist measures they normally abhor to help guarantee food sovereignty, perhaps more because it is a Muslim majority country that they want protection against rather than their preferred vulture capital funds listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Real, complex problems exist in the agricultural sector but much of these have to do with the neoliberal policies that the extreme right favor rather than their fallacious arguments against the 2030 Agenda. Farmers need to be cautious who they hitch their wagons to or in the end may end up even worse.