Disappointed with the Prime Minister's announcements on Friday, farmers want to hold
"the siege of Paris"
this Monday afternoon to put pressure on the public authorities.
“It’s the only way to make yourself heard,”
regrets Cyrille Milard, president of the FNSEA in Seine-et-Marne.
This historic mobilization, which concerns all agricultural production and regions, shows the depth of the malaise and the inability of the executive to solve our problems despite the fine speeches.
Words of love are not enough.
We want action, and immediately.
In the meantime, we continue the mobilization, this time around Paris.”
“The coming week is one of all dangers,”
warns Arnaud Rousseau, the president of the FNSEA, traveling this Sunday on a blockage of the A16, closed for 80 kilometers between the Somme and the Oise.
“
Either because the government does not hear us, or because the anger will be such that everyone will then take their responsibilities
.
We call on everyone to be calm and determined.
There is no question of there being other accidents
,” he continues, referring to the tragedy of Pamiers, in Ariège, where a farmer and her daughter were killed last Tuesday on a dam by a car. arriving at high speed.
“Our objective is not violence, nor to go for provocation.
If some want to do it, they will do it outside the framework that is ours
,” says the leader of the first French agricultural union.
Concretely, the FNSEA and the Young Farmers (JA) plan to block access to Paris from 2 p.m. on the 7 highways leading to the capital (A1, A4, A5, A6, A10, A12 and A13).
They will stop their tractors on the road within a radius of 30 to 40 kilometers around Paris, near the Francilienne, the ring road of the Île-de-France region.
“At each blockage point, we have planned some 70 to 80 tractors to stop the traffic,”
adds one of the participants in the system, Maxime Buizard-Blondeau, JA in Loiret.
We come from twelve departments of the greater Paris basin and its surroundings.
We plan to take turns at least until Thursday, when President Macron is due to go to Brussels.
He should obtain the suspension of the measure forcing us to fallow 4% of our land this year.
In addition, for the Breton and Norman colleagues who have stopped breeding, we demand an end to the obligation to resow cultivated meadows.”
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“Our movement is united”
For their part, farmers from Rural Coordination (CR), the second largest French agricultural union, plan to block access to the Rungis market, after organizing a blockade in Roissy this Saturday.
“Without supplies for a few days, perhaps Parisians will realize the importance of agriculture in our country
,” explains Serge Bousquet-Cassagne, CR president of the Lot-et-Garonne chamber of agriculture, cereal producer and prune producer.
Our action is complementary to the FNSEA and the JA.
They are laying siege to Paris, we are blocking Rungis.
We are leaving this Monday morning with a convoy of 50 to 60 tractors and other departments will join us on the trip.
Dordogne, Haute-Vienne and Creuse have decided to join in the angry action.”
Taking into account the average speed of a tractor (40 to 50 kilometers per hour) and the 650 kilometers which separate, for example, Agen from Rungis, the convoy should only arrive during the night from Monday to Tuesday.
Furthermore, they could be slowed down by the police, already installed late Sunday afternoon near the market.
After showing a certain leniency last week, Gérald Darmanin this time asked law enforcement officials to put in place
“an important defensive system in order to prevent any blockage by farmers of the Rungis market, Ile-de-France airports and to prohibit all entry into Paris.
Also read: Nicolas Baverez: “Euthanasia of French agriculture”
The movement, and this is quite rare to underline, brings together farmers from all sectors, unionized or not, while the month of January is one of the calmest of the year in the fields.
“We are supervising a convoy of around twenty tractors, including some from the JA and the FDSEA,”
indicates Pascal Aubry, straw pig breeder, general secretary of the CR in Mayenne.
They must go to the Saint-Arnoult tollbooth
.
The idea is to pick up people along the way and go to Rungis, or even Paris.
Our movement is united and responsible.
We will be waiting for our colleagues from Lot-et-Garonne and those from other regions in Saint-Arnoult.
What we are asking for is first of all remunerative prices and not bonuses, then comes the subject of excess standards.”
“Decisions that change software”
Elsewhere in France, despite the continued decline in the number of roadblocks this Sunday, the gendarmerie still counted 20 actions in the afternoon, in 17 departments.
In Gard, the A9 motorway was still cut near Nîmes around 6 p.m.
“We are waiting for the Minister of Agriculture to come with concrete announcements, otherwise we will not lift the roadblocks,”
says Daniel Sève, president of the department's FNSEA.
In Indre et Loire, the arrival of Gabriel Attal on Sunday morning at a market garden was not enough to convince.
On the contrary, according to the head of the FNSEA: “
We did not have a good experience of what happened last week
(during a trip to Occitanie on Friday, Editor's note).
The communications, the cameras, the straw bale and all that, that's not our thing.
What we need are decisions that we feel change the software
.
I tell the Prime Minister that we must go much further.
As long as these demands are not met, the mobilization will be total.”
In these conditions, it is difficult to say when this conflict, historic in its scale, will end.