ROME – As part of continent-wide protests against low food prices and rising costs, a small delegation of farmers on Sunday led a cow that has become a symbol of the uprising toward St. Peter’s Square for the Pope’s traditional noontime Angelus address. They were turned away before being able to enter.
Convoys of farmers driving their tractors down city streets and around famed landmarks have become a familiar sight in Rome in recent days, part of agricultural protests that have broken out across Europe, including in Spain, Poland, France and Belgium. Named Ercolina II, the cow was led down the Via della Conciliazione, the broad avenue leading to St. Peter’s Square, with the farmers hoping she might receive a blessing form the Pope.
Having reached a police barrier just outside St. Peter’s Square, they were turned away by a security agent who informed them that livestock could not enter the square.
“I brought her to raise consciousness about the problem,” Cristian Belloni, the owner of a cereal production company who’s been transporting the cow across Italy as a symbol of the farmers’ cause, told reporters. “They want to impose rules on us that are too tight,” he said, referring to the EU.
“We’re here to pray, and to see if that prayer will bring us some advice on the next steps to take,” he added.
Across Europe farmers are objecting to falling food prices and rising production costs, especially for energy, and to EU regulations on climate change which they claim hamper their competitiveness and limit their markets.
In France, farmers have drawn support from leaders of the Catholic Church in the country, who have criticised the “double standards” that EU farmers have to labour under.
Many farmers also complain of increasing reliance on agricultural imports from outside the EU that aren’t subject to same regulations relative to health and safety, and they’re also pressing for tax cuts on fuel purchases. The uprising is a fairly heterogenous movement, with no clear leader or unified agenda.
On 9 February, tractors painted green, red and white – the colours of the Italian flag – drove past Rome’s famed Colosseum as part of the protests. Later in the day, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni met with a delegation of farmers’ associations, vowing among other things to extend an income tax exemption for agricultural producers that’s been in place since 2017.
Last week, several tractor-driving farmers also made their way to Sanremo in northwestern Italy for the country’s most famous music festival, the finale of which drew a 71 per cent share of the national television audience.
During a primetime television slot, the famed host of the event, known as Amadeus, read a statement from the farmers, while television cameras showed images of Ercolina II resting outside the main entrance to the concert hall in a cattle pen adorned with a sign that said in Italia: “Without farmers, there’s no food and no future.”
Ercolina II is the daughter of another cow named Ercolina, who also featured in a protest in St. Peter’s Square in December 1997. At that time, she was brought by dairy farmers objecting to EU limits on milk production.
On Sunday, Ercolina II wore a photo of her famous mother in St. Peter’s Square around her neck. After the cow was not able to enter the square, Belloni milked her during a brief demonstration and offered cups of milk to passers-by and pilgrims gathered for the Angelus, the noon-time prayer offered to the Virgin Mary and which was once a common practise across Europe’s Catholic countries, especially among its agricultural communities.
A famous oil painting known as “The Angelus” by French painter Jean-François Millet, completed circa 1857 and 1859, depicts two peasants bowing in a field over a basket of potatoes to say the prayer after hearing the ringing of the bell from the church on the horizon.
The Pope made no mention of the protests during his remarks after the prayer on Sunday.
In recent days, European governments have agreed to pump hundreds of millions of Euros into the agricultural sector in an effort to ease the crisis.
Photo: A woman drinks fresh milk from the cow named Ercolina II during a protest by farmers near St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican, Rome, 11 February 2024,. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni met with Italian farmers associations on 9 February 2024 after weeks of demonstrations across the country and promised to reinstate a limited tax break. (Photo by FILIPPO MONTEFORTE/AFP via Getty Images.)
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