We are fed up! Peasants and urban allies struggling for agrarian and food change

Abstract

Since 2011, every year in January, when the agribusiness fair Grüne Woche takes place in Berlin, Germany, a protest against the dominant agrarian policy is staged on the streets: Wir haben es Satt!. It is organized by a coalition formed by organized civil society and social movements, such as small farmers and peasant movements, environmentalist, human rights movements, development organizations, amongst other groups. They demand an agrarian and food change. This coalition is unique as it bridges rural-urban divides in a number of forms: in the organizations that are part of the coalitions, in the demographics on the street protest, in the action repertoires, in the forms of injustice that they denounce in the agrifood system and in the political agenda.

Drawing on varied sources of data (2017-2023), including participant observation, interviews with leaders, documental and visual analysis, and a representative protest survey conducted in 2020, this article investigates the political subject formation of this coalition. It analyzes processes of inclusion and exclusion along class, urban-rural, gender, interspecies, citizenship, and other axes of intersectional food inequalities, as well as which forms of injustices in the agrifood system are addressed. Engaging with literature on food studies, social movements and global entangled inequalities, we draw on the concept of food inequalities to analyse the multidimensional, intersectional, multiscale and dynamic inequalities in the food system.

After many years in which no much was achieved in terms of concrete policy change in the purported direction, their demands have been partially incorporated in the recent governmental plan in 2022. Independent of policy outcome, we argue that the enduring politics of coalition is in itself a rare achievement of social mobilization across so many divides. The diversity of claims and injustices addressed in and through this coalition shows how broader alliances can work despite class-divides, urban-rural difference, and human-nature dichotomies.