French farmers are driving opposition to a massive transatlantic trade deal between five South American nations of the Mercosur bloc and the 27-nation European Union that officials say will likely lead to its delay.
Farmers turned out across France this week with their heavy tractors to block roads and build makeshift barricades, tried and tested methods of piling pressure on the French government that have previously proved successful in winning concessions.
They are incensed by a planned free-trade deal between the EU and the five active Mercosur countries — Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia — that would progressively remove duties on almost all goods traded between the two blocs over the next 15 years.
The accord has been under negotiation for 25 years, and once ratified would cover a market of 780 million people and a quarter of the globe’s gross domestic product.
EU lawmakers voted Tuesday to advance the deal by adding new safeguards to it in addition to approving concessions to farmers made by the European Commission. Nonetheless it is still likely to be delayed because three key demands from the French have not yet been met.
French discontent over profits and disease
In France, an agricultural powerhouse in the European Union, farmers’ concerns about the Mercosur trade deal are combining with anger about government sanitary measures against the spread of a bovine disease, creating a volatile cocktail of rural discontent and growing protest.
Speaking to The Associated Press on Tuesday from a tractor blockade on a highway leading into Paris, aspiring farmer Loic Rivière said he was fighting for his ambition of setting up his own cereal or vegetable farm.
“We want to protect our future,” he said. “What we face isn’t the same as our parents. There’s more competition, more globalization, more diseases” affecting crops and animals.
Scattered cases in France of lumpy skin disease, a viral cattle disease previously confined to sub-Saharan Africa and mainly transmitted by insect bites, are also inflaming emotions in farming communities, after government officials ordered the culling of infected herds.
About 30 tractors blocked the RN12 highway heading toward Paris at the protest Tuesday that Riviere was part of, he said. French media reporting from other demonstrations around the country this week showed farmers piling up potatoes, tires, straw bales and other things they had at hand to make barricades. Some were set on fire, creating dramatic television images of flames and smoke that gave an impression of bubbling rural fury, even though some of the protests were relatively small and scattered.
“In France, we’re very well known for being real grumblers, very unhappy,” Rivière said of farmers’ proven skills at making their anger known. “We have tractors, they’re big and very visual.”
Motorists showed their support for the protesting farmers by tooting their horns, he said. “The ambiance is good,” he said.
Farmers “are fed up of not being listened to,” he said. “What we do is the foundation of life but obstacles are being thrown in our way.”
