It’s
not just the motorways linking to Paris: be it Rennes or
Bordeaux, Nîmes or Toulouse, French farmers are blockading
more than 100 roads in the country. Similar events are taking
place across Belgium and Italy at the time of writing, with
grievances over the costs of carbon-cutting targets, towering
paperwork, low wages and unfair competition.
“Sure,
I’d be up for joining them for a bit of mayhem if I were still
in business,” Didier, the 63-year-old father of my childhood
friend from Brittany tells me over the phone. In the 1990s, he
ran a pig farm with 300 animals in Côtes-d'Armor, operating
under the Label Rouge, a guarantee of quality particularly
favoured by Italians. But beset by increasingly complex
regulations and low returns, he closed shop in the 2000s. He
is now in construction. “Agriculture is finished,” he said. “I
don’t believe in it anymore”.
Didier’s
testimonial echoes those collected by management academic
Sandrine Benoist. Since 2019, she has been following 42
farmers in central France, watching them juggle the
contradictions created by demands of ever-lower prices and
greater output, all while taking on the burden of
environmental norms. A long-time observer of farmers’
protests, Benoist notes that while such movements have secured
short-term wins, up to now they’ve failed to provoke the
structural change farmers are after. So what’s the point of
them? She
asks provocatively in this article.
Von
der Leyen will be attempting to work through some of these
tensions at the EU’s strategic dialogue on the future of
farming. If only bumblebees could also be offered a seat at
the table. This week, we bring you pioneering research on how
these pollinators are reacting to the cocktail of pesticides
they are exposed to in the countryside. While previous studies
had either been carried out in labs or, in the case of rarer
field-based experiments, focused on single compounds, this
new study examines hundreds of pesticides on 106 sites across
Europe.
As
you read these words, your larynx is likely carrying out tiny
movements. I say “likely”, as not everyone has an “inner
speech,” the voice resonating in one’s head as one reads or
thinks. Philosopher Daniel Gregory has spent the past years
attempting to grasp the nature of this silent voice in the
mind. Is it silent speech? Imagined? Or something else? Some
answers – and many more questions – here. |
Geoffrey Smith, University of Kent; Dorothea
Mylopotamitaki, Collège de France; Karen Ruebens, Collège de
France; Marcel Weiss, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität
Erlangen-Nürnberg
New
discoveries of bone fragments at Ranis cave in Germany prove
the early presence of cold-adapted Homo sapiens in northern
Europe |