EUROPE’S 21st-CENTURY PEASANTS’ REVOLT DROWNING ECO-MAD 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 organsiers 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 21st century 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 solidarite”.’

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 tractorbased protests involve not only French farmers, but others across a huge swathe of Europe, too.

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 technocrat paradise that is the enormous HQ 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 per cent 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 per cent, raising the share of land under organic management to 25 per cent, cutting the use of pesticides by half, increasing welfare measures and, most controversially of all, allowing between four and seven per cent 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 four per cent 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 per cent. But people still want