Seven months later, the instigator of the A64 blockade looks back on this movement which set the agricultural world ablaze in January 2024

In January, Jérôme Bayle, a farmer from the Pyrenees, was behind a blockade of the A64, with tractors and bales of straw. This son of a farmer who committed suicide in 2015 launched a spontaneous movement, which took on an unexpected scale.

On January 18, 2024, a blockade of several dozen tractors and bales of straw blocked the A64 motorway near Carbonne, in Haute Garonne. Defying his FDSEA union, Jérôme Bayle, the breeder behind this unprecedented protest, was surrounded by only a few friends. “Only a bullet in the head would stop me from driving a tractor onto the highway, we have nothing left to lose“, he said as his companions set up mannequins hanging from a bridge to recall the worrying suicide rate in the profession.

In 2015, after his father’s suicide, Jérôme Bayle took over the family farm at the foot of the Pyrenees. When he decided to block the motorway between Toulouse and Bayonne, the former rugby captain warned that the tractors would not leave until three demands were met: reimbursement of costs for MHE, the disease that attacks herds, the abandonment of the tax on non-road diesel, and the construction of water reservoirs or dams.

These wishes were granted about ten days later, following a visit by Prime Minister Gabriel Attal. Jérôme Bayle kept his word by withdrawing his tractors, and he was immediately accused of having stopped the movement too early, of having betrayed the cause, among others by political figures from all sides. It is quite the opposite, defends the new spokesperson for farmers seven months later, who claims to have been surprised by the extent of his media coverage: “It was not planned, he assures. When we get to 50 interviews per day, the goal is to talk about the agricultural world… I would have at least had the pride of making a full page in the New York Times !”

“We thought that 48 hours later, we would have squadrons of CRS everywhere, that we would be thrown out and that the story would be over. In the end, it turned out to be a movement that took on national proportions.”

Jerôme Bayle, breeder.

to franceinfo

For him, the agricultural cause had not had so much light since José Bové. He does not consider himself the spokesperson for French farmers, but only wanted to express “the problems of the agricultural world base in simple words, that everyone can understand”, he said. As for the criticisms and accusations of compromise, he simply responds that he is a man of his word, whether with the companions or the Prime Minister, with whom he believes he has had a discourse “frank and honest”. And if Gabriel Attal used him to restore his reputation, as we heard at the time, Jérôme Bayle retorts that it still had an effect. “benefited the agricultural cause”: “We must not forget that an agricultural orientation plan was put in place, which did not exist.”

Today, the breeder believes that the movement has succeeded in “reverse the curve” and to “recreate a link that no longer existed in the profession”. Even if the fight must be continued, he adds, particularly in terms of income. Without revealing which ones, Jerôme Bayle confides that he has been approached by several parties to run in the European elections, but not by Emmanuel Macron’s party.