“Politics is about keeping your commitments, the government must keep its own,” declared the president of the Île-de-France region, Valérie Pécresse.
Farmers went in a procession on Sunday evening near the Villacoublay air base, near Paris, to denounce the proposed free trade agreement with the Mercosur countries, before new mobilizations from Monday. “Macron, if you go to Rio, don’t forget your hillbillies”: on board 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, noted AFP journalists .
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. Before leaving, the Head of State reaffirmed Sunday in Buenos Aires that France would not “sign as it stands” the free trade treaty between the European Union and Mercosur, saying it wanted “continue” to oppose it.
Opposition to Mercosur
“Politics is about keeping your commitments, the government must keep its own”declared the president of the Île-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 both 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. “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 agricultural operators' unions) Île-de-France, present in Vélizy-Villacoublay.
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. “It is also a social fight so that tomorrow everyone in this country can eat correctly, with healthy products, and that there is more fairness in the standards and constraints that this government and Europe imposes on us, the French farmers”declared the vice-president of the FNSEA Damien Greffin upon the arrival of the procession.
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