French PM meets frustrated farm leaders as reforms delayed again

French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal meets leaders of the powerful FNSEA farming union on Monday evening, a day after his agriculture minister announced a long-delayed reform package had again been postponed.

The growing anger of farmers, some of whom have already taken to direct action to express their frustration, is shaping up to be the first major challenge of President Emmanuel Macron’s newly appointed government.

Attal will meet both FNSEA and young farmers’ leaders at his Paris offices at 6 p.m. (1700 GMT) at a meeting scheduled before the latest delay was announced. He will face demands for concrete action to address their problems.

Already, over the weekend, Attal was insisting that he was on their side.

“Our farmers are not bandits, polluters, people who torture animals, as we sometimes hear,” he told a meeting on Saturday in the southern Rhone region.

But the latest action by farmers in the southern Occitanie region gives a measure of their anger.

They started a blockade of the A64 motorway late on Thursday at Carbonne, some 45 kilometers southwest of Toulouse.

Among their grievances are the ever-increasing costs the sector faces and what they say is the choking effect of over-zealously imposed environmental regulations.

They are also angry about progressive tax increases on the non-road-use diesel that is essential to their work.

Similar issues have led farmers in other European nations to also take action.

Fleets of tractors have brought traffic to a standstill in Germany and Romania, and farmers have also protested in the Netherlands and Poland.

They all face the challenge of inflation — caused in part by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and what some see as unfair competition from Ukrainian agricultural imports.

In Britain Monday, fruit and vegetable producers will again demonstrate in front of parliament against what they say are the unfair terms of their contracts with the main supermarkets.

WITH AFP