To lift the blockages, farmers are still waiting for “concrete actions”

2024-01-22 19:36:00

Will the first crisis that Gabriel Attal faces be contained or spread like an oil stain? This Monday, the meeting between farmers’ organizations and the new Prime Minister was supposed to defuse the risk of greater social unrest. But at the end of the discussions this Monday evening, no compromise or agreement seems to have reassured the agricultural federations.

The president of the FNSEA Arnaud Rousseau indicated that there would be no “no lifting of shares” carried out by farmers in France to express their dismay, as long as there is no “no concrete decisions” of the executive.

“We need very concrete actions and therefore what we said to the Prime Minister is that as long as there are no concrete decisions (…) there will be no lifting of actions carried out on the ground”, declared Arnaud Rousseau to journalists, ensuring that the agricultural world “will not be satisfied with measures”.

For now, farmers will therefore maintain the pressure and continue their actions throughout the week (rblocked roads, media calls, soon radar coverings…)

Among their demands, the rejection of environmental standards and taxes voted in Brussels:

“The EU has passed around fifteen texts which impose new constraints on farmers. This comes on top of the consequences of the Covid health crisis and then the war in Ukraine: increases in production costs and the disruption of trade flows”explains to The Tribune Christiane Lambert, president of the Committee of Professional Agricultural Organizations.

“We need hands and an agricultural policy that gives itself the means” (Christiane Lambert, FNSEA)

In France, the profession is going through a deep malaise. In forty years, the number of French farmers has been divided by four and the average age of farm managers (51.4 years) raises concerns regarding the resumption of activity.