Several thousand angry beet farmers from across the European Union rallied on Monday to attack plans to reform EU sugar policy, saying the drastic cuts being proposed will force them out of business. Blocking streets with their tractors in part of Brussels' EU district, the farmers protested outside a meeting of EU ministers debating an overhaul of regime barely altered since the late 1960s.
A reform deal is not expected until November. "Destruction is my hobby," read a placard held by Polish farmers showing a caricature of frightened sugar beets running away from a manic-looking EU Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel wielding an blowtorch.
One of the tractors had sugar beets woven into a crucifix on its front, while a few demonstrators were dressed as beets.
Fischer Boel published her reform plan last month, saying the EU sugar policy had been unchanged for 40 years and created prices three times the world market.
The plan calls for hefty cuts to minimum sugar and beet prices, and also production. Beet growers say her blueprint would put 120,000 farmers out of work over two years and cause the loss of 150,000 jobs directly and indirectly linked with the sugar industry.
"Without my beet, I die. Fischer Boel, you've lost the plot," said one French farmer. Organisers had called for some 6,500 farmers to attend the rally, which was visited by several EU ministers who will take part in the debate later on Monday.
Sugar beet is grown by more than 325,000 farmers in all 25 EU countries except for Cyprus, Estonia, Luxembourg and Malta. Poland is home to 89,000 beet farmers, by far the largest number in any one country; Germany ranks in second place with 48,000. "It's a radical reform but we need that more than modernisation," Sweden's Agriculture Minister Ann-Christin Nykvist told Reuters on the margins of the rally.
"They (Swedish farmers) do not agree with me. I try to make clear they will have good profitability and we will continue to have beet growing in Sweden, especially in the south."