This Tuesday, French farmers maintained blockades on eight access highways to Paris for the second consecutive day. and several hundred are heading with their tractors towards the capital's food market waiting for new aid measures for the sector from the Government.
(Also read: Why farmer protests are spreading across Europe).
On board tractors, On Monday afternoon, farmers began a “silence of the capital for an unlimited duration,” at the call of the first agricultural center, the FNSEA, and its allies from Young Farmers (JA), after 11 days of protests.
The sector demands measures to solve the fall in income, low pensions, the administrative complexity, the inflation of environmental standards and foreign competition, especially the agreement negotiated by the EU and the Mercosur countries.
“The determination is total,” said Arnaud Rousseau, president of the main and powerful agricultural union FNSEA, who was received in the afternoon by the Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, and who indicated that they continue negotiating with the Government.
In an interview with the Europe 1 radio station, Rousseau pointed out that there has to be “a change of course” by the Executive and “symbolic emergency measures.”
The president of the union explained that the impression the prime minister gave him on Monday is that he had the will to go “further on all issues”.
Since early Monday afternoon, several hundred tractors have blocked traffic on the A1, A4, A5, A6, A13, A15 and A16 motorways several dozen kilometers from Paris.
In addition, a procession of tractors that left the city of Agen (southern) on Monday and was joined by others along the way spent the night in Limoges and resumed its march at 5 a.m. in the direction of the capital.
Tractors to block the Paris food market
That convoy avoided the attempts of the gendarmes to interrupt its journeysince its stated objective is to close the access to the Rungis food market, the largest in Europe, fifteen kilometers from Paris.
The Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, who mobilized 15,000 agents in response to these protests, has been warning since the weekend that he will not allow it, nor will the blockade of the Orly and Charles de Gaulle airports, nor the arrival of tractors to the city.
Darmanin asked the forces of order, however, not to intervene in the blockades of the so-called 'siege' in Paris or in the rest of the country –where there are several dozen – unless there are threats to property or people.
(Keep reading: French Court annuls the most controversial measures of Macron's immigration reform).
Attal, who was appointed to his position on the 11th, will speak at 3:00 p.m. local a general policy speech before the National Assembly in which he decided that he will not submit to the vote of the deputiesand which offers him the opportunity to present the announcements to the agricultural sector that the minister of the sector, Marc Fesneau, has promised.
After a first package of measures last Friday, which did not bring an end to the protestsfarmers demand a change in the competitive situation that they say they suffer with products imported from other countries, including those of the European Union, such as Spain and Italy, where many fruits and vegetables come from.
Also strict compliance with the so-called 'Egalim law' which theoretically guarantees that industrialists and distribution groups They must be paid for their products at a price higher than their production costs.
Beyond the simplification of rules and bureaucracy anticipated by Attal, they demand a modification of European policy to put an end to mandatory fallow, limit entries of products from Ukraine and end free trade agreements with other economic blocs.
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These last issues will be addressed by Emmanuel Macron in a meeting scheduled during Thursday's extraordinary European summit in Brussels with the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.
The French president also wants Brussels to renounce continuing negotiations with Mercosur about an agreement that he has been blocking since it was signed four years ago and to which he directly opposes.
EFE
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