2024-01-30 07:22:28
Los farmers They started this Tuesday the second day of blockade of strategic roads around Paris, determined to show that they can resist for several days if the “new measures” revealed yesterday by the Government continue to disappoint. At the center of the conflict is competition with lower prices of Italian, Greek, Spanish or Moroccan agricultural products. Environmental organizations are concerned about a possible setback in environmental standards in the face of pressure from the French camp. The majority agrarian unions are trying to take advantage of their advantage due to the impact of the mobilization. They ask, in particular, to reconsider restrictions on the use of pesticides and other specific aids. According to a police source, a thousand farmers and “a little more than 500 machines” participated in Monday’s blockades around Paris. The objective of waiting until Friday is evident, given the objective of achieving economic advantages for the French agricultural sector. At the blocking points, farmers are prepared to maintain the blockades for a long time, with food, generators, water tanks… Around 15,000 gendarmes have been deployed to prevent the protest from leading to clashes or burning of trucks.
A convoy of producers that left this Tuesday morning from Limoges towards the National Interest Market (MIN) of Rungis, changed route after being blocked on the A20 by the gendarmes, according to the Rural Coordination (CR) that directs the operation. Armored gendarmerie vehicles were deployed in Rungis, but the convoy was stopped early in the morning several hundred kilometers from the capital by police deployed on the roads, provoking the anger of farmers interviewed by the media. on board the tractors.
On the A1, the A4, the A6, the A13, farmers spent the night on their tractors after having begun blocking the motorways near the capital on Monday afternoon. “The night has been short, we will have to recover, but we are prepared,” said Samuel Vandaele, general secretary of the FDSEA 77, in a hoarse voice, under a bridge on the A4 motorway, about thirty kilometers east of Paris, AFP reports. . Braziers, generators, beer and coffee starred in the morning of farmers blocking roads with their tractors. More than a week after the first road blockade in Occitania, which began the movement on January 26, other actions are planned throughout France.
Government proposals
And new measures must be revealed during the day, since the first agricultural union, the FNSEA, considered, after the emergency measures announced on Friday by Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, that it was necessary to “go further.” The head of Government received again on Monday afternoon, for three and a half hours, Arnaud Rousseau and his counterpart from the allied union Young Farmers (JA), Arnaud Gaillot, without statements at the end.
Uninvited, the left-wing minority Confédération paysanne union calls on other organizations to focus on “stopping free trade agreements” and “formally banning the purchase of agricultural products below their cost price.” “The motto is to stay until we have an answer to the main points,” declared Thomas Robin, cereal producer in Tilly and deputy secretary general of the FDSEA Ile-de. -France, contacted by AFP.
“We all want to return to our crops and our animals,” said Samuel Vandaele, general secretary of the FDSEA 77 and former president of the JA. “We don’t want to bother our fellow citizens,” he added when organizing the camp on Monday. Attal, who will make his general policy statement on Tuesday, announced on Friday in particular an inflated compensation for livestock farmers whose livestock have been affected by an epizootic haemorrhagic disease and the abandonment of the increase in the tax on off-road diesel fuel (GNR).
In Marmande, in Lot-et-Garonne, farmers have been taking turns since Monday morning near two supermarkets (Biocoop and Leclerc), at a roundabout where they control the loading of foreign and French trucks.
About 150 farmers with their tractors, from Haute-Garonne, Gers, Tarn and Ariège, plan to block access to Toulouse airport on Tuesday morning, according to the secretary general of the FDSEA Haute-Garonne, Luc Mesbah.
In a sign of some unrest, the prefecture of Drôme asked the inhabitants of the department “not to accumulate food reserves”, ensuring that “the main supermarkets” were sufficiently supplied.
Arnaud Quémard, general director of Sanef (Northern and Eastern motorways), estimated on Tuesday morning at RMC that the blockades caused a drop in traffic of 30 to 40%, with significant losses of income, with “significant costs”, especially for road cleaning”
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