Progressive Political News

A couple of Spanish farmers visited the Midwest in December on a “solidarity tour” with stops in Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin.

Javier Fatás, a dryland grain farmer, and Luis Portillo, a dairy farmer and cheesemaker, came to discuss the wave of farmer protests across Europe against unfair prices and trade policies and to promote international solidarity and the importance of food sovereignty, or local control over basic means of sustenance.

Portillo, thirty-three, runs a dairy farm with a brother in the north of Spain, near Bilbao. He studied cheesemaking in France, and showed pictures of his beautiful farm, where his small herd of Swiss dairy cows grazes on a mountainside along with his sheep and where he makes giant wheels of cheese in a beautiful rustic farm building.

Fatás, sixty, grows alfalfa and other forage crops on the farm where he grew up in Cadrete helping his parents harvest grapes, oats, fruits, and vegetables. He remembers the massive protests of his youth, after the death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. Farmers protesting industrialization, globalization, and low prices played an important role in the democratization of Spanish society.

Fatás and Portillo are members of the Spanish Coordinator of Farmers and Ranchers Organizations, or COAG, a national grassroots coalition of more than 150,000 farmers and ranchers that is a European member of La Vía Campesina, the largest umbrella organization for farmers, fishers, herders, and Indigenous peoples in the world.

At a dinner hosted by the Wisconsin-based Family Farm Defenders, the two Spaniards exchanged stories with local farmers about the existential struggles of rural people. Wisconsin farmers wanted to know if farmers in Spain were under pressure to grow their operations to stay in business, as U.S. farmers are, under the “get big or get out” model of agriculture that has decimated small, family farms in this country for decades.

No, the Spanish farmers replied. In Portillo’s region, the average dairy farm is still very small—about forty-seven cows. While industrial agriculture is on the rise in both Europe and the United States, in Spain and France, small farms and slow food are still revered.

On the flip side, when the Spanish farmers asked if U.S. farmers had been conducting massive protests of the sort that made headlines across Europe last year—with tractors blocking major highways and hundreds of thousands of marchers descending on cities like Madrid and other European capitals—the Wisconsin farmers shook their heads. There have been no massive protests in rural America over the economic crisis here—unless you count the election of Donald Trump.

Despite these differences, farmers in the United States and Europe are, in many ways, in the same boat. The feeling of abandonment and indifference from the government and a majority of urban and suburban voters is similar. So is the terrible calculus of moving from growing food for local and regional consumers to producing commodities traded on the global market.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Spanish farmers began holding protests at major supermarket chains, where the price of milk, at thirty cents per liter, had dropped below the thirty-eight cents per liter it cost to produce. The farmers demanded that the government enforce the law guaranteeing that major wholesale supermarket buyers pay fair prices.

That’s something Wisconsin dairy farmers, who have experienced year after year of low prices, can relate to. Even as consumers have felt pinched by inflated food prices since 2020, those prices did not translate into better pay for farmers, who also had to grapple with rising input costs.

In Spain, the blossoming of “farmer consciousness” has created a surge of hope, Portillo and Fatás said. Protests grew throughout the pandemic, with farmers marching while holding signs that said “Somos esenciales,” or “We are essential.”

“Schools closed, hospitals closed, but people still had food. They realized the importance of farmers,” Portillo said. “If food had been in the hands of big companies, the problem would have been much worse. Small, local farmers kept food available.”

He flipped through a slideshow of the tractor brigades and marches demanding better pay and respect for farmers. “We went out in the streets to give dignity to farmers,” he added.

Dairy farmers in Spain continue to go out of business at an alarming rate. Portillo’s region of the country was home to 13,000 dairy farms in 2004. By 2024, that number had dropped to 750.

But after the supermarket protests, prices increased from thirty cents per liter to sixty cents per liter, he said. And the farmers who protested met with the European Union’s agriculture commissioner, Spain’s agriculture secretary, and local government officials.

The protests that were triggered by low prices moved on to objections to European Union environmental rules that, the Spanish farmers said, didn’t take into consideration regional variations. Across Europe, farmers have objected that they should not have to shoulder the costs of European climate policies.

“The painful impacts of the climate crisis and globalization have left farmers in Europe marginalized and vulnerable to populist politicians, warn antiracism campaigners and academics,” The Guardian reported last November.

The article quotes Nick Lowles, the chief executive of the U.K. antiracist group Hope Not Hate, who said, “What we have seen . . . should serve as a warning sign to the political classes—the necessary rapid transition to a low carbon, sustainable economy has to be properly funded, planned, and equitable, and not done at the expense of working people.”

Far-right, populist groups have made gains with rural voters in Europe, just as they have in the United States. But that political dynamic is not set in stone.

Rural voters helped put U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders over the top in Wisconsin’s open presidential primary in 2016; then those same rural voters in Wisconsin turned around and helped elect Trump to his first and second terms in the White House.

Trump’s aggressive criticism of global trade deals, his focus on the suffering of working-class voters and farmers, and his pitch that he will remember the “forgotten men and women” of America resonated with rural voters. But like the anti-environmentalist, anti-immigrant, anti-government European far right, Republicans in the United States who are peddling resentment are short on actual policies that will help farmers.

Together with the Family Farm Defenders and other food sovereignty groups, the COAG farmers from Spain are fighting for a political vision that values sustainable farming and a human-scale economy. Those things are not, in fact, at odds, despite the dismissive observations of mainstream journalists and economists who view Europe’s agricultural policies as protectionist, sentimental, and out of all proportion with farmers’ mere 1 percent contribution to Europe’s gross domestic product.

Farmers in the United States get similar treatment from hardheaded analysts who view them as somehow out of date and minor players in the vast U.S. economy—forgetting that, whatever its value on the global market, food, together with breathable air and drinkable water, is priceless. Devaluing farmers helped drive the Democrats’ sweeping defeat in 2024. For decades, the party has overvalued upscale, suburban voters and devalued rural people. In 2024, the chickens finally came home to roost.

Across the globe, if progressives don’t start to stick up for the interests of rural people, the far right will happily move into that space.

As Portillo and Fatás prepared to return to Spain, they said 2025 would be another year of big protests.

“We don’t want promises; we want justice,” Fatás said.

They will begin the new year protesting Big Tech in agriculture and Europe’s free trade agreements with South America and New Zealand.

“We want young people to come back to the farm,” Fatás added.

Lately, Portillo said, “you can smell the fear” of government officials, “because of farmers’ consciousness of their power as people who give everyone their food.”

Mental health has long been a pressing concern for children in Gaza, where, for decades, Palestinians have faced food insecurity, contaminated drinking water, periodic assaults by Israeli forces, and confinement to the twenty-five-mile coastal strip. But in the nearly seventeen months since Hamas’s attacks against Israel on October 7, 2023, Israel’s full-scale assault on Gaza has created horrifically traumatic conditions that have led to widespread alarm about children’s mental health needs in the region.

A new report was released in December from War Child Alliance, a United Kingdom-based organization that advocates for the mental health and well-being of children in conflict zones around the world. It reveals the staggering toll on the mental health of Gaza’s children, who struggle every day to survive amid bombing, armed assaults, starvation, and disease while lacking adequate shelter and medical care. The report, based on data gathered last June, includes interviews with 506 children who had been injured or lost a family member. It found that 96 percent of children interviewed felt that death was imminent, 87 percent displayed severe fear, and 49 percent wanted to die because of the war.

Kieran King, War Child’s global Head of Humanitarian, told The Progressive in an interview shortly before the six-week ceasefire took effect on January 19 that while these figures are shocking, they represent a longstanding state of affairs in Gaza. 

“It didn’t start on October 7,” King says. “There was a report published by Save the Children in 2022 called Trapped, which found that 59 percent of children were showing reactive signs of mutism, not speaking entirely or partially due to a  specific traumatic event; 79 percent of children exhibiting bed-wetting. These are figures you don’t see anywhere else. Those statistics really laid bare the unimaginable psychological impact on children in Gaza.”

King, in this interview, pointed to a recent study published by the leading medical journal The Lancet, which showed that the mental health impact of conflicts in several countries over a period of years was that, on average, 22 percent of children suffered from some acute trauma related to that conflict.

“In Gaza, it’s undeniable that every child is affected,” he said. “Four out of five demonstrate signs of acute trauma—nightmares, acute anxiety, withdrawal, mutism and also symptoms of physical pain, not from injury but from mental trauma. I think it speaks to one of the areas that is unique about the conflict in Gaza, which is the impacts affecting the entire population and the mental health crisis, and the only remedy to that is a ceasefire.”

According to King, War Child and other organizations are also working on child protection and education as well as mental health and psychosocial support. “We run programs to identify children with specific vulnerabilities and protection risks,” he said. “We work through those cases with those children to address those risks, but when it comes to the mental health solutions, we do group therapy sessions, we do individual counseling.” 

King said this work is being done “with children who are subject to repeat trauma and repeat displacement,” adding that the risk this compounded trauma “poses for their future well-being can’t be quantified today, so that’s a massive concern for us and everyone else.”

James Leckman, a professor of child psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine who has worked in Israel and Palestine, notes that certain fundamentals are necessary to ensure good trauma care. Such care, he says, starts with “adequate nutrition, a safe place to live and to learn, and that they actually can envision a realistic path to a positive future. And the reality in Gaza is none of those things.” 

Leckman is the co-founder of the Empowerment and Resilience in Children Everywhere, which provides training and support programs for professionals working with children in Gaza, and is a member of the Early Childhood Peace Consortium. His work, he says, involves “giving presentations and speaking with counterparts and raising money and being supportive of peace-building.” Some of his colleagues teach psychologists and others from both sides of the divide.

King echoed Leckman’s assertion that psychotherapy is inaccessible for nearly every child in Gaza. This shortage, King said, stems from a widespread lack of professional expertise: As of January, there were only five psychiatrists and a few dozen psychologists remaining in Gaza, serving a population of more than one million. “We’re working with our partners and with those specialists for ways we can embed mental health expertise into other sectors, such as health and education,” said King.

Four weeks in, the six-week ceasefire has mostly held, aside from Israel’s killing of roughly 130 Palestinians in the strip. But both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump have indicated that Israel will most likely carry on the war when the ceasefire ends. 

“While this fragile ceasefire means the bombs have stopped falling for now, there has been systemic damage to the society in Gaza,” King told The Progressive via email on February 18. “Until we have a safer and more stable environment, and full access, then we will not be able to fully address the immense psychological trauma that children have experienced. States and donors must be ready to support a Palestinian-led, long-term, wide-ranging rehabilitation program for all the children of Gaza.”