“We are here and won’t go away. And the problems we face continue to exist,” Spiros Saliakis, a member of the Co-ordinating Committee of farmers in Thessaloniki, told the press that day.

“If our demands are not met by February 24, we will come out on the roads again,” said Athanasios Kokinoulis, president of the Union of Agricultural Cooperatives (UAC) of Larissa, the heart of the cotton country.

The mobilizations began on January 20 when hundreds of cotton farmers held a demonstration that involved over 2,000 tractors. The Federations of Farmers Associations as well as the UACs organized these protests. On January 31, the cotton farmers were joined by hundreds of other farmers, including rice, fruit, and wheat growers in a nationwide day of protest rallies organized by the All-Farmers Fighting Association (PASY).

In the north by the Bulgarian border and on several arteries in the Thessaly region of north-central Greece, the protesting cotton farmers set up road blocks at different points along the roads with their tractors. At Tembi, a point of the national highway linking the northern and southern parts of the country, the farmers parked 500 tractors on either side of the road for 10 days to make their case known. From January 28 to 29, the farmers closed off the road for 24 hours to press their demands.

“From the price they offer us now, we barely can cover expenses,” Giorgos, a cotton farmer, told these reporters at the Tembi roadblock on January 30. “What we demand is a better price as payment for the hard work we do.”  
 
Crisis of overproduction
While cotton farmers led the protests, many other farmers are facing a similar squeeze. Due to a harvest that exceeded expectations, the prices of a number of crops have dropped so low that working farmers are unable to meet the costs of production. As a result, crops rot away in storage as farmers’ debts pile up.

About 30,000 tons of cotton from the 2003 crop is still in the warehouses unsold. Some 50 percent of the apple crop is also languishing in storage. Farmers have sold only 300,000 tons of the 1.4 million tons of grain produced last year, and 80,000 tons of potatoes are also rotting in the warehouses. Tomato growers have to plant for the next season but they have not yet been paid for previous year’s crop. As a result, the prices that farmers receive for rice, apples, wheat, sugar beets, grapes, potatoes, and tomatoes are as much as 50 percent lower than last year.

Faced with high costs and low prices, farmers are increasingly forced to borrow money to cover their operating costs, and to depend on price supports.

“With the cotton we sell at the subsidized price we may cover our expenses, but then we have nothing to show for a year of work,” Vangelis, a cotton and wheat farmer in the village of Drougos in Thessaly, told the Militant January 30 as he watched over 20 tractors lined up at the side of the road. “This is why we demand the government accept the extra quantities. This is our income. We did not produce this illegally. What are we supposed to do with it, eat it?”

“In 2003 the price [of cotton] was over one euro, or 350 Greek drachmas, per kilo, but for 2004 the price dropped to 275 drachmas,” Sotiris Parlapanis, president of the Federation of Democratic Farmers Associations of Thessaloniki, told the press. Greece is the biggest cotton producer in the European Union and receives a total of 700 million euros in subsidies for cotton, which corresponds to a quota of 1.14 million tons of cotton per year.

Government agencies give licenses to farmers to cultivate a specific acreage. But a bumper harvest in 2004 meant that the cotton quota for the country was exceeded by 70,000 tons, which amounts to over 20 percent of total production.

When the farmers began to show their determination to fight for price supports, the government made its move. Officials hastily organized “investigations” of farmers and claimed that the overproduction was caused by cotton farmers “illegally” sowing more acreage than the government allows. By subtracting these “illegal quantities” from the nationwide production, the government raised the cotton subsidy by .15 euros per kilogram in hopes of pacifying angry farmers while at the same time smearing them as “cheats.”

The modest increase makes a difference, but as most tractors head home, farmers continue to press their demands for a better price and that the government buy up the extra quantities of cotton and pay farmers using money from the national budget.  
 
Middlemen reap big profits
Greece is the fifth-largest exporter of cotton in the world, although its total production is just over a tenth that of the United States. A handful of capitalist cotton gin owners, some of whom are tied to the textile industry, like the giant Mouzakis Company, set the price. Worldwide competition has reduced their profits in the past four years, and has concentrated Greek cotton manufacture into fewer hands. Of the 300 drachmas cotton farmers receive this year, only 60 represents the market price, while the remaining 80 percent comes from price supports.

“The middlemen and the manufacturers get the bulk of the subsidies, while the farmers get only a fraction,” Giorgos told the Militant. If you plant a lot of a land and also own it yourself, you have no problems. Like this son of an old landlord I know in Larissa with 1,000 stremmata (4 stremmata = 1 acre) of land who lives in Athens and is an engineer. In that case you get a lot of subsidies and can diversify what you plant.”

Most of the farmers the Militant interviewed farm between 150 and 400 stremmata of land. For working farmers the plunge in the price of their products is a life-and-death question as they find themselves barely able, and in some cases unable, to earn enough from their work to plant for another season. As a result of this squeeze, many have been forced to give up farming. In 1993 farmers made up over 20 percent of the population in Greece, while today that figure is just over 12 percent.

Like other political forces, leaders of PASY use Greek nationalism in referring to the “anti-farmer” policies pursued by successive governments as being “loyal to the commands of the EU.” Such views mask the character of capitalist agriculture in Greece, which aggressively exports products—including cotton—to countries like Turkey and China just the same as other capitalist countries do.

Farmers in other countries who are either more productive or are paid less can easily be made out to be the cause of the problem, rather than viewed for what they are: fellow producers facing the lash of the same exploitative world economic system.

“This is a long-term problem and cannot be fixed by patches,” Vangelis said in a telephone interview February 6. “Farmers are discussing what to do next.”  
 
 
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