On the eve of the opening of the Agricultural Show in Paris, angry farmers demonstrated in the French capital, February 23, 2024 (AFP/Ludovic MARIN)
“Macron, without solutions, no room”: they are angry, disappointed, ready to fight. The president’s name alone was enough to trigger boos in the crowd of FNSEA farmers gathered in front of the entrance to the Agricultural Show in Paris on Friday evening.
At the stand mounted in front of the Porte de Versailles exhibition center, where in a few hours Ferme France will open to the public, Arnaud Rousseau speaks to his troops.
The president of the majority agricultural union in France returns to the invitation, quickly canceled by the Elysée, from the environmentalist collective Earth Uprisings to a major debate with the head of state planned for Saturday, also canceled. “It was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
“Whoa,” growls the crowd of flocked T-shirts. “We’re walking on our heads.”
“Tomorrow, the President of the Republic intends to come to this living room,” continues Arnaud Rousseau.
“We’re going to bleed him!” shouts a farmer. New whistles.
French farmers demonstrate their anger in Paris, February 23, 2024, in front of the exhibition center where the Agricultural Show will be held from February 24 in the French capital (AFP/Ludovic MARIN)
This anger, summarizes the president of the FNSEA on the platform, “is something that comes from afar”. He talks about “dignity”, “income”, “not being bothered” on a daily basis by incessant controls and standards, recalls the red tape which suffocates them and made them leave their farms several weeks ago.
“Tomorrow, we want signed papers,” shouts a member. “I will tell him,” replies Arnaud Rousseau, who considers it important that President Macron “hears the anger of the agricultural world”.
“This living room is ours,” he recalls. The crowd approves.
Armed with torches, bells and flags in the colors of the FNSEA and Young Farmers (JA), hundreds of demonstrators marched across Paris for a weapons vigil in front of their “house”.
– “Macron, come back to earth” –
“To have even imagined a debate with a movement – the Earth Uprisings – that the government itself has described as eco-terrorist, which denigrates us, destroys our installations, is to walk on the head”, estimates Martin, 28 years old, on the street for the first time.
“Putting us on an equal footing with these people shocked the farming world,” says Olivier Jendrop, a 42-year-old grain farmer from Seine-et-Marne.
Demonstration of angry French farmers on February 23, 2024, in Paris, in front of the Agricultural Show site (AFP/Ludovic MARIN)
Under his sign “Manu Tchao!”, Romain Garnier explains: “If things don’t change, he has to leave. With what he’s given us so far, it’s chao.”
He would like to be able to use acetamiprid again, a neonicotinoid insecticide banned in France but still used in Germany to protect sugar beets from aphids. “You just have to decide: it’s quick, it’s concrete.”
Coming from Aisne, Mathilde de Wever, 45, runs a mixed crop-livestock farm with her husband. “Fed up with promises: this job is a passion. For us, no cinema, no swimming pool, no restaurant, that’s fine with me, but let us work!”
She is not angry about the fallow obligation for 4% of land. “It’s like you’re banned from a room in your house, but you still have to clean. Who would accept that?”
Fed up with injunctions “from people who know nothing about agriculture. Cut on this date, plant at this time, declare this and that. Lost hours… The administration works with dates, we with the climate. That is enough”, summarizes her husband Alexis.
Before their gathering in the evening in front of the Agricultural Show site in Paris, farmers demonstrated in the streets of the capital at the call of the FNSEA and the JA (AFP/Ludovic MARIN)
In front of him, a tall guy smiles, holding his sign high: “Macron, after the uprisings, come back to earth.”
“Frankly,” says a union executive, “we have no control over anything. They are boiling hot.”
“The living room is us”, “this is our house”, many of them say, beer in hand, shouting to drown out the thunderous sound system all the way to the front of the chip stalls which are selling non-stop.
“We’re here for the night. After the arm of honor he gave us yesterday (Thursday), he must come and tell us things,” said Vincent Bouvrain from the Paris region.
Which things? “A course”, “a vision” and something that changes in the farmyard. NOW.
© 2024 AFP
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