Looking back at one month of farmers’ anger in France – Technologist

From blocking freeways, appearing on TV, protesting in front of government buildings and supermarkets’ purchasing centers, working on industrial sites, riding their tractors and having their presence felt at the French prime minister’s office and the Elysée, farmers have become a dominant, even omnipresent, presence in France for almost a month now.

However, when French livestock farmers established the first roadblock on the A64 highway near the town of Carbonne in southwestern France on January 17, no one could have imagined the scale of the mobilization that would spread across the country. A wave of latent anger had begun to express itself. Farmers have voiced their frustrations and plan to escalate their frustrations to coincide with the opening of Europe’s biggest agricultural trade fair: The Paris International Agricultural Show, on Saturday, February 24.

Farmers drove their tractors into central Paris on Friday with two convoys of vehicles and public rallies planned by farmers’ unions ahead of the agricultural show. They have also planned to keep up the pressure on the government, as a delegation was to remain in front of the show’s venue, to welcome Emmanuel Macron as he arrives on Saturday.

Despite the official call by farmers’ unions for a halt to the mobilization on February 1, protest movements have continued to be organized across the country. From checking the origins of food products in stores to dumping manure in front of public buildings and “snail” operations aimed at slowing traffic to a crawl, farmers’ protest actions have taken many forms. The Confédération Paysanne union, for instance, launched an assault on Lactalis, the largest dairy products group in the world, on Wednesday, February 21. Nearly 200 demonstrators stormed the dairy giant’s headquarters in Laval, western France, and demanded a meeting with its CEO, Emmanuel Besnier, as part of the union’s demand for better wages for livestock farmers.

Strategic electoral battle

Compensation and unfair competition issues were at the heart of the first farmers’ mobilizations – from winegrowers from the famous Bordeaux and Languedoc wine regions who had to sell off their surplus wine at cut-rate prices; to cattle, sheep and goat farmers who have been struggling for years to obtain decent sales prices. The last straw was the epizootic hemorrhagic disease that affected cattle herds in southwestern France in the fall of 2023. An increase in the tax on off-road diesel fuel (GNR) also served as a catalyst.

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