Thomas Waitz

Waitz was born in the city of Vienna, the capital of Austria. His father worked with the Austrian railroad and was involved in agriculture. After visiting the school in Vienna he left Austria for a period of world traveling. When he came back in 1994 he and his wife started together to run the ecological farm in the district Leibnitz in the very south of Styria.[3] The key element on their farm is the mixed forest, which is a plenter forest and it is worked based on a near-natural forest management. Tom is also involved in a tiny lumber mill in Slovenia. The second focus of their farm is ecological beekeeping with about 70 colonies of the Carniolan honey bee. The third sector on the farm is the breeding and taming of animals: a very special kind of sheeps, the Carniolan stone sheep and Border Collies.[4] The Border Collies are trained for herding dogs and got even the skills to herding much bigger animals like cows. Tom is father of three children.

For Tom, green is "the only serious political force interested in maintaining small-structured agriculture with all its positive effects on the environment and food quality and which is committed to small and organic farmers".[5] Since he started with the Greens, Tom has held and still holds a variety of positions: treasurer at the Green Education Workshop Styria, member of the Styrian provincial board, member of the extended federal board. For more than 10 years Tom has been involved in the green organisation Grüne Bäuerinnen und Bauern (GBB), and since autumn 2017 he has also been chairman of the GBB Styria and the GBB Austria.[6] Until 2016 he was also the first and so far only Green Chamber Councilor in the provincial chamber for agriculture and forestry in Styria.[7]

In February 2017 Tom applied for the position of board member of the European Green Party(EGP),[8] and was elected in March 2017 at the Global Greens & European Greens Congress 2017 in Liverpool as the only Austrian board member of the European Green Party at present. In this function he is responsible, among other things, for the cooperation with Green Parties in the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Poland, Hungary and Albania and supports and accompanies the development of possible Green Parties in Croatia, North Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia.[9]

On 10 November 2017, Tom took over the mandate of Ulrike Lunacek in the European Parliament[10] where he was, among other things, a member of the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development[11] and was involved in negotiations on the new funding guidelines 2021-2027 for the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).[12]

In any case, his political focus is on agriculture and the wide range of issues it covers, from food quality, food safety and animal welfare to combating climate change. Furthermore, Tom is committed to a common, eco-social economic policy of the EU, and for uniform social standards within Europe. At the same time, however, he would like to see other areas delegated back to the member states, in which the states can make decisions closer to the citizens, and cites as an example what he sees as unnecessary overregulation for direct marketing by farmers.

Tom attracts a lot of attention with his actionism, for example, he already in 2016 laid down tree trunks infested by bark beetles in front of the country house in Graz's Herrengasse,[13] or in January 2018 he stopped illegal animal transporters together with the Styrian police.[14] Besides environmental and agricultural policy, Tom is also involved in peace policy, in particular he is working for a Europe-wide ban on nuclear weapons. The joint protest action at Tom received particular attention from the members of parliament Tilly Metz from Luxembourg, Molly Scott Cato from Great Britain and Michèle Rivasi, who supported the unfurling of a banner on the runway of the military airport Kleine Brogel in Belgium, thus drawing attention to the permanent presence of US nuclear warheads in the middle of Europe.[15]

After the 2019 European Parliament election Tom was unable to take up his mandate directly but had to wait until the British MEPs left in February 2020 due to the Brexit. In addition to the Committee on Agriculture and Petitions as deputy, Tom is now also a member of Parliament's Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Committee and a delegate to the Association Committees on Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo as deputy.