Amets Ladislao, partner of the organic and local products cooperative Bizkaigane, member of the executive of the agricultural union EHNE-Bizkaia and member of the Etxaldeko Emakumeak / Women of Etxalde – Errigoiti, Bizkaia

Amets, born in Algorta, moved away from the traditional university path after a frustrating experience in a history degree, and decided to devote herself to agricultural work, despite her family’s initial rejection. ‘I want to be a farmer’, she said, and began her training at the agricultural school in Derio. Although she does not come from a farming background, she has worked for more than 20 years on multiple farms in Bizkaia, which has given her extensive knowledge of the sector. She currently works in Bizkaigane and, from there, she actively collaborates with the EHNE-Bizkaia agricultural union: “Getting involved in agricultural unionism has been just another part of my work, like production. I can’t understand one without the other”, she says.

As part of EHNE-Bizkaia, Amets defends feminist and agroecological unionism, committed to food sovereignty and the transformation of the production model. She acknowledges that feminism within the union has been driven by women from below, demanding more diverse and sustainable agricultural models: “We women stayed in the small models, and then we understood that this was also a political commitment”. Although there are challenges in terms of participation in wider spaces, she says that from a feminist perspective there is now “a tendency to look after interpersonal relationships more than to carry out activities”. She considers that “peasant women have a practical urgency and that we understand care from a different perspective”, which is why she maintains that peasant feminism has its own forms and times.

Amets recounts the many difficulties involved in being a woman and a young woman in a historically ageing and masculinised sector. She explains that women’s work is often valued from a paternalistic point of view, which prevents constructive criticism and real learning: “you go ahead with your blunders and nobody dares to tell you ‘but not like that’”, she says. Despite these barriers, she highlights her union’s commitment to feminism, which has gone from being “the end point of the agenda” to being integrated into all debates. In contrast to more direct strategies such as that of the Sindicato Labrego Galego, in EHNE they opted for a gradual incorporation: “we gradually introduced the issues”, seeking not to generate discomfort, but maintaining the firmness of the transformative objective.

From an intersectional perspective, Amets denounces the triple precariousness faced by rural women: economic, political and gender-based. “We are women and therefore we suffer all the discrimination that women suffer in general: invisibility, permanent judgement”. She adds that many were not recognised as peasant women even by themselves due to patriarchy, and recalls how her union pushed for measures to ensure social security contributions for women in the 1990s. However, even today public policies, such as the CAP, perpetuate inequalities by subsidising landowners and animal owners – mostly men or large companies – instead of supporting those who actually work the land. “The CAP is the only public aid in the whole of Europe that is not linked to an income,” she denounces.

Amets also criticises the lack of development of the Basque Statute for Women Farmers, pointing out that it became an end in itself: “when we had the Statute, that’s it, everyone breathed a sigh of relief”. Although it has promoted measures such as parity in the executive, she warns that without a thorough work on power relations, these changes are insufficient. She recounts the case of UAGA, whose executive broke up because it did not really integrate the women who had been incorporated. Finally, she insists that what they are looking for is not a superficial change, but a structural transformation: “what we want is a new scenario that can no longer be reversed”.