Markus Ritter, the People's Poisoner

Markus Ritter, President of the Swiss Farmers' Union, is a master of deception.

He sells hard-nosed lobbying interests as concern for «food security.» Yet behind this façade lies a system that poisons soils, contaminates drinking water – and kills over 80 million farm animals in Switzerland every year.

Lobbying against clean drinking water

Ritter is the loudest defender of an agriculture based on chemicals and factory farming. He fought the drinking water and pesticide initiative with every means at his disposal to protect the old structures: pesticides in the fields, residues in the water, poison in the food – and the public pays the price with its health. At the same time, millions of animals are fattened in cramped stalls and slaughtered under cruel conditions. Ritter calls this «food security» – in reality, it is a system of organised exploitation and destruction. It has long had nothing to do with food, but with toxic fillers. The environmental pollution caused by industrial agriculture also affects wildlife.

His argument that without synthetic chemicals and industrial animal production food security cannot be guaranteed is a blatant lie. It primarily protects those farmers who are unwilling to rethink, and the agrochemical and meat industries that earn billions from poison and animal suffering. Meanwhile, bees are dying, soils are losing their fertility, the climate is suffering, and the population is drinking water laced with pesticide cocktails.

Lobbying bloc in the Federal Palace

Through the Farmers' Union, Ritter commands what is arguably the most powerful lobbying bloc in the Federal Palace. Through scaremongering, fake facts, and multimillion-franc campaigns, he prevents change. In the short term this may appear “successful” – in the long term it is a disaster: for the environment, for public health, for the animals.

Ritter thus stands for an agricultural policy that places profit above all else: above nature, above the fundamental right to clean water, above the lives of millions of animals. He is the face of a system that can make us all sick and destroy the land. Biodiversity is suffering massively under intensive agriculture.

As long as Ritter represents Swiss agriculture, nothing will change: more pesticides on the fields, more animal suffering in the stalls, more obstruction against real change. He does not defend farmers — he defends a policy of poisoning and industrial killing machinery. A disgrace for Switzerland.