EUROPE’S 21st-CENTURY PEASANTS’ REVOLT DROWNING BUREAUCRATS IN BRUSSELS IN A MOUNTAIN OF MANURE
Our man joins thousands of French farmers on the picket line and hears their fears over saucissons et biere
YOU don’t need to spend long on the A4 just outside Paris to confirm the adage that, if going on strike was a competitive sport, France would be its undefeated world champion. Here, on what is usually one of Europe’s busiest motorways, several hundred Gallic farmers have parked their tractors next to a concrete flyover bridge. On paper, they are staging a political demonstration. In practice, it looks more like a sort of music festival.
An enormous U-shaped haystack, blocking all six lanes, protects revellers from the howling wind. Fire pits keep them warm.
There’s a beer tent serving free lager and cider on tap and further down the road, a second bar, this time in a trailer. At the centre of things stands a large marquee filled with trestle tables, where you can help yourself to baguettes, camembert, salami and apples. A short walk away is an open-air disco area, where they play Johnny Hallyday late into the night.
Demonstrators have been on this picket line, 30km from the Champs-Elysees, for most of the week. They pitched camp beds in cattle trucks, used portable toilet cubicles provided by organisers and made liberal use of the free wifi and diesel generator-powered charging spots for their mobile phones.
‘It’s incredible,’ said a gendarme from the local town of Jossigny, a commuter village adjacent to Disneyland, when I visited. ‘I was here on Monday morning when they arrived. Everything was set up in about ten minutes. By the time I came down from the bridge, people were already handing out beer and cooking sausages on a barbecue. Every few hours, more people are arriving with fresh supplies.’
At first glance, the only obvious clues that this was some sort of protest were a couple of banners dangling from the bridge, alongside an effigy of a man wearing a boiler suit. Until, that is, you spoke to the farmers.
THEN the sense of righteous anger that had taken this hardy group from their fields to this windswept freeway suddenly became very clear indeed. This is, for want of a better term, a 21stcentury peasants’ revolt. ‘We are sick, sick, sick of being ignored!’ declared Jean-Guillaume Hannequin. ‘We are saying: “Enough!”’
Jean-Guillaume farms 200 hectares of barley on a family plot near Verdun on the Belgian border, where he lives with his wife and two children. He’d driven his tractor an astonishing 300km to be here. ‘The effigy that hangs from the bridge above me represents the farmer who is committing suicide, every other day, because of the terrible situation in our industry. It is a crisis. That is why we protest. We will carry on until our politicians listen. But that could be a long time, so we have also made sure that people have a beer and a nice meal and build what we call “la solidarité”.’
The protesters were, in other words, very much here to stay.
Dubbed ‘les gilets verts’ or ‘green vests’ to distinguish them from the populist ‘gilets jaunes’ protesters who have held sometimes violent demonstrations across France in recent years, they also weren’t alone. At one point, on Thursday afternoon, their tractors were among an astonishing collection of 4,500 agricultural vehicles blocking no fewer than 80 key locations on France’s road network.
Indeed, for most of the week, every major road into Paris has been closed, emptying the normally bustling streets of traffic, and causing fresh fruit and veg to disappear from some stores.
In other corners of France, especially in the southern provinces where the more militant of the nation’s 500,000 farmers live, things became febrile. At a supermarket in Castelculier, a village north of Toulouse, a roof collapsed under the weight of slurry sprayed at it by farmers upset at the quantity of foreign produce on the shelves.
In Narbonne, a building belonging to a farming insurance company was burned down. And farmers in Clermont-Ferrand, west of Lyon, on Wednesday succeeded in using welding equipment to close the gates to a local government building behind so-called ‘sustainable development’ policies.
On a freeway near Carcassonne, a tractor was filmed upending lorries carrying Lithuanian vegetables, which were then disposed of in a bonfire. On the A7 outside Marseille, crates of imported tomatoes, cabbages and cauliflowers were tossed across the freeway.
Near the south-western border, protesters tipped 100,000 litres of Spanish wine down a drain. And outside a supermarket near Clermont, one enterprising protester covered the Tarmac in soil, before ploughing it and planting seeds.
This month’s escalating tractor-based protests involve not only French farmers, but others across a huge swathe of Europe, too.
IFA members held demonstrations in almost every county this week in solidarity with EU farmers. And angry scenes have been playing out from the islands of Greece to the great plains of Romania, Poland and Germany and the Belgian container port of Zeebrugge, which was being intermittently blockaded this week.
To understand what is fuelling it, and where this movement is heading, we must venture hundreds of miles north of Paris to Brussels.
SPECIFICALLY, to the headquarters of the European Parliament. This colossal building was encircled on Thursday by farmers who parked 1,500 tractors in the road and lit a series of bonfires before they were drenched by water cannon and dispersed by riot police.
The angry group was protesting against a series of EU farming policies that have had a disastrous impact on their lives and livelihoods, along with several proposed new laws that will make their already perilous existence harder still. Back in 2021, the EU passed a European Climate Law which mandates that the trading bloc will be ‘carbon neutral’ by 2050 and should have achieved a 55% reduction in carbon emissions (compared to 1990 levels) by 2030.
The Commission declared that this so-called Green Deal, heavily supported by Green parties who hold the balance of power in the European Parliament, would turn ‘climate and environmental challenges into opportunities’ and make ‘the transition just and inclusive for all’. Farmers saw things differently. The Global Farmer Network, a worldwide alliance, summarised the Green Deal as the EU’s ‘plan to eliminate modern farming in Europe’. Others branded it part of a ‘de-growth’ agenda for agriculture.
Measures to be imposed on farmers included reducing fertiliser use by 20%, raising the share of land under organic management to 25%, cutting the use of pesticides by half, increasing welfare measures and, most controversially of all, allowing between 4% and 7% of their land to remain fallow in an attempt to increase biodiversity.
The problem is that the measures simultaneously reduce the amount of food a farm produces, and therefore the profits it makes – not to mention the industry’s ability to feed people.
To ward off potential food shortages, the EU then set about negotiating deals to increase the import of cheap food products from overseas – which not only drove down prices local farmers could expect to receive, but is the exact opposite of environmentally friendly.
‘In France, we have a saying “on marche sur la tete,” or “we are walking on our heads,” which is a way of saying that things are being done in a way that is completely stupid,’ said Jean-Guillaume, who is the regional representative for the FNSEA, France’s main agricultural trade union. ‘This is a perfect example of that.
‘The EU is saying “for biodiversity, get rid of 4% of your farm”. But then we are now importing food from New Zealand instead. In my department, we’ve been told to
reduce our cattle population by 12%. But people still want to eat beef, so instead we might bring it from Brazil where they are cutting down the rain forest to make cattle ranches.
‘We have a local milk transformation industry, making cream and cheese, which is now having to import milk because they can’t get enough of it from France. That’s complete madness.’
Of particular concern are plans to strike an EU trade deal with the Mercosur trade bloc, made up of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. It will lead to yet more agricultural imports, including 99,000 tonnes of beef, 25,000 tonnes of pork and 180,000 tonnes of poultry and sugar, driving farm-gate prices down in the process.
Then there was a decision by the EU, soon after the Russian invasion, to allow Ukraine’s agricultural products to have tariff-free access to Europe. The sheer volume imported has caused prices of several key products to collapse, while the war has seen costs of fertiliser – much of it produced in Ukraine – and fuel soar. In other words, costs have risen while revenues have fallen.
‘Before the war, 16% of Ukraine’s cereal came into Europe. Now it’s 53%,’ said Charlotte Vassant, an arable farmer from Aisne who was protesting at Jossigny. ‘There were 20,000 tonnes of sugar beet coming in per year. Now it’s 750,000. As a result, prices have got very low. I used to sell my beet for around €200 a tonne. Now it’s near to €100. It has become very, very tough to make money. And all the time there is more regulation.’
The bureaucracy Vassant and her colleagues face was laid bare this week by environmental journalist Emmanuelle Ducros, who used daily newspaper L’Opinion to describe how EU regulations plus directives from local, regional and national agencies (which are all empowered to issue fines) mean individual farms are required to operate under a bewildering array of contradictory rules. ‘Being a farmer in France amounts to reading Kafka on a tractor,’ she declared.
Ducros observed, for instance, that the rulebook for a chicken farm which produces eggs is 167 pages long, with strict standards governing everything from the shape of a perch to the exact angle that the bottom part of a cage must be built at (14 degrees).
Elsewhere, a complex system of agricultural zoning means some farms fall into as many as five different bureaucratic ‘segments’ each with their own set of rules.
There are 14 different regulations governing how to correctly trim a hedge, depending on the ‘heritage code’ and exact area it can be found in. Some of the rules governing when they cannot be cut because of nesting birds clash with others that require them to be trimmed on certain dates. And so on.
The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, which chews through a colossal €59 billion each year, is administered by inspectors who demand that farmers submit timestamped pictures of individual fields to prove they’ve ploughed them on the correct dates. These and other exercises in form-filling mean that French farmers spend an average of 20% of their working week on paperwork, while their farms are monitored by drones and satellites.
Against this backdrop, it was perhaps inevitable tensions would eventually spill over. Indeed a warning shot was fired over the border in Holland last year, where efforts to meet an EU target of reducing nitrogen emissions by 50% saw it announce draconian plans to close 11,200 of the country’s farms and force another 17,600 to reduce their livestock numbers by a third. Opposition to the policy – likened by farmers to a form of ethnic cleansing – saw the launch of the Farmer-Citizen Movement, a grouping which came from nowhere to become the largest party in every regional administration and is set to be part of the next Dutch government.
Further discontent has been brewing in Germany this month after a coalition of major parties, including the Greens, decided to pass a budget that abolishes both a diesel tax rebate enjoyed by farmers and their exemption from vehicle tax. Convoys of tractors have since blocked autobahns in every state. On one occasion 5,000 tractors drove to Berlin and brought streets next to the Brandenburg Gate to a complete halt. On another, 105,000 people were on the streets in Bavaria.
‘Agricultural diesel was the straw that broke the camel’s back and put farmers on the road,’ the secretary-general of the German Farmers’ Union (DBV), Bernhard Krüsken, told the Mail.
‘There is an urgent need for a rethink at the EU level. The EU Commission, in particular, must abandon the idea that success can be achieved with blanket bans and impractical requirements.’
Back in France, the most recent tractor protests were relatively late in kicking off. They began on January 17 near the Spanish border when the A64 motorway was blocked by farmers cross about a perceived failure to properly compensate cattle farmers whose herds had been affected by a virus. Within a week, direct action had spread across the region.
The so-called ‘siege of Paris’ which saw eight main roads into the capital blockaded from the early hours of Monday, significantly raised the political stakes.
With some protesters telling reporters that ‘the goal is to starve Parisians’ the authorities became concerned they might blockade Rungis International Market, a vast food market nicknamed The Belly Of Paris through which 8,000 tonnes of food pass each day.
WERE it to shut down, the government agency Ademe estimated that the city’s 12 million residents would run out of food in 72 hours, raising the spectre of the famous siege of 1871, when the Prussian army prevented food reaching the city for several months and starving Parisians devoured the city’s resident population of horses, cats and dogs, along with elephants from the city’s zoo. On Wednesday, riot police arrested 18 farmers attempting to disrupt traffic outside the facility, while another 73 were detained after finding their way into an administrative centre. Crucially, despite their impact on the motorway network, the farmers enjoy heavy public support, with polls indicating that more than 80% of voters are behind them. At one point, even Greenpeace came out in support, with a group of activists lighting flares from a bridge in Paris.
Fearing further escalations, embattled President Emmanuel Macron did what French governments traditionally do when facing industrial action – threw money at the problem.
Having pledged to increase state support for various farming sectors, the administration also promised to block the EU’s trade deal with South America, tighten import controls and pass laws ensuring that France should be self-sufficient in food.
At crisis meetings on Wednesday and Thursday, the EU was likewise persuaded to suspend the introduction of a law requiring up to 7% of farmland to be left fallow until 2025. Rules limiting the way Ukrainian imports could be sold were also passed.
The French farming unions responded by calling off their sieges and yesterday the country’s road network began to reopen.
But when I caught up with JeanGuillaume on his long tractor journey home, he was adamant: ‘It’s not the end of striking and I believe there will be other actions in the next weeks. As I tell my colleagues, as long as the beer tank is not empty, we keep on striking.’