Greece: Return to the land?

The Food Programme

BBC

Arts, Food

4.4 • 976 Ratings

🗓️ 23 July 2017

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week, Sheila Dillon is in Greece to speak to farmers and food producers about how they are carving new lives for themselves out of the financial crisis.

Greeks have now lived through seven years of austerity after the most catastrophic European financial crisis in modern times. Unemployment is above 23%, higher than anywhere in the EU. Amongst the under 25's the figure is more than 46%. Life is tough in Greece.

But food and farming tell a more uplifting story. Employment in food production and farming is up. Many young people left their former lives in the cities and moved back to the countryside to start farms and food start-ups.

Now, Sheila Dillon takes a trip from Greece's second city Thessaloniki in the north, to the capital, Athens to meet food producers and farmers in Greece. She asks how they are surviving, and whether food and farming might help Greece in it's recovery. She asks senior advisor in the Greek Ministry of Rural Development and Food, Professor Charalambos Kasimis, what the Government are doing to help Greece's newest farmers. And finds that part of the story involves a failed UK crowd-funding campaign to pay off the Greek national debt.

Presented by Sheila Dillon. Produced by Clare Salisbury.

Transcript

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0:48.8	I'm in the central market in Thessaloniki, the second city of Greece, and I'm surrounded here by its meat of a minute.
1:00.0	We've just passed a lot of cheese stalls. All the things that you think about, you know,
1:04.8	Greece, oregano, oregano in by the kilo, and of course olives in a hundred guises.
1:13.0	Greece has one of the highest percentages of people
1:19.0	working in agriculture in the European Union, something above 13%.
1:25.0	It doesn't seem surprising that people turned back to agriculture and turned back to
1:32.0	to the land faced with a catastrophe of 2010.
1:37.0	We're in the middle of Thessaloniki, we're going to go out into the countryside to meet some of those people.
1:43.0	Parsley, the Greeks love Parsley.
1:46.0	It's such a rich country.
	...

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