For a few days it has begun in France a widespread protest by farmers, who blocked access to some roads and motorways in the country with their tractors. The protest by French farmers is only the latest in a series of protests recently organized by farmers’ trade associations throughout Europe.
Through the leader of the main trade union, the FNSEA, the French farmers have made it known that they will remain on the roads “for as long as necessary” and until concrete responses to their “despair” arrive from the government, such as reiterated on Monday 22 January after a meeting with the new Prime Minister Gabriel Attal. The farmers are asking for emergency measures to support their business and denounce, in particular, the low level of their incomes and the excessive administrative and bureaucratic burdens to which they would be subjected.
The protests began last week, in Occitania, in southwestern France, when farmers they had blocked a section of the A64 motorway, which connects Toulouse to Bayonne. In the following days there were demonstrations in various cities across the country and new blockades in both directions on the A62 motorway, near Agen, capital of the Lot-et-Garonne department, in the New-Aquitaine region. On Monday 22 January in the same area farmers blocked access to the Golfech nuclear power plant.
At dawn on Tuesday morning, around twenty tractors blocked traffic in both directions near Albon on the A7 motorway, Drôme department, in the Rhône-Alpes region, and still other vehicles blocked the A63 motorway between Bayonne and Bordeaux. The prefecture of Ariège, in Occitanie, he made it known that a woman participating in the protests died and that her husband and teenage daughter were seriously injured after a car crashed into a checkpoint at dawn. The three people in the car were arrested, but for now there are no other details on what happened.
The farmers’ protests are expanding and hardening in #France.
Now also in Lot-et-Garonne, where angry farmers dump tires onto the railroad tracks below.#FarmersProtest pic.twitter.com/mSjgG5f5Jx— The Interventionist (@Intrvntnst) January 23, 2024
The protests by French farmers add to those held in recent weeks in various European countries including Germany, NetherlandsPoland, Spain, United Kingdom e Serbia. Although each local protest was organized from time to time for specific reasons, several newspapers spoke about a trend: many farmers oppose the direct and indirect consequences of the European Green Deal, a series of measures promoted by the European Union to make energy production and the lifestyle of citizens more sustainable and less harmful to the environment.
European farmers are protesting in particular against the Farm to Fork plan, which envisages converting at least 25 percent of cultivated land to organic farming by 2030, and against the proposal, still under discussion in the European Parliament, to drastically reduce the use of pesticides, again by 2030 (a first proposal to reduce them by 50 percent had been rejected after much pressure from trade associations).
– Read also: Farmers’ protests have returned to Europe
The specific reasons for the French farmers’ protest have to do with the increase in taxes on tractor fuel – which several European governments are considering to achieve the objectives of the Green Deal – but also with the cost of energy and the excessive , in their opinion, regulation and bureaucratization of their profession. All issues that the government is addressing, according to them, slowly and inefficiently. “The farmers who call us no longer even know what they have the right to do or not do” and do not feel “adequately supported”, he summarized toFrance Media Agency Véronique Le Floc’h, president of Rural Coordination, the second agricultural union in the country.
THE #farmers dump tons of manure and waste on the railway tracks #Agen.#AngryFarmers pic.twitter.com/asZtDwuXeV
— Luc Auffret (@LucAuffret) January 22, 2024
French farmers have also denounced the postponement of a bill promised more than a year ago by President Emmanuel Macron, which would have as its main objective to promote generational change in the agricultural sector, which is aging rapidly. The protest also concerns the massive imports of cereals, poultry and sugar from Ukraine into Europe, at such low prices that according to farmers it represents a form of unfair competition.
The French government has been trying for months to do something to resolve the crisis. In December, former prime minister Elisabeth Borne announced the abandonment of tax increases on pesticides and irrigation. On January 19, the Minister of Agriculture, Marc Fesneau, had in turn promised financial support from the state to farmers. For now the promises have not been materialized.
Just like in Germany, in France too the far right is trying to exploit the farmers’ protests ahead of the European elections. Jordan Bardella, president of the Rassemblement National, the main French far-right party, accused “Macron’s Europe” of wanting “the death of agriculture”.
The far right has called for a “state of emergency” for the agricultural sector, an economic policy aimed at defending national products against foreign competition and France’s exit from free trade agreements that allow the mutual opening of markets between different countries. «I am happy that Mr. Bardella developed an interest in agriculture over the weekend», he replied Agriculture Minister Marc Fesneau, defining the far-right’s proposals as impracticable.
– Read also: The German far right is trying to exploit the farmers’ demonstrations