“To every problem, you respond with a standard.
» Gabriel Attal castigated this Tuesday the “crocodile tears” of opposition towards farmers who are increasing their actions in France as elsewhere in Europe, protesting in particular against financial charges and environmental standards considered too heavy.
“Sometimes your tears for our farmers are like crocodile tears, really,” the Prime Minister said during the government questions session at the National Assembly.
Agriculture: @GabrielAttal believes that the “tears” coming from the left benches “sometimes” resemble “crocodile tears”.
“To every problem you respond with a standard.”
#DirectAN #QAG pic.twitter.com/AjSwokgm6X
— LCP (@LCP) January 23, 2024
“Every time our farmers, our family breeders, have a project to extend their breeding” or “a project is launched (…) on a water reservoir to fight against drought, on investments to our farms, it is your friends who are opposed to them,” he listed, particularly targeting rebels and environmentalists.
“To every problem, you respond with a standard.
To each difficulty, you generally respond by pointing the finger at our farmers,” denounced Gabriel Attal.
The rebels and environmentalists targeted
“Some speeches about our farmers present them as bandits, as polluters of our land, as torturers of their animals.
We would also like to hear your indignation and your defense of the agricultural model,” he continued.
He had previously praised the “passion” of farmers, the “commitment of a France which gets up at dawn every day, which works, which only asks to be able to do its job well and to be recognized”.
Also read “We walk on our heads”: why the agricultural world denounces the standards
The head of government had also mentioned the "fear" of farmers "of the disappearance of our model, of the loss of quality, of the absence of succession", and their "wound, that of women and men who give everything for our land, everything for our animals and who find themselves constantly denigrated, caricatured, cornered.”
Farmers “clear-eyed about the importance of the EU”
“Talking with our farmers, (…) is also talking with lucid women and men about the importance of the European Union” which finances the Common Agricultural Policy, he also asserted.
To the RN deputy Nicolas Meizonnet who denounced a “common policy in Brussels totally disconnected from the specificities of the French model” of fishing, Gabriel Attal replied that it was Brexit, i.e. the exit of the United Kingdom from the EU in January 2020, “who has most endangered our fishermen in recent years” and “that the first supporters of Brexit were you, it was the National Rally”.
Also readHow the RN is riding the anger of farmers: “They represent the rurality that we want to defend”
The president and head of the RN list in the European elections Jordan Bardella went to Lorient on Tuesday to discuss with fishermen, who have been subject since Monday and for a month to a fishing ban in the Bay of Biscay to preserve dolphins , a source of anxiety for the sector despite the aid announced.