On a farm in northern Belgium, not far from the hundreds of tractors blocking Europe's second-biggest port to demand more respect for farmers, Bart Dochy switched on his computer, waiting for a government program to load with maps of his land next to empty digital boxes demanding to be filled with statistics on fertilizer, pesticides, production, and harvesting.
"They also supervise us with satellite images and even with drones," Dochy said. His frustration highlights the yawning gap in trust and understanding that has opened up between European farmers and what they increasingly see as a nanny state looking into every nook and cranny of their barns, analyzing how every drop of liquid manure is spread.
From Greece to Ireland, from the Baltics to Spain, tens of thousands of farmers and their supporters joined protests across Europe in recent weeks. It was enough to put the farmers' plight on front pages all over the continent, setting it up as a key theme for the June 6-9 parliamentary elections in the 27-nation European Union.
Farmers have always lived by the whim of nature. Fickle regulation, though, they cannot accept. "That is what is creating this level of distrust. It's like living in Russia or China," Dochy said, instead of the fertile flatlands of Flanders in northwestern Belgium.
Farmers have many complaints — from insufficiently regulated cheap imports to overbearing environmental rules — but the reams of red tape set off everyone almost instantly. The EU, however, is also the hand that feeds them, with some $50 billion (euros) going into a vast network of programs that touch on agriculture in various ways every year. In return, farmers must account for their spending — in ways they find increasingly onerous.
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