The China Mail - Farm uproar spreads in EU as France seeks to quell protests

Their complaints range from rising costs to meeting carbon-cutting targets, fuel prices, inflation, bureaucracy, and Ukrainian grain imports.

The French mobilisation has blown up into a serious crisis for Prime Minister Gabriel Attal only three weeks into the job. Some 1,000 farmers with hundreds of vehicles blocked key roads into Paris for a second day, with some sleeping in their tractors overnight.

Addressing parliament, Attal said his government stood ready to resolve the crisis and praised the agriculture sector as "our force and our pride".

Agriculture embodied the "values of work, freedom and entrepreneurship", Attal said. "It is one of the foundations of our identity and our traditions."

In an apparent reference to contested EU rules, he said: "France must be granted an exception for its agriculture."

- 'Not like before' -

President Emmanuel Macron, speaking during a visit to Sweden, said he was opposed to a trade deal between the European Union and South American bloc Mercosur, which has emerged as a key grievance for farmers worried about foreign competition.

But Macron also said that it was "too easy" to blame all the farmers' woes on the EU.

"We did a lot in the last years to help," he said.

Macron said authorities would "try to simplify the rules" to help farmers and vowed to show "flexibility" on certain regulation.

After more than a week of intensifying French protests, disgruntled farmers in other European countries joined the movement.

Dozens of Italian farmers staged a protest with tractors near Milan Tuesday, the latest in a series of small demonstrations across the country.

Spanish farmer unions said they would join the movement with a number of protests, while Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis offered to speed up financial aid to farmers to stave off protests engulfing other countries.

Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Belgium and Romania have all seen protests in recent days.

Much anger is directed at environmental requirements included in the EU's updated Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), and the bloc's forthcoming "Green Deal".

In France, protests have spread to the capital where tractors, hay bales and other objects have prevented motorists from entering Paris along several key routes.

The government has so far promoted a softly-softly approach with the protest, while making clear that any attempt to block Paris airports or the Rungis wholesale food market to the south of the city would be a red line.

- 'Feed not starve' -

A convoy of producers left on Tuesday from the southwestern town of Limoges for Rungis where armoured gendarmerie vehicles were deployed to ensure food supplies are not disrupted.

Arnaud Rousseau, leader of the biggest farmers' union FNSEA, said he was against any interference with food distribution.

"Our objective is not to starve French people, but to feed them," he told the Europe 1 broadcaster.

In the southwestern city of Toulouse, farmers blocked the entrance to the city's Blagnac airport with tractors and burned tyres.

Farmers unions have judged that a first battery of measures announced on Friday did not go far enough.

"The watchword is to stay as long as we do not have an answer to the main issues", Thomas Robin, a cereals farmer producer and also of the FDSEA, told AFP.

French farmers are angry about incomes, red tape and environmental policies they say undermine their ability to compete with other countries and have left France increasingly dependent on imports.

"Obviously we want to be treated better, but more than anything we want fewer free-trade agreements," Thierry Bonnamour, a farmer from the Savoie region, told AFP at a roadblock near the south-eastern city of Lyon.

The Mercosur deal as well as Ukrainian grain imports into the EU are on the agenda of talks between Macron and EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen Thursday.

France is the biggest beneficiary of EU farming subsidies, receiving more than nine billion euros ($9.8 billion) per year.

Once the bloc's biggest agricultural exporter, it is now third the Netherlands and Germany.

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S.Wilson--ThChM