“Macron, if you go to Rio, don't forget your hillbillies”: aboard around twenty tractors and around thirty other vehicles, the demonstrators blocked two of the three lanes of traffic on the national 118, which runs alongside the Yvelines military base, AFP journalists noted.
It is from there that President Emmanuel Macron flew to Argentina on Saturday, before going to the G20 summit scheduled for Monday and Tuesday in Brazil.
Some of the farmers who came by tractor planned to spend the night there.
“I am mainly against this Mercosur agreement which scares us as producers, but also as consumers,” Romain Garnier, cereal and beet producer in Val-d'Oise, explained to AFP.
Mercosur
“It’s going to be a very tough fight,” anticipates this 39-year-old operator, who came by car with a sign “Manu, stop Mercosur, it makes you deaf.”
“Last year we stayed for a week on the A1 motorway, we hope for similar mobilizations,” he said near the procession supervised by a large police force.
Before flying to the G20 in Rio, President Emmanuel Macron reaffirmed Sunday in Buenos Aires that France would not “sign as is” the free trade treaty between the European Union and Mercosur, saying he wanted “ continue” to oppose it.
“Politics is about keeping your commitments, the government must keep its own,” declared the president of the Ile-de-France region Valérie Pécresse, who came to support the farmers. She tried to reassure her interlocutors by arguing that the Prime Minister “Michel Barnier was a great Minister of Agriculture”, who “knows the subject by heart”.
If taxes on agricultural fuel (GNR) had been one of the ferments of the wave of agricultural anger last year, this is the outcome of the EU's proposed free trade agreement with the Mercosur countries (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay) which could set things on fire this year.
Despite opposition from the political class and French agricultural stakeholders, the EU seems determined to sign this agreement by the end of the year, which will notably allow Latin American countries to sell more beef, chicken or sugar without customs duties in Europe.
“A bullet in the foot”
“We are being put in a world of free trade and we must have the same rules as the others, otherwise we are dead,” deplores Damien Radet, general secretary of the FDSEA (departmental federation of farmers' unions). Ile-de-France, present in Vélizy-Villacoublay.
“We run 100 meters with a ball and chain on our feet,” says the 54-year-old farmer, for whom the emerging movement is expected to “last.”
“Tonight is the restart of the pressure that we are going to exert on the government,” adds Samuel Vandaele, FDSEA general secretary of Seine-et-Marne, who calls for “agriculture and food to be considered at their fair value.
The majority union alliance FNSEA-Young Farmers is due to officially kick off this new cycle of agricultural mobilization on Monday, with rallies and symbolic actions.
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