French farmers protest as government prepares to announce new measures

French farmers are once again protesting today, putting pressure on the country’s government, which is expected to announce new measures aimed at addressing the agriculture sector’s concerns.

French farmers occupy and block the A1 motorway between Lille and Paris during a demonstration in Lesquin, northern France on Thursday. Photograph: Xinhua/Rex/Shutterstock

Key events

‘The world is changing too fast for us’: organic farmers on urgency of French protests

Angelique Chrisafis

Pierre Bretagne woke at 4am to feed the cows on his organic farm near the coastal town of Pornic in western France, then did something he had never dared to before.

He made a cardboard protest banner about the nightmare of French bureaucracy and went to cheer on a go-slow convoy of tractors warning that French farming and the rural way of life was facing collapse. Effigies of dead farmers dangled from nooses on tractor trailers as the convoy drove into the centre of the Brittany city of Rennes, beeping horns and waving banners. “Quality has a price,” read one.

“We’re fed up and exasperated,” says Bretagne, 38. “I love my job – I farm organically because it’s what I believe in and it’s the right thing ethically and in terms of health. In nine years of farming, I’ve never been on a protest; I’d rather be with my animals. But things are getting so difficult – we need decent prices that reflect not just the quality of our produce but the love we put into this job and into the countryside. This is a passion, a vocation, but we don’t get the recognition for it.”

The French government has been taken by surprise by the scale and fury of grassroots farmer demonstrations that have spread from the south-west across the whole country this week.

Bales of hay and tractors have been used to block main highways; manure has been sprayed on public buildings and supermarkets in the south-west. Crates of tomatoes, cabbages and cauliflowers that farmers said had been cheaply imported were dumped across roads.

Although the protests follow other demonstrations by European farmers in countries including Germany and Romania, the French protests have a particularly urgent and local political flavour. France, the EU’s biggest agricultural producer, has thousands of independent producers of meat, dairy, fruit and vegetables and wine, who have a reputation for staging disruptive protests.

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