Patricia Chagnon is an MEP for France’s Rassemblement National, which sits with the sovereigntist conservative and anti-globalist Identity and Democracy (ID) grouping in the European Parliament. Originally from the Netherlands, Chagnon relocated to France in the 1990s and acquired French citizenship in 1996.
She first made her foray into politics in early 2014, when she was elected to serve as an opposition municipal councilor and community councilor of the Baie de Somme agglomeration community in Abbeville. A few months later, in 2015, she went on to become a regional councilor for the Hauts-de-France region.
Chagnon became an MEP in 2022, replacing her colleagues from RN who were elected as members of the National Assembly in France’s legislative elections the same year.
Farmers in Germany, France, Poland, Spain, and elsewhere have their own unique set of reasons for taking to these streets, but the common thread uniting farmer movements across the bloc appears to be Brussels’ excessive overreach in climate policy and agricultural matters (i.e. the Green Deal, Net Zero). Is that how you see it?
There are individual triggers in individual member states because of national legislation. But it all goes back to Brussels and three essential issues.
It is first of all the unfair competition that is being imposed on our farmers through free trade agreements, driving prices down.
Second, there are numerous, complicated legislation, regulation, and administrative burdens that are also imposed by Brussels.
Third, there is an overall philosophy of degrowth in the European technocratic elites here in Brussels.
When you put all that together and you add the ‘agri-bashing,’ you have the ingredients of these European-wide agricultural protests.
Since the farmers’ movement in Holland, which started two years ago, the farmers are starting to say, “You can’t do this, we can’t make a living, we can’t continue our jobs,”—it will be the end of farming in Europe if we let Brussels implement what it wants to implement.
We know the war in Ukraine—and the subsequent flood of cheap Ukrainian agricultural products into Europe—has precipitated farmer protests in Poland. Protests are anticipated to take place in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe for the same reason. How has the deluge of cheap grain from Ukraine affected French and Western European markets?
The EU decided to lift all custom barriers for Ukrainian agricultural products, thus being able to flood the EU market. Now, there are two problems with that.
First of all, there is the problem of simple food security. We don’t know what products are being used in Ukraine, and of course, there was unfair competition. This has directly affected the neighboring countries of Ukraine, amongst which the Polish farmers who are really very angry. But it has not only done that, it has actually driven the wheat price in Europe down. So this entire branch of farming has been touched because the price for their produce, the price for a tonne of grain, has dropped tremendously since the market has been flooded by cheap Ukrainian grain.
And given the importance of the surface of agricultural land in Ukraine, the single largest agricultural country in Europe, with a surface of 41,5 million hectares dedicated to farming, the threat is real to the farmers all over Europe.
It’s not like you’re letting in a couple of kilos of wheat or a couple of eggs— their production capacity is huge.
More broadly, to what extent is the widespread economic discontent felt across Europe, especially among working and middle-class communities, fueling these protests?
If we analyze the Dutch example, it makes it much easier to understand what’s going on in the other European countries.
The Dutch farmers started demonstrating together with other farmers at first. This was two years ago when the Dutch government declared that they had to reduce livestock production and close 3000 farms because cows were not good for the climate or whatever. At the announcement of these drastic measures, farmers and breeders joined forces. First, they informed rural areas what this would imply for them: If you close livestock production, you also take out the guy who sells the food or the local business who does the repairs for you. So they first explained the economic ecosystem, and how this threat seemingly only to farmers was actually threatening rural life.
They mobilized the farmers who were directly touched, then other farmers in rural areas, and eventually they moved into the towns and cities to explain the effects that this would have on the quality of food of all Dutch people. For example, they put the question, “Do you want to eat meat coming from Argentina or from New Zealand rather than the meat that we produce right next to you that is of a very high quality?”
They got people interested and then mentioned the financial distress of Dutch farmers. Everybody knows that farmers are very hardworking people. The population was very touched to learn that these hardworking people were on the brink of bankruptcy. The withering wages of farmers were openly discussed, their long working weeks were explained. People were shocked about what they learned.
Awareness grew, and the question was asked —”is that really what I want? Do I really want to feed my family with stuff that’s coming in from the other side of the world?” The general public was mobilized.
This is the pattern that I think is what we’re seeing now. At least that’s what we’re seeing in France. The general public supports the Farmers and their demands.
The farmers’ protests seem to have crystallized the dispute between economic globalism on one hand, and sovereigntism and economic protectionism on the other. Can you speak to that?
What the agricultural crisis shows us, and what unites them, is that we cannot accept total liberalism, we cannot open our countries to the winds of all, from all over the world. If we do that, we will lose our farms.
Over the past 20-30 years in the EU, there have been constant small attacks on agriculture. It started with sort of shaming them for being dirty for using filthy products, for being polluters, coming from the extreme Left ecologist wing basically. And in the meantime, this suited ultra-liberal globalists very well.
In France, our supermarkets are supplied through big distribution centers. And of course, these huge companies who own these distribution centers, they want to make money. They want to be able to buy their produce where it is cheapest. So they want to go shopping all over the world. If meat is cheaper in Argentina this year, they will buy their meat there. If sugar is cheaper in India, they want to go and buy their sugar there.
So these ultra-liberal, globalist, capitalist, multinational companies—they want to be able to shop worldwide and just feed us with produce on which they can make the biggest profits.
So this globalist Right and this ecological extremist Left have found a common enemy: European agriculture. This is why their attacks on farmers have been so efficient, because they’ve been attacked by both sides.
Strange bedfellows.
Very strange bedfellows, yes. And you hear that the ‘greenies,’ they’re pretty silent on the subject of the farmers’ revolt at the moment.
The EPP, after many of its members having voted in favor of globalist, free-trade-at-any-cost policies, is now ramping up its rhetoric in support of the farmers. Do you think this is merely campaign rhetoric?
Yeah, yeah, they signed all the free trade agreements. They are part of the system that put this in place. The EU elections are coming, so they need to tone down and say, “oh sure, we hear you and we’re going to do something about it.” But this is a complete contradiction when you see how, previously, they all voted together for free trade agreements, which has opened EU agriculture to unfair competition from all over the world.
You spoke about the farmers’ protests in the Netherlands in 2022—protests which ultimately resulted in the agrarian, populist BBB landing a major victory in the country’s provincial elections the following year. Do you think the events taking place on the ground today will result in a similar outcome in national and European parliamentary elections later this year?
These rural protests, the farmer protests, are going to have an influence. This is because the agricultural problems condense to really different visions of society. People are feeling this, they are starting to realize this.
The vision of having farmers, the vision of producing your own food, the ideological vision that it’s important to maintain your own traditional agriculture, to maintain vibrant rural areas, which have a sense of belonging, where roosters sing in the morning … It is part of our national identity—something French people are very attached to. If you ask French people, you will find that they believe that that’s “real” France. So I think this is touching on a very sensitive issue. People are starting to realize it’s not only farmers, it’s not only food, it is actually the whole model that we have of a vibrant rural France that’s being put in jeopardy.
I think that realization is Europe-wide, because the nature of people is the same.
Roots are something extremely important. Yes, I think it will have a big effect because there are two really opposite ideological views of how to go about this.
On the one hand, you have the Brussels technocrats who want to have the “one-size-fits-all” agricultural program for the whole of EU, and opening it up to import from other countries. And then you have us, sovereignists, who are saying—of course we should be working together, but every nation-state should be in a position to defend their own traditions, their own system, their own vision on how they want to feed their people. Is it a system by which they say, oh, we want to be socially independent, we want to be autonomous? Is it a system where they want to use lots of imports?
I don’t think that’s something Brussels should be dictating. It’s something every member state should decide for themselves. I could imagine that a country like Luxembourg might not be able to aim or say, “I want to be self-sufficient in agriculture.” But France certainly can say that we want a certain independence. It should be noted that until 2022, France was an agricultural exporting nation, and since 2022, we’ve become an importing nation.
When eating locally produced food, first of all, it’s good for the environment. We’ve said for many years that we believe in shortening the circuits of feeding people. If you feed people with produce that is produced near to them, and then treat the waste near them; if you transform agricultural products or meat products near them, you avoid all the pollution of transport, you avoid trucks on the roads, or airplanes, or container ships going around the world. It’s a very sound circle system that should be put into place everywhere that we can.
Right, it seems like common sense that a more localized supply chain model would be much better for the environment than the current model.
Of course it would be better for the environment. However, it would not be better for the profits, probably, of the big distribution centers, right? Because they would be cut out. They wouldn’t be necessary. So there is a lot of opposition to trying to put in place systems which are just common sense, as you say.
But the public is becoming aware that there is a huge problem. Farmers are paid less and less —but the distribution centers, they are turning out really nice profits. Someone is benefiting from these EU policies, and it’s not the farmers—nor the general population.
I was listening to the radio the other morning and some journalist on a mainstream TV channel was saying French consumers should be really careful before supporting the farmers because that’s gonna drive up prices in the supermarkets. Claiming that imported produce can feed them for less.
This is a scandalous misrepresentation of reality: The big wholesalers put huge pressure on the French farmers and drive their prices down by putting them at the mercy of unfair international competition. In the meantime, French families are dealing with huge price hikes, all while the profits of these distributors, of these big supermarket chains, just keep going up!
Do you think the energy from the protests will be channeled into support for the sovereigntist parties like Rassemblement National, as it happened in the Netherlands with the BBB and then later PVV?
I think that in reality, the votes will go to those political parties and leaders who have always defended rural areas and farming. In France, farmers will very much come to Rassemblement National who consistently supported French farmers for decades against unfair competition and absurd regulations and rules.
If you read the liberal press, they suggest that the support shown by national Right parties like Rassemblement National and Alternative for Germany (AfD) for farmers is disingenuous and these parties are merely looking to score political points. What is your response to these kinds of accusations?
Like many of my colleagues, I was publicly alongside the farmers way back in 2008 when the sugar plant in Abbeville was shut down. That sugar factory was closed because the EU was giving money to Poland to build sugar factories over there. So the owners of the sugar factory in Abbeville, which had been there for a century or so, and was aging a bit, they decided, “well, we better go to Poland; we can buy new machines and get EU subsidies.”
So they closed the sugar factory down in Abbeville. When you close down a sugar factory, you don’t only close down a sugar factory that employs a couple of hundred people, but you impact all the sugar beet farmers around the area. You don’t transport sugar beets over long distances to another sugar beet factory; that’s not profitable anymore. So it destroyed a whole chain of production in a rural area.
At the time, when I did my first campaign locally, it was one of the major subjects that I addressed. Agriculture, in my case, has been a very long-standing combat because I totally believe that agriculture is absolutely essential to keep vibrant ecosystems in rural areas and to maintain our rural areas. Because if there are no farmers, well what are you going to have? Barren fields will soon be overtaken and overgrown.
As for my party, we’ve always defended rural life and the different ways of rural life in France. People don’t exactly share the same way of life, let’s say, in the more temperate north of France and, let’s say, in the Mediterranean south of France. It is, to us, an inherent part of our nation’s diversity and the traditions that are maintained in rural areas.
Do you see any parallels between the Gilet Jaunes protests in 2018 and today’s farmers’ protests? Both have had a populist, anti-globalist character, but to me, the Gilent Jaunes protests in many ways transcended traditional right-left divides, whereas perhaps that hasn’t been the case with the farmer protest. Can you speak to that
Yes, I do. But do not forget we also had big demonstrations against putting up the retirement age in France.
What I think is common about all these demonstrations is that there is huge distress among the ordinary people of France—and on different subjects. The yellow vests were sparked by the increase of the petrol prices by a couple of cents. Putting up the retirement age all while fraud in society is ongoing, is equally unacceptable.
It’s not that French people dispute that they might need to work more, or have price increases, but they see that their money is being wasted. And every time this government needs to find money for a new project, they don’t look at decreasing other expenses, they make the ordinary people pay. Directly by increasing taxes, or indirectly by scaling down public services. That is totally unacceptable of course.
You can’t cut funds given to migrants or for the war in Ukraine?
Well, for example, money given to migrants, money given nowadays to Ukraine, to wage war and buy weapons. I read the number the other day, immigration costs 54 billion euros a year for France. Also, look at our petrol companies, they made huge profits last year. Whilst many French households cannot pay their energy bills or put petrol in their cars, Total made 21.6 billion profit last year in the middle of this energy crisis. A historically high profit.
Some are getting seriously rich while our country is falling into shambles …
How should the EU balance its desire to drastically scale back CO2 emissions with the need to maintain previous levels of economic prosperity? I do wonder how much of an effect it would have on the planet if the EU cut its CO2 emissions to zero. The U.S. and China, the world’s largest CO2 emitters, would still be producing more than 16 million metric tons of CO2 emissions.
That’s what we produce as CO2. Now, what I like to see is what we induce as CO2 on the other side of the world with our huge imports. Wouldn’t that be interesting? We are importing CO2 because we’re not producing here. But don’t think that, if we close farms down in Europe, that people are gonna stop eating. No, they’re just gonna import it from somewhere else and the CO2 and the pollution will be produced somewhere else. So I think it is totally absurd reasoning because if we continue the system by which we import, not only do we produce CO2 on the other side of the world, but we add the CO2 of huge container ships which use very crude stuff that they have as fuel. Environmentally speaking this also does not make any sense.
It should be noted that farmers in France have made huge efforts over the past years, and their branch has successfully adopted methods that are more respectful of the environment.
We need to continue to make efforts to have better production systems, we are all aware that it’s important to adopt a more respectful attitude towards nature. We all want to breathe clean air, want clean water to flow in our rivers and out to the seas. We all agree. But today, it is by punishment and force that the EU enforces their rules. We believe we need to encourage and reward. And, of course, fund research and let scientists help us find innovative solutions!
