The protest mobilizations of French farmers and ranchers are gaining intensity with each passing day. Yesterday the blockades of motorways and roads by tractors spread to more regions, from Alsace to Brittany, from the Pas de Calais to Bouches-du-Rhône (Marseille), and caused serious inconvenience to transporters and motorists.
The National Federation of Agricultural Exploitation Unions (FNSEA) threatened to take the actions to the Ile-de-France region starting today, which includes Paris and its surroundings. Access to the capital could be affected, which would create a serious situation in an area where more than 12 million people live and is the political and economic nerve center of the country.
As a small appetizer of what could be a harassment of the capital, a lone tractor driver stood without permission on the Champs-Élysées before being forced by the police to leave Paris.
One of the places where there was the most tension was in Agen, in the Lot-et-Garonne department. A McDonald's chain store was attacked. The protesters threw bales of straw inside and also burned a European flag. Hours later, the object of the farmers' anger was the prefecture. Several tractors piled up a large quantity of straw bales and tires in front of the building's fence. Then they set fire to the accumulated mass and from a large tanker pulled by a tractor they sprayed the place with manure. The firefighters and riot police did nothing for a while to avoid a direct confrontation. It was not easy to forcibly remove the heavy vehicles.
The Government is waiting. It is the most serious crisis that the new Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, is experiencing, without a doubt a litmus test for the young head of Government, only 34 years old. According to his spokesperson, Attal wants to intervene on the ground as soon as possible to try to calm things down. The decisive thing, however, will be to make some concrete concessions, such as canceling the planned increase in diesel for agricultural use and speeding up compensation to farms that are victims of pests.
The list of farmers' demands is long. The main complaint, although it does not have an easy solution because it depends on many factors, is the low level of income of the majority of farmers and ranchers. Some claim that, after paying all expenses (seeds, fertilizers, fuel, feed, electricity, loans, insurance) they only earn barely 500 euros net per month despite working 12-hour days, with hardly any holidays or vacations. A general complaint from the profession is directed at European policy, which they accuse of favoring large industrial farms and multinationals in the sector to the detriment of medium and small farms.
The environmental standards derived from the European Green Deal are also the target of criticism, considering that limitations on the use of fertilizers or organic production quotas make their work even more difficult and less profitable. The paradox arises that radical environmentalists and fundamentalist vegans are the bête noire of many farmers. In some areas, for example, ranchers complain about the overpopulation of wolves and bears, which decimate herds, and demand fewer limitations when it comes to shooting down wolves or firing intimidation shots to scare away the plantigrades.
Better access to water, which is scarce in some regions, is another demand from farmers. Radical environmentalists are virulently opposed, for environmental reasons, to initiatives to build small reservoirs, as is the case in the Deux-Sèvres region, west of Poitiers, where there were violent clashes months ago.
