The farmers' movement resumes. The agricultural unions will be received by the Prime Minister on January 13, but the Rural Coordination estimates the “too late” date and calls for mobilization, to block Paris and to demonstrate throughout France. Sophie Lenaerts, president of Rural Coordination in Oise, is the guest of RTL this Sunday, January 5.
“We've been at meeting points for a year now, demonstrating and explaining the problems of the agricultural world. We asked for a date at the start of the school year, Sunday or Monday or later. If I don't I'm mistaken, there's the galette des rois on Monday at Matignon, but I think that if we know how to celebrate, we also know how to work and receive us,” she protests.
According to her, the blockages will begin from Monday because “this Sunday, colleagues are taking to the roads.” The union “hopes to be able to return safely to the capital on Monday” in groups or individually. “We made requests for authorizations which, for some, were not accepted. The intention is not to receive us. It's a shame in our country to have to come to this“, she laments.
Farmers are “drowned under standards”
Sophie Lenaerts, however, hoped that François Bayrou would be more sensitive to their anger because “he is a man of the land, of the land. He is himself a farmer, a horse breeder”.
The agricultural union recalls that their demands are concrete. To begin with, that there are no more controls on farmsbut “controls on imported products, on street markets and on labeling in large-scale distribution of products leaving the agri-food industry”.
Second point: the unique application of European regulations because farmers are drowned “under standards”. “We no longer know how to work, we no longer know how to produce today in the agricultural world because of all that,” she explains. A dramatic situation, according to the vice-president, who indicates that three quarters of her colleagues “cannot pay their social security contributions”.
Read more
