“France is not isolated” in Europe against the Mercosur treaty, according to the Minister of Foreign Trade

France is one of the countries most fiercely opposed to the free trade agreement with Mercosur. But to prevent this project, it will need the support of several European partners.

On the set of BFMTV, the Minister for Foreign Trade, Sophie Prima, denounced a “treaty more adapted to today’s world”. She explains that France “is not isolated” in this battle. “I can’t reveal my aces, but France is not isolated and we are working,” she said.

Austria, Poland, the Netherlands and Ireland could also oppose the project. On the other hand, it is supported by European heavyweights, such as Germany, Spain, Italy and Portugal.

While the movement of anger began in many provincial towns in particular, it was at the end of the day that farmers planned to mobilize in Bordeaux.

The FNSEA and the Young Farmers of Gironde have called for a rally, from 4 p.m., at the Saint-Michel sports park. “Traffic difficulties are to be expected,” underlines the Gironde prefecture. The protest is expected to end at 11 p.m.

Michel-Édouard Leclerc believes, on BFMTV, that the “agricultural component of Mercosur is nonsense”. The president of the strategic committee of the centers E. Leclerc emphasizes that mass distribution was excluded from these negotiations.

“I was not asked my opinion on the capacity, or not, to slow down imports from Latin America […] Our buyers were never involved in the establishment of the treaties,” he explains.

Several avenues leading to the city center of Amiens are blocked by farmers at the call of the Hauts-de-France Rural Coordination.

They wanted to gather in front of the State agency providing professionals with aid from the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union. They were prevented from doing so by a police cordon.

To have the text it negotiated adopted, the European Commission has two options: submit its draft global agreement, which should then be ratified by each of the 27 countries of the European Union. Or split it in two, with a strictly commercial part.

In this more likely case, adoption must be by qualified majority (15 out of 27 favorable States, representing at least 65% of the Union’s population). France alone represents around 15% of the European population (68 million out of a total of 448.4 million inhabitants in Europe). France therefore needs partners to block this agreement.

Green MP Sandrine Rousseau criticized Emmanuel Macron’s “chin effects” on Monday. The Head of State assured that France would not “sign as it stands” the EU Mercosur free trade treaty. But, according to her, without organizing a “blocking minority” within European countries.

“There is no declaration or no measure that really allows us not to sign Mercosur,” denounced Sandrine Rousseau on LCI. Emmanuel Macron is traveling to Brazil after Argentina this weekend.

The Minister of Agriculture, Annie Genevard, explained on France Bleu Besançon that she was “in contact with my counterparts in the Netherlands and Italy”. She explains that she is trying “to constitute a veto minority on this agreement which is not a good agreement […] Intense diplomatic work is being done today to bring together a certain number of countries.”

During an impromptu press point, the farmers announced their intention to leave Vélizy-Villacoublay during the morning.

Since Sunday evening, around a hundred farmers have been blocking part of the N118 lanes at this symbolic location, near the airport frequently used by the Head of State or members of the Government.

At the start of the year, the returned panels were the prelude to the first agricultural crisis. The profession then denounced a world “where we walk on our heads”, with farmers strangled by standards and suffering to make a living from their work.

This time again, the panels, covered or removed from the municipalities, were the precursors of act two of this same deep crisis.

It was about denouncing a profession plunged into darkness which is “going straight into the wall”. A situation deciphered in this 20 Minutes article.

Guest of Sud Radio, the president of the FDSEA of Seine-et-Marne, Cyril Millard, explains why he is blocking part of the N118 in Villacoublay with a hundred farmers, near the airport often used by ministers or the head of state. “This agreement would be the death of a large part of French agriculture and in particular of breeders. It’s becoming unbearable. We cannot talk to us about food sovereignty and then sell us Mercosur, with products banned here.”

“A treaty that would endanger our breeders.” Why does the free trade treaty with Mecosur exacerbate tensions with the agricultural world?

Find in this article our decryption to understand everything about this new agricultural crisis.

“A militant tree”. In support of farmers, the municipal committee of Pomport, a small town in Dordogne, decided to install an “upside down Christmas tree”. Every year, for the past five years, this committee of around twenty people has chosen a “totem tree”.

The municipality has chosen, this time, to act in response to the signs returned by farmers at the start of the year. These then evoked a world where agriculture “walks on its head”. A movement as a prelude to the first agricultural crisis.

Many wine growers, affected by the serious wine crisis hitting the sector, are based in this small town.

“Eighty-five demonstration points are getting underway,” says Pierrick Horel, president of the Young Farmers, on RMC.

He specifies, however, that the profession “does not want a concrete blockage as we saw last year”. He cites, as examples of actions, “filter dams, fires of anger, demonstrations in front of prefectures”.

Farmers will have the floor at the Congress of Mayors, organized until Wednesday by the Association of Mayors of France, in Paris. “We are going to carry out an operation with them, an expression of their demands”, specifies the president of the association, David Lisnard to Public Senate. “The agricultural world and the municipal world are very closely linked in France. Farmers, like mayors and what we experience in businesses, can no longer stand being stifled by bureaucracy.”

The president of Hauts-de-France, Xavier Bertrand (LR) gave his support to farmers on TF1. “It’s a profession that operates at a loss. On all subjects, income, agricultural law […] we immediately put all these complications behind us,” he explains.

“Otherwise in a few years, we will talk about agriculture in France in the past tense,” continues the former Minister of Health, then of Labor. “They don’t have to hide, they are right to demonstrate, they are not delinquents. »

Piles of town entrance signs have been placed in front of the prefecture. Several were hung on the gates. The initiative comes from the FNSEA, reports France Bleu.

The work should be blocked this Monday.

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”: 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. Some of the farmers who came by tractor planned to spend the night there.

On the ground, the mobilization, which could “last until mid-December”, will result in gatherings in front of prefectures and on squares or roundabouts called “Europe”.

Thus, members of the FNSEA and the JA plan to symbolically occupy the “Bridge of Europe” which connects Strasbourg to the German commune of Kehl.