By Sharon Kimathi, Energy and ESG Editor, Reuters Digital
French farmers are in focus after blocking highways around Paris with their tractors as part of nationwide protests demanding better pay and living conditions.
Farmers in France, the European Union’s biggest agricultural producer, have complained of unfair competition from rivals in more lightly regulated countries.
Over the last week, they have set up roadblocks on motorways to highlight their cause. They have also damaged property, including local government offices.
In Longvilliers, southwest of Paris, Reuters footage showed tractors blocking the A10 highway both to and from the capital, with traffic diverted to smaller roads.
French farmers block the A64 highway with their tractors to protest over price pressures, taxes and green regulation in Carbonne, south of Toulouse, France. REUTERS/Nacho Doce
‘Red tape simplified’
The French government dropped plans to gradually reduce state subsidies on agricultural diesel but that has not satisfied the protesting farmers.
After two weeks of protests that have spread across France, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal announced a series of measures to ease financial and administrative pressure on farmers.
He said a plan to phase out state support on diesel would be scrapped, red tape simplified, and an appeal lodged with the European Union for a waiver on bloc-wide rules on fallow land.
But Arnaud Rousseau, head of FNSEA, France’s biggest farming union, told French TV station TF1: “We have decided to pursue our movement. The prime minister had not responded to all of our questions.”
Manure on public buildings
“We will stop this Kafka-esque system,” said Attal, 34, criticizing the EU rules and responding to the first big crisis of his premiership. “We will stop this planned trajectory of increasing tax on non-road diesel fuel.”
Attal also announced a raft of other steps designed to quell the unrest that has seen farmers spray manure over a public building and supermarket, dump hay bales in highways and empty the contents of trucks carrying fresh produce from neighboring countries.
France would remain opposed to signing the Mercosur free-trade deal, which farmers say will flood the country with cheaper Latin American meat and produce, he said.
France will also push to ease European Union rules forcing farmers to leave some of their land fallow.
Farmers must meet certain conditions to receive EU subsidies – including a requirement to devote 4% of farmland to “non-productive” areas where nature can recover. That can be done by leaving land lying fallow.
Two EU officials told Reuters the EU’s executive Commission was looking into changing the fallow land rule, as requested by France, among other options to respond to the farmers’ concerns.
Action in other EU countries
France’s protests follow similar action in other European countries, including Germany and Poland, ahead of European elections in which the far right, for whom farmers represent a growing constituency, is seen making gains.
In Brussels too, traffic on the ring road around the Belgian capital was disrupted by angry farmers and about a dozen tractors made it through to Square de Meeus in Brussels’ EU area where they honked loudly.
Angry farmers stopped about five trucks with Spanish vegetables and dumped the produce near the distribution center of Belgian retailer Colruyt near Brussels, Belgian media reported.
