Paris (AFP) – Protests by angry farmers spread across Europe on Tuesday as the French government scrambled to placate agriculture workers who have blocked motorways and launched convoys of tractors toward Paris.
Their complaints range from rising costs to meeting carbon-cutting targets, fuel prices, inflation, bureaucracy, and Ukrainian grain imports.
The French mobilisation has blown up into a serious crisis for Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, who is only three weeks into the job after a cabinet shake-up by President Emmanuel Macron.
Around 1,000 farmers with hundreds of vehicles blocked key roads into Paris for a second day, with some sleeping in their tractors overnight.
Authorities said there were still 120 roadblocks in place across France on Tuesday evening, with more than 12,000 farmers and 6,000 tractors involved.
Addressing parliament, Attal said his government stood ready to resolve the crisis and praised the agriculture sector as “our force and our pride”.
Agriculture embodies the “values of work, freedom and entrepreneurship”, Attal said, adding: “It is one of the foundations of our identity and our traditions.”
In an apparent reference to contested EU rules, he said: “France must be granted an exception for its agriculture.”
But in an acknowledgement that a first battery of measures announced on Friday did not go far enough, Attal told lawmakers that “new support measures” would be announced in the coming days.
A source in Attal’s office said the prime minister would meet with officials from the FNSEA farmers’ union, the country’s largest, in Paris on Tuesday evening.
He will then meet Wednesday with the Farmers’ Confederation — which on Tuesday called for the blocking of distribution centres for grocery stores to protest over chains that sell agriculture products below cost, at farmers’ expense.
It said Attal had yet to offer “any long-term prospects” for farmers.
– ‘Not like before’ –
Macron, speaking during a visit to Sweden, said he was opposed to a trade deal between the European Union and South American bloc Mercosur, which has emerged as a key grievance for farmers worried about foreign competition.
But Macron also said that it was “too easy” to blame all the farmers’ woes on the EU.
“We did a lot in the last years to help,” he said.
Macron said authorities would “try to simplify the rules” to help farmers and vowed to show “flexibility” on certain regulations.
After more than a week of intensifying French protests, disgruntled farmers in other European countries joined the movement.
Dozens of Italian farmers staged a protest with tractors near Milan on Tuesday, the latest in a series of small demonstrations across the country.
Spanish farmer unions said they would join the movement with a number of protests, while Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis offered to speed up financial aid to farmers to stave off protests engulfing other countries.
Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Belgium and Romania have all seen protests in recent days.
Much anger is directed at environmental requirements included in the EU’s updated Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and the bloc’s forthcoming “Green Deal”.
France’s government has so far taken a soft approach to the protests, while making clear that any attempt to block Paris airports or the Rungis wholesale food market to the south of the city would be a red line.
– ‘Feed not starve’ –
A convoy of producers left on Tuesday from the southwestern town of Limoges for Rungis, where armoured gendarmerie vehicles were deployed to ensure food supplies were not disrupted.
Arnaud Rousseau, the FNSEA leader, said he was against any interference with food distribution.
“Our objective is not to starve French people, but to feed them,” he told Europe 1 radio.
In the southwestern city of Toulouse, farmers blocked the entrance to the city’s Blagnac airport with tractors and burned tyres.
“The watchword is to stay as long as we do not have an answer to the main issues,” Thomas Robin, a cereals farmer producer and also of the FNSEA, told AFP.
French farmers are angry about low incomes, red tape and environmental policies they say undermine their ability to compete with other countries and have left France increasingly dependent on imports.
“Obviously we want to be treated better, but more than anything we want fewer free-trade agreements,” Thierry Bonnamour, a farmer from the Savoie region, told AFP at a roadblock near the southeastern city of Lyon.
The Mercosur deal as well as Ukrainian grain imports into the EU are on the agenda of talks between Macron and EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen on Thursday.
France is the biggest beneficiary of EU farming subsidies, receiving more than nine billion euros ($9.8 billion) per year.
Once the bloc’s biggest agricultural exporter, it is now third behind the Netherlands and Germany.
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