Sophia Stille // 03.06.2022
In the new episode of our podcast, we talk once again about the ‘Save Bees and Farmers’ initiative. This time, we had the pleasure to welcome Veronika Feicht, who works as an agricultural policy campaigner for the German-based NGO “Umweltinstitut München”.
We talk about the main goals of the initiative and how she assesses the current situation of wildlife, biodiversity, agriculture and farmers in the EU. As Veronika Feicht was involved in organising the initiative, she also shares her experiences about the challenges of collecting signatures during a pandemic and strategies for pandemic-friendly campaigning. Lastly, we learn about how we all can contribute to the goal of saving our biodiversity and supporting farmers who are working to make our agriculture more sustainable.
The Save Bees and Farmers Initiative is a European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) that wants to make agriculture in the EU sustainable by phasing-out synthetic pesticides to restore biodiversity. As Sophia introduced in the previous podcast episode, more and more insects are losing their habitat or are negatively affected by the high usage of synthetic pesticides on our agricultural land. At the same time, farmers are under high pressure to produce more and more efficiently and in constant competition with large agri-businesses. This ECI addresses these issues and demands action from the European Union. The organisers of the ECI collected more than 1 Million signatures and therefore, the initiative was successful. Now they are waiting for the European Commission to react to their demands.
We hope you enjoy the listen!

