In the Gard, where the A9 and A54 motorways are cut near Nîmes, “it continues and teams remained mobilized all night,” Laurence Biscayet of the FDSEA told AFP this Saturday, January 27 in the morning. Gard. According to her, instructions were given to “gather before 8 a.m. There is a need to sit down, evaluate last night’s announcements and think about the actions that will follow,” she declared.
To try to extinguish the rising revolt in the countryside where many are no longer able to make a living from their profession, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal unveiled emergency measures on Friday in Occitania, the cradle of the protest. He acceded to some of the demonstrators’ most pressing demands, including the abandonment of the increase in the tax on non-road diesel (GNR), inflated compensation for breeders affected by MHE cattle disease, heavy sanctions against three food manufacturers not respecting the Egalim laws on prices.
“Putting agriculture above all else”
“We will not let go of you. I will not let go of you,” he said from a cattle farm in Montastruc-de-Salies (Haute-Garonne), saying he had “decided to put agriculture above all else.” “. Enough to satisfy the Occitan breeder Jérôme Bayle, initiator of the first blockage on the A64 who, alongside the Prime Minister, announced on the Carbonne dam (Haute-Garonne) that it would be lifted by Saturday noon.
But not the FNSEA which, together with the Young Farmers, is the majority union of the profession, nor the Rural Coordination or the Peasant Confederation. “What was said this evening does not calm the anger, we must go further,” said the president of the FNSEA, Arnaud Rousseau, on Friday. On the blocking points set up by tractors on highways and major roads, “there will be shifts”, he predicted, while proposing to go to “meet” the Prime Minister on Saturday Morning.
The Peasant Confederation said for its part it wanted to “continue the mobilization” to obtain “structural measures”. Its members announced a “surprise” action this Saturday morning in Figeac (Lot). If the blockage of the RN145 in the Creuse must be lifted at midday, the count is not there for Christian Arvis, president of the FDSEA of the department, for whom “Gabriel Attal’s announcements are a shame”, ” pipe, scoops,” he scolded on Friday.
European elections
In Brittany, numerous blockades were lifted almost everywhere on Friday evening but in Guingamp (Côtes d’Armor), several dozen angry farmers invaded the center of the town with tractors and skips at the end of the evening. Everywhere across France, the leading agricultural power of the European Union, a mixture of passion and despair was expressed, with processions here displaying a straw hanger, there displaying the slogan “Children we dream of it, adults we die of it “.
“At his time, my grandfather lived with four hectares of plum trees and ten cows, today you need 120 cows to live, you need 60 hectares of plum trees,” Théo Artillan, 20, told AFP. from Temple-sur-Lot (Lot-et-Garonne). He “no longer wants to settle down”. The mobilization was mourned on Tuesday by the accidental death of a farmer and her daughter on a dam in Pamiers (Ariège), where a white march will take place on Saturday from 1:30 p.m.
In Matignon, the reception of the measures is carefully scrutinized. “We have to see how the situation evolves over the weekend,” observes those around Gabriel Attal, who promises “to continue to bring a certain number of measures between now and the Agricultural Show ” end of February.
While the farmers’ vote is an issue in the European elections, politicians have not failed to criticize the government’s response. “Short-term” measures which “respond neither to the issues nor to expectations”, criticized RN leader Marine Le Pen. A “comms operation” for Eric Coquerel (LFI).