Subscribe here: [ Ссылка ] The meeting of European Union (EU) leaders in Brussels on Thursday was accompanied by a demonstration of angry farmers who blocked the roads around the summit venue with some 1,000 tractors, protesting against rising costs and shrinking income.

The event in the Belgian capital was part of EU-wide demonstrations that had caused disruption over the past weeks in France, Germany, Lithuania, Romania, the Netherlands, Greece, and Poland. On Friday, farmers in Malta also took to the streets in Valletta to show solidarity with their European peers.

Reacting to the wide-scale demonstrations, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told a press conference after Thursday's summit that farmers had an important role in the bloc's economy and promised changes to tackle their challenges.

Although national governments, including Berlin and Paris, have announced some measures to appease the farmers, analysts foresee little change to existing EU agricultural policies, at least in the short term.

FARMERS' COMPLAINTS

Yu Xiaohua, director of the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development at the University of Gottingen in Germany, said farmers in Europe are bearing the brunt of high inflation and shrinking profit margins. Yet, the reasons leading to the recent protests are different depending on each country's specificities.

Despite food prices soaring across Europe, farmers have been grappling with various challenges, including rising costs, falling sales prices, red tape, taxes, debt, and even climate change impacts. The wide-scale demonstrations that first started in Germany and France were attempts to call decision-makers' attention to the acute problems of the European agricultural sector.

According to Belgian farmer unions -- the Wallonian Federation for Agriculture and the Union of Female Farmers in Wallonia, farmers need to spend a lot of time dealing with the large amount of red tape imposed by the EU, which keeps them away from working in the fields.

In Germany, last month's International Green Week, which is considered the world's biggest consumer fair for the food, agricultural, and horticultural industries, coincided with farmers protesting against planned subsidy cuts. The demonstration saw hundreds of tractors and trucks blocking traffic around the exhibition area.

Yu told Xinhua that German farmers were protesting because the financial crisis had forced the German government to reintroduce taxes on diesel used by agricultural machinery. "For every hectare of farmland, this tax translates to a cost increase of 30-40 euros."

"In this period of high inflation, while everyone else is trying to get wage increases through strikes, farmers are not only bearing the impact of the same inflation but are also facing a 10 percent reduction in income. This is intolerable for them and serves as the trigger for this wave of protests," Yu said.

For European farmers, who are complaining about the soaring cost of diesel, fertilizers and irrigation, national governments' efforts to cap food prices were also bad news. Furthermore, extreme weather conditions exacerbated by climate change and imports of cheaper agricultural products from third countries were cited among the challenges.

In Athens, Greece, farmers are demanding prompt financial aid promised by the government, after a severe storm caused damages amounting to about 1 billion euros (1.09 billion U.S. dollars) in the Thessaly region, one of the country's main agricultural production regions.

Even between EU member states, competition can be fierce. Spain's transport companies and agricultural producers have been facing a crisis as their shipments were blockaded by French farmers. Some French protesters have even resorted to destroying Spanish produce, exacerbating tensions.

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