Farmers block the Franco-Spanish border with their tractors, on the French side in Biriatou, March 7, 2024 (AFP/Archives/ANDER GILLENEA)
French and Spanish farmers are preparing to block cross-border crossing points along the Pyrenees on Monday, in the home stretch before the European elections, to “weigh” on the vote and demand in particular cheaper energy.
Eight crossing points between Spain and France must therefore be blocked, from the Basque Country in the west, to Catalonia in the east, from 10:00 a.m. and for varying durations but which should not exceed 24 hours.
Significant disruptions are expected on cross-border roads and surrounding areas.
In the Pyrénées-Orientales, the A9 motorway will be closed on the French side towards Spain from 7:00 a.m. and access to the secondary road network is prohibited for heavy goods vehicles from 6:30 a.m., according to the prefecture, which recommends ” strongly (…) to postpone any travel to Spain and the border sector.”
On the Pyrénées-Atlantiques side, it is the A63 which will be seriously affected, due to a blockage point at the Biriatou toll, after a snail-like operation started on the A64, in Briscous.
– “Labelless” organizers –
This mobilization, for cheaper energy and compliance with mirror clauses (which involve imposing on third country farmers the same environmental standards as those provided for in Europe), has the particularity of not having been organized by traditional agricultural unions. .
“It is not normal that standards are imposed on us that are not respected on the products we import,” explains Xabi Dallemane, one of the organizers of this “without label” gathering in the country. Basque.
For this cattle and duck breeder based in Bidache, the operation is “peaceful” with the aim of “putting pressure on our future MEPs”.
“We want to weigh in, because when I speak to the government, they explain to me that 80% of agricultural laws are decided in Brussels, so we understood that now the battleground was no longer national, it was European,” adds Jérôme Bayle, breeder from Haute-Garonne who became a figure in the agricultural protest movement at the start of the year.
“We are not asking for the ends of the earth, just for Europe to be standardized in regulations and taxes,” he adds.
On the Spanish side, the mobilization is led by local platforms, most of them born in recent months and organized via Telegram loops, which makes the scale of the movement difficult to predict.
One of them, the Catalan collective Revolta Pagesa (“peasant revolt”), claims to be fighting “for the defense of the earth” and “for food sovereignty”.
© 2024 AFP
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