Protesting farmers spray Brussels police with liquid manure

BRUSSELS

Farmers clashed with police in Belgium on Monday, spraying officers with liquid manure and throwing eggs and flares at them in a fresh show of force as the European Union’s agriculture ministers met in search of ways to address the protesters’ concerns.

The farmers are angry at red tape and competition from cheap imports from countries where the E.U.’s relatively high standards do not have to be met.

Brussels police said that 900 tractors had entered the city, many bearing down on the European Council building where the ministers were meeting. Smoke drifted through the air near where police in riot gear sheltered behind concrete barriers and barbed wire, firing tear gas and water cannons at the protesting farmers. Scores of tractors also lined main roads leading to the city’s European quarter, snarling traffic and blocking public transport.

A few tractors pushed through barriers, sending officers scurrying. Belgian Interior Minister Annelies Verlinden urged police to identify “rioters” who hurt people or disobeyed instructions from officers.

“The right to protest is dear to us so it must be used with respect,” she said in a post on X.

At the start of the month, a similar demonstration turned violent, with farmers torching hay bales and throwing eggs and firecrackers at police near a summit of E.U. leaders.

Some of the tractors were draped with signs lamenting what farmers see as the slow death of working the land. “Agriculture. As a child you dream of it, as an adult you die of it,” said one.

“We are getting ignored,” Marieke Van De Vivere, a farmer from the Ghent region in northern Belgium, told The Associated

Press.

She invited the ministers “to be reasonable to us, to come with us on a day to work on the field, or with the horses or with the animals, to see that it is not very easy … because of the rules they put on us.”

The protests are the latest in a series of rallies and demonstrations by farmers across Europe.

On Saturday, French President Emmanuel Macron was greeted with boos and whistles at the opening of the Paris Agricultural

Fair by farmers who claim that he’s not doing enough to support them. Spain, the Netherlands and Bulgaria have been hit by protests in recent weeks.

The movement, which has gathered pace as political parties campaign for Europe-wide elections June 6-9, has produced results. This month, the E.U.’s executive branch shelved an anti-pesticide proposal in a concession to the farmers, who make up an important voting constituency.