Berlin's Green Week - quality products inside, chaos and confusion outside

Tuesday, March 8, 2016

At the German capital's January food and farming exhibition, conventional agriculture confronts special interests from the countryside in colourful parades. The result: a traffic-stopping duel featuring over 20,000 participants.

by NORMAN DUNN

Every January, the "Green Week" exhibition in Germany presents the world's highest quality food and drink. This also makes the event an ideal location for any related pressure group to push its point of view on the various production methods. After all, every niche in agriculture's complex sector has representatives making their way to the German capital for the Green Week – farming leaders, food and beverage producers, wholesalers, retailers and tens of thousands of consumers.

A well-established Green Week tradition is that city dwellers flock here to taste the hugely varied rural products on offer from just about every region in Europe and from many other parts of the globe. It's also traditional that the main gates of this exhibition are picketed every morning by lobby groups, often against what we might call conventional livestock farming. First arrivals face a barrage of boos and catcalls and a forest of protest placards and banners presented by vegans, vegetarians, followers of Greenpeace and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals but also increasingly the rather less radical slow food fans and opponents of global trade.

True, some protesters lean towards the loony side. Otherwise, though, this annual Green Week protest barrage is often a useful reminder of present and future pressures on the food production sector and the demands from a consuming public becoming acutely aware of our crowded world.

But what about the farmers' points of view out there on the Berlin streets? These did not fail this January with country folk well represented among the protesting masses. This was the second time that a farmer-run counter demonstration took to the streets under the title "Wir machen Euch satt" (We keep you well-fed). The well-fed demo's arguments: information instead of ideology, how farming has to be at least a wee bit industrial in its approach, the problems (and costs) of producing food in a modern world.

Countering the "well-feds" for the first time this year was a demo proclaiming: "Wir haben es satt" – We're fed-up (with conventional farm production). Here's where things got really complicated because the fed-ups (with a claimed 23,000 out on the streets) also included farmers. However, these are more specialized, for instance in organic farming or from small-scale family farm associations. The "fed-ups" also included larger organizations such as BUND (the German Association for Environment and Nature Protection) and "Bread for the World" – a U.S. Christian movement aimed at ending hunger.

While the fed-ups joined the well-fed demos in calling for government and European Union action to improve producer prices, the former, representing something over 100 special interest groups, wanted continuation of traditional farming values, such as wide rotations and even more emphasis on countryside protection and animal welfare back home in Europe. Leading this demo was farmer Jochen Fritz. "People want to see farmers, and not corporations, producing their food," he pointed out. "They want healthy food and no gene technology in the fields, in the trough and on their plates. They want to see animals out on pasture, pigs kept on straw." Jochen Fritz also stressed that his fed-up protestors are against overproduction in Europe from mega-farms, "dumping food in third world countries to the detriment of local food producers."

Both demos were certainly colourful and generally extremely good-natured. When the few hundred "conventional" farmers could make themselves heard, they emphasized that they too wanted more transparency in production for their consumers, along with clearer labelling of products.

For the consumers on their way to tasting the delights of the Green Week farm produce feast, the result of all those demonstrations was mostly chaos and confusion. Admittedly, peaceful demonstration is a democratic right, but observation from the sidelines leaves me with the following thoughts.

Farming and food production must get its PR more organized if it wants to make a real impression in this way. Mass demonstrations with such a mix of participants and their various polemics only confuse the issues and arguments.

Farmer demos have to address the real consumer concerns. Ignored by the conventional lobby this time around was growing unease about huge livestock production units. (Jochen Fritz cited a relatively nearby 10,000-sow breeding unit and 400,000 chicken feeding farm.) For the opposition to the vegan contingent, instead of ridicule, maybe a leaflet on non-livestock production units would have been more helpful.

There's also real concern on the streets regarding global overproduction of meat and milk – less because this lowers producer prices at home, but much more because of the social damage done abroad where these cheap products may be dumped.

The Berlin Green Week exhibition in a nutshell. Inside: quality and order, beautiful presentation of the best that world farming has to offer. Outside: also a great show but, in the end, chaos and confusion. Agriculture argues and no one ends up listening. BF

Norman Dunn writes about European agriculture from Germany.