REPORTAGE
Farmers still blocked several roads in France, including Lyon and Paris, Wednesday, at midday. Some gathered on the ring road of the capital, west side, while others went to the Champs-Elysees where a tense face-to-face took place with the CRS. Before being surrounded by the police, they had poured straw on the avenue. A few hundred meters away, 200 tractors blocked the inner ring road.
Against the "agrobashing" of everyday life
One of them, Jacques, a cereal farmer in Loir-et-Cher, had come to protest against restrictions on the use of pesticides. "Today, the state wants to wash whiter than white by trying to impose standards, preserving society with ZNT, non-treatment areas around homes, but this diminishes our competitiveness of production", regrets he at the microphone of Europe 1.
He and others tell the "agrobashing" they live in everyday life: treated as "polluters" day after day, sometimes even prevented from working. Finally, the third issue of discomfort for these farmers is the distortion of competition. It is illustrated by these products imported from abroad and cheaper.
Fears about Ceta
Interviewed by Europe 1, Christian, a Norman farmer, fears the arrival of Canadian meats with Ceta (global economic and trade agreement): "These are tons of meat that will enter France, which compete with what we already have We need to protect our agriculture, it's our food that must be protected, it's the food of France, the French. "
A guest of Matthieu Belliard in the morning of Europe 1, the Minister of Agriculture Didier Guillaume said to the side of the farmers, Wednesday morning: "I support their anger and this event because today too much is too much, there is enough of this permanent denigration, of this misunderstanding with civil society, between metropolises and rurality, between farmers and fellow citizens. "
"Concretely, we propose to farmers an inversion of the constitution of the prices with the law Egalim, to support them in front of the large distribution so that their prices go up and we help them throughout the agro-ecological transition so that the link between the society and the farmers are not distended, "he added.
Blockages in Lyon
All these farmers hope to meet and discuss all these topics with the President of the Republic or the Prime Minister in the afternoon, but they remained at midday blocked on part of the Champs-Elysees and on the ring road. Around Lyon, three highways were involved on some sections, the A466, A6 and A47.