Paris (AFP)

Sense of rejection, opposition to areas of non-treatment pesticides or trade agreements: farmers demonstrated Tuesday throughout France by blocking roads at the call of the majority union, the FNSEA, and Young Farmers.

Under the slogan, "France, do you still want your peasants?", The mobilization began Tuesday morning early in the Aisne, the Var and the Drôme, and had to reach its strong point in the early afternoon with the planned blockage of major roads, including many motorways.

The objective of these events: "to show on the roads, to draw roundabouts, to address the representatives of the State", told the AFP Xavier Benoist cereal, during a blocking at Chateau -Thierry (Aisne).

Mobilization was important in the middle of the day in the East of France where a hundred tractors blocked the A4 motorway near Strasbourg.

In Bas-Rhin, just before 13:00, more than 500 tractors were still converging on five blocking points, mainly on the A35 and A4 motorways, generating "several kilometers of traffic jams" behind the convoys, without 'no other incident has been reported,' it was reported to the prefecture. In the Haut-Rhin, about 120 tractors blocked the junction between the A35 and A36

"The problem is political, on the one hand we have a speech that speaks of a strong, living agriculture and on the other we are stunned with endless norms, not to mention free trade treaties and + agribashing +, while one is an agriculture recognized as virtuous ", denounced Fabrice Couturier, president of the FDSEA of Moselle where the farmers organize dams in Metz, Thionville and Sarrebourg.

- non-treatment areas -

Among the latest standards considered, areas of non-treatment with pesticides ignited the powders. "The ban 10 meters from houses, it represents in the Aisne 10,000 uncultivated hectares, that means the equivalent of 80,000 tons of unprocessed wheat, or 1.5 million euros of lack for farmers", explained to AFP Benoit Davin, FDSEA referent for the district of Soissons.

In Ile-de-France, 200 tractors were mobilized according to the FDSEA, in Val-d'Oise, Yvelines, Essonne, Val-de-Marne and Seine-et-Marne.

"In this country you have to know if you still want farmers or not.It must stop to believe the consumer that what comes from abroad is beautiful and what produces French agriculture is crap ", said François Lecoq, representative of FDSEA Ile-de-France, adding that" French agriculture is the most monitored, the most traced, the most controlled ".

About a hundred tractors converged on rallying points in the Marne, while several dozens of tractors blocked the cities of Toulouse, Montauban and Agen, in the South-West. Blockades also took place in Ille-et-Vilaine, around Calais, Caen or Dijon.

In the Hérault and Vaucluse, about 50 farmers, according to the FDSEA, about thirty according to the gendarmerie, had left the Avignon Sud motorway entrance to perform a snail operation on the three lanes of the A7.

According to him, a next day of mobilization has been set for October 22, if no announcement is made by then.

© 2019 AFP