As a wine blogger rode across central and northern Italy the second week of February, drivers could spot protest signs from the freeway:

“No to insect flour. No to lab-grown meat.”

These were just two of the urgent slogans of opposition that appeared repeatedly along the autostrada.

Flour made from bugs and meat manufactured in a lab make for eye-catching calls to action.

But the “major tractor protests” that are being staged across Europe right now are a reflection of deep-seated problems in the way the EU administers subsidies and creates regulations for health, fairness, and — imagined — sustainability.

This week, the Marche grape growers association Terroir Marche published this post on their social media where one of its members, winemaker Giacomo Rossi of Col di Corte, describes the issues European farmers, including grape growers, are facing.

“We are farmers,” he writes, “and that’s why we stand with the farmers. We stand with everyone who practices their sacrosanct right to protest.”

I’ve translated a few salient passages from their manifesto. I hope it will help people to contextualize what’s going on with EU farmers right now and why they are protesting.

As Giacomo points out, it’s not just insect flour and lab-grown meat that has European farmers worried.

To give you a sense of the scale of the protests, the Seattle Times just published the following title earlier this morning: “Thousands of farmers advance on Madrid for a major tractor protest over EU policies.”

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When it comes to the European [Economic] Community [EEC], the [farmers’] true struggle is to get the EEC to simplify the bureaucracy and to revise the laws that individual countries pass in order to comply with EEC directives. There is no association of farmers that opposes these laws because to do so would be counter to their reason to exist and would reduce their profit. They live off of and thrive thanks to the senseless bureaucratization [of agriculture]…

The never-ending call to increase production derives principally from the poor management of the enormous amount of subsidies that the EEC doles out to farms. These resources tend to burden small and medium-sized farms with debt and disproportionate aid. It also compels them to spend on prohibitively expensive farming products that were created and are sold by just a handful of the big multinationals…

There is a complete disconnect between the reality of those who speculate [financially] on farmers… The banks and investment groups place bets on “weather derivatives”… It’s absurd to categorize food [products] as common commodities.