Angry farmers deployed tractors to block main roads in and out of Paris on Monday, in an escalating standoff that has left the capital engulfed in unrest and become the first major test for newly appointed French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal.
Last week Mr Attal rushed to rural areas in southern France and offered a series of swift concessions as he sought to head off widening street protests by food producers across the country. But the steps failed to appease many farmers.
Their grievances are so varied that the protests present an increasingly precarious moment for a government that defies easy solutions. Many farmers say foreign competition is unfair, wages are too low and regulations from both the government and the European Union have become stifling.
“I am determined to move forward,” Mr Atal said on Sunday after visiting farmers in the Indre-et-Loire region of central France. But he also warned that “there are things that cannot be changed overnight”.
On Monday, hundreds of farmers from the Paris region and elsewhere in France gathered in the French capital for what they called an indefinite “siege” announced by the country’s main farmers’ unions. The action was a major escalation after a week of protests and highway blockades that have already engulfed the country.
The main farmers’ unions said they had no intention of storming Paris or blocking the capital entirely, but that they had decided to block eight major roads between five and 25 miles around the capital, with similar barricades and traffic delays expected elsewhere. including cities such as Lyon.
“Our aim is not to annoy the French or destroy their lives,” Arnaud Rousseau, head of FNSEA, France’s largest farmers’ union, told RTL radio. “Our goal is to put pressure on the government.”
Unions hope to stage a “military” precision operation, with safety measures to prevent fatal accidents like the one that killed two people last week, and rolling shifts of farmers at staff barricades for days.
“We are increasing the pressure because we know that when they are away from Paris, the message is not being heard,” Mr Rousseau said.
Authorities have warned residents to prepare for extremely disrupted traffic and have deployed 15,000 police and gendarmes across France to secure the protests. President Emmanuel Macron’s government has so far moved cautiously in its response to the movement, which enjoys support from more than 80 percent of the public, according to opinion polls.
“We are not here for a test of strength,” said Gérald Darmanin, France’s interior minister. he said on Sunday.
Mr Darmanin said security forces would adopt a “defensive posture” to prevent farmers from crossing “red lines”, such as entering major cities, blocking airports or disrupting Rungis, the largest wholesale food market in the world, just south of Paris.
After a meeting with farmers last week, Mr. Attal promised to simplify bureaucratic regulations, deliver emergency aid faster and enforce laws meant to guarantee a living wage for farmers in price negotiations with retailers and distributors. He also said the government was scrapping plans to cut government subsidies on diesel fuel used in trucks and other machinery.
But the steps have so far failed to quell farmers’ anger, which is deep and varied. Grape growers, ranchers, grain farmers and other producers have voiced widespread complaints about low wages, complex administrative hassles, environmental regulations, unfair foreign competition, and skyrocketing energy and fertilizer prices caused by the war in Ukraine .
Other problems are more specific – from access to water to cattle epidemics – and farmers have issued a long, jumbled list of demands to the government, although some can only be addressed at the European Union level.
In Agen, a town in southwestern France where the protests have been particularly intense, farmers leaving for a 370-mile trip to Paris said they did not trust Mr. Attal, who last week rushed to the region and vowed to put agriculture first. than anything else.
“It’s just words,” said Théophane de Flaujac, 28, who joined the protest from his family’s vegetable and grain farm, which he says has come under increasing pressure as distributors opt for cheaper imports from Spain and elsewhere without the same strict environmental rules. France. Last week, some protesters emptied trucks carrying foreign goods.
“Before, he said he would put education at the center of everything,” Mr de Flaujac said of Mr Attal. “Now, he says it’s farming. After he’ll say it’s transport, then health care.”
The few dozen farmers leaving Agen on tractors festooned with protest signs and French flags were members of Rural Coordination, a radical, right-wing and anti-European group that broke away from FNSEA in 1991.
Last week, these farmers besieged Agen, throwing debris in front of symbolic buildings such as the train station and banks and social service offices that serve the farmers. The farmers also blocked the gate of the cute prefectural building with giant tractor tires, wooden pallets and hay bales and sprinkled it liberally with liquid manure.
They now have their sights set on Paris, which they expected to reach on Tuesday.
“We did everything we could here,” said Karine Duc, 38, an organic grape grower and co-president of the local chapter of Rural Coordination. “We are going to Paris because we need answers and real measures.”
“This is our last fight,” she added, donning her union’s mustard yellow cap. “Farmers feel that if we don’t get this, we’re going to go broke.”
It is unclear how long the unions can maintain a united front over the protests, which began with a handful of farmers rebelling against a local FNSEA chapter.
Rural Coordination wants to disrupt Rungis, the wholesale food market on which Paris depends for much of its food, while FNSEA and other more mainstream unions have ruled it out. Taking no chances, the authorities have already placed armored police vehicles on the market.
Édouard Lynch, a French historian specializing in agriculture, said the protests were influenced by unions in the run-up to the Chamber of Agriculture elections, which are crucial in rural areas because they provide training and distribute agricultural subsidies. The competition itself added an unexpected impetus to the protests.
“Clearly, you can see them competing now,” said Mr. Lynch, a professor of modern French history at the University of Lyon 2. “Agrarian coordination has been very effective, so the FNSEA must keep pushing.”
Farmers also turned up the heat ahead of the European Union summit in Brussels starting on Thursday, which Mr Macron is scheduled to attend.
Some of their anger has been directed specifically at the EU’s Green Deal, which aims to ensure the bloc meets its climate targets but has left farmers across Europe feeling unfairly targeted by new environmental obligations.
Marc Fesneau, France’s agriculture minister, told France 2 that he would push to maintain an exemption from the EU’s obligation for larger farms to leave 4% of arable land fallow or devote to other “non-productive” features , such as olive groves – to preserve biodiversity. if they want to receive critical agricultural subsidies.
