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Paper short abstract

This paper examines Polish farmers’ protests against the EU Green Deal as expressions of deeper rural discontent. It argues that rural Poland emerges as a frontier where competing values, imaginaries, and functions of agriculture are negotiated under contemporary capitalism.

Paper long abstract

This presentation explores Polish farmers’ resistance to the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, focusing on the 2023–2024 protests against the Green Deal. It approaches rural Poland as a frontier of possibilities within contemporary capitalism, where competing imaginaries and assignments of value and function are negotiated through everyday agricultural practices and political contestation. Drawing on ethnographic research, we argue that farmers’ opposition is rooted less in environmental concerns than in long-standing struggles over economic survival, cultural identity, and political autonomy. We call for a more nuanced anthropological understanding of rural protest, emphasizing how economic, historical, cultural, and political factors intersect in shaping rural agency within contemporary capitalism.

The analysis shows how the Green Deal became a symbolic focal point for broader rural discontent toward the EU. Farmers’ narratives reveal how core values—particularly their ethos of autonomy, moral attitudes toward labour, and strong attachment to land—clash with bureaucratic regulation and agricultural models perceived as externally imposed and “Western”. EU policies are widely experienced as economically unjust and as threatening traditional farming practices and national sovereignty. These perceptions are intensified by historical memory, especially experiences of forced collectivization and past forms of foreign control, which continue to shape distrust toward supranational governance.

The presentation conceptualizes the Green Deal as policy framework that revalorize rural spaces by redefining agriculture through regulatory and environmental logics. Farmers respond ambivalently: while they strategically engage with state and EU support, they frame autonomy and freedom from external control as non-negotiable when governance becomes too invasive.