“We will be in Paris on Sunday evening.” Rural Coordination has maintained its call for mobilization and demonstrations in the capital from January 5, 2025. Farmers took to the road this Sunday morning from Tarn-et-Garonne.
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Block the toll at Saint-Arnoult, Rungis and around fifteen purchasing centers in the Paris region. These are the objectives displayed by the Rural Coordination which calls on farmers to mobilize from this Sunday, January 5 evening in Paris. The movement was announced, shortly after Christmas, by one of the representatives of the trade union organization in Tarn-et-Garonne. Promise kept. Farmers met in Montauban, before taking the road towards the capital.
Yellow hats with the CR logo on their heads, there are around fifteen of them preparing to leave at the Montauban tollbooth, on the A20 motorway. Tractors loaded on trucks are already on their way to Paris, we are told. And around a hundred farmers from Tarn-et-Garonne could well head, this Sunday, January 5, 2025, towards the capital.
“We are leaving to block Rungis. To make us hear politicians. We don't go up to break, we go up to be heardsays one of them. We are expected this evening at 6 p.m. in Paris by our other colleagues from France.“
Maurice Andral, orchard operator in Moissac in Tarn-et-Garonne, denounces unfair competition from other European productions.
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© FTV
Maurice Andral is a fruit producer, he operates 30 hectares of orchards in Moissac. What pushes him to mobilize today? Unfair competition, particularly from Eastern countries where production costs are much lower than in France. “They have a very low minimum wage, around 300 to 400 euros per month in Eastern countries. We are more like 1800 euross, explains the arborist. Our central companies are looking for the financial stakes, to make a lot of money and will buy in these countries.“
Also read: Angry farmers. Rural Coordination calls for blocking the capital on January 5, 2025
The one who revealed this call for mobilization on December 27, 2024 on his social networks was Pierre-Guillaume Mercadal. The spokesperson for the Tarn-et-Garonne Rural Coordination is of course there this Sunday, January 5. The aim of the maneuver, he tells us, is the peasant cause and the establishment of a “French agricultural exception“.
What we are asking of the government is not the moon. We are asking for immediate decisions to be made on things which are free, which cost the State nothing.
Pierre-Guillaume Mercadal, spokesperson for CR 82
What are these measures that Rural Coordination intends to see released as quickly as possible? The end of the over-transposition of European standards in France, the cessation of controls, administrative simplification or even the exit from European electricity pricing, lists Pierre-Guillaume Mercadal. As well as a road map for “a real way out of problems“.
On Friday, Matignon indicated that the Prime Minister, François Bayrou, would receive the agricultural unions “in turn” on January 13. A date considered too distant by the second agricultural union, behind the FNSEA. Remember that this call for mobilization comes a few hours before the official launch of the campaign for the elections within the chambers of agriculture.
According to a police source, “internal contradictions and with other unions reduce the risks of large-scale mobilization”. The Paris and Val-de-Marne police headquarters have banned all undeclared gatherings in the center of Paris and in the Rungis sector, from this Sunday at 6 p.m. and until Monday noon.
(Comments collected by Sandra Wachlewicz and Camille Saiseau)
