French farmers demonstrated again on Friday, by surprise blocking the area around the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, a sign of anger, felt throughout Europe and which could return to France, fueled by union rivalries.
After the head of state’s rowdy visit to the Agricultural Show on Saturday and two days before its closing, several dozen farmers briefly blocked traffic with straw bales and tractors, according to the police.
Sixty-six people were arrested, including Patrick Legras, a member of the Rural Coordination at the initiative of this undeclared demonstration.
After announcements on floor prices and cash flow aid, the unions have a meeting with President Emmanuel Macron in mid-March, before the presentation of a major agricultural orientation law.
The pre-dawn irruption of agricultural machinery and bales of straw at the foot of the Arc de Triomphe, a highly symbolic place and scene of violence during the popular “yellow vest” movement in 2018, reminded us of the wounds still present. keen on the agricultural world.
Other actions took place elsewhere near Paris, with tractors blocking an exit from the ring road.
The Arc de Triomphe is a place of commemoration of soldiers who died in combat for France where foreign heads of state passing through Paris are often invited.
“We will not give up,” Véronique Le Floc’h, president of Rural Coordination, the second largest French agricultural union, told AFP.
“Still not heard”
“We cannot say that we are going to help farmers and at the same time sign free trade agreements,” she added, referring to trade agreements approved the day before by the European Parliament with Chile and Kenya.
Born in 1991 from a split with the majority union FNSEA, the Rural Coordination, accustomed to muscular actions, defends a French “agricultural exception” in a country of traditions, with a majority of small farmers whom it considers crushed by the free exchange.
“We went up this morning to lay a wreath at the Arc de Triomphe to pay tribute to all the farmers who commit suicide,” Axel Masson, a breeder in Loir-et-Cher (center), told AFP.
“We are still not heard by the State,” he added.
The CR activists were “on their way to the Palace of Versailles when they decided to make a detour via the Arc de Triomphe. It was not planned, it was an initiative of the activists” in the heat of the action, clarified Mme The Floc’h.
Once the square was evacuated, shortly after 9:30 a.m. local time, traffic resumed and a convoy of tractors took the road to the Palace of Versailles, where around twenty tractors arrived around noon, escorted by the police.
Since the start of the crisis in January, the government has promised more than 400 million euros in emergency aid, the strengthening of laws to protect farmers’ income and even to bring agriculture to the rank of a “major general interest”.
“Populism”
The executive also promised to ease constraints, particularly environmental ones, at the cost of concessions criticized by NGOs and scientists on pesticides.
“Today, the money is going down to the farmyards,” assured the Minister for Agriculture, Agnès Pannier-Runacher.
“Tightening the rope too much can be counterproductive,” commented his colleague at the Ecological Transition, Christophe Béchu, visiting the Agricultural Show.
At the end of the Show, Sunday evening, “everything will not be settled and everyone knows that,” declared the Minister of Agriculture, Marc Fesneau, at the microphone of France Bleu Occitanie.
At the forefront of the mobilization, the majority unions FNSEA and Young Farmers (JA) are not considering new mobilization in the streets at this stage.
“We must continue to work,” Arnaud Gaillot, president of JA, declared to AFP, deploring “populism without solution” on the part of the Rural Coordination, which in turn accuses the FNSEA and JA of having contributed to the current crisis by co-managing the sector with the State.
“If we have to start union action again because it’s blocking us, we will do it but our objective is not to take union action to be visible,” indicated the number 2 of the FNSEA, Hervé Lapie .