Paris (AFP)
The president of the FNSEA asked Wednesday farmers mobilized in the provinces and blocking the Paris ring road to "suspend the movement" after a day of mobilization, after a meeting with the Minister of Agriculture and advisers from the Elysée.
"We suspend and we meet on the 3rd (December) in the morning, that is to say Tuesday morning at 9:30, Édouard Philippe and his advisers with the Young Farmers to redo a point on all subjects," said Christiane Lambert after meeting Anne de Bayser, Assistant Secretary General of the Élysée, and the Elysée's agricultural advisers, as well as Minister of Agriculture Didier Guillaume, in the premises of his ministry.
The farmers who were demonstrating at the FNSEA and Young Farmers' unions called to express their distress at the economic difficulties that accumulate and the mistrust of some of the citizens, especially concerning the areas of non treatment with pesticides (ZNT) - to protect people from the potential dangers of these products.
"We have a lot of scraps, we know there are tough decisions, the players have to play the game," said Lambert.
- Non treatment areas -
Referring to the thorny issue of ZNTs, badly experienced by farmers, Ms. Lambert said that "it is not a question of distance" but "more a question of good practice".
She denounced a debate "completely hysterical by controversial political decisions", taken "in a pre-electoral period" and which, as the President of the Republic said, she stressed, fall under "the competence of the agencies, ANSES, and the responsibility of the code of the environment ".
"I trust my doctor, when (he) tells me to get vaccinated, I do it, we all need to have more confidence in science," she added, implying that farmers use authorized products under conditions established by ANSES, the health safety agency.
"If science says we can go to zero meters, the government will follow: this is what said the Ministry of Agriculture and the representative of the President of the Republic," said Ms. Lambert.
For his part, Didier Guillaume felt that the meeting "went very well": "we support this movement, because on the two points claimed, they are right.First, we must stop this permanent denigration of farmers. Farmers are not polluters (...) The second topic we support is that farmers' income today is not high enough, "he said.
- Snail operations on the device -
Coming from six regions around the capital, tractor farmers originally planned to gather on Foch Avenue, a wealthy neighborhood in the west of the capital, where police were waiting for them. They finally carried out snail operations on the ring road, hoping for a meeting with the President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron, while about 200 farmers, who came on foot or by car, were massed at a crossroads on the Champs-Élysées, according to an AFP journalist on the spot.
In the early evening, the leaders of the two national unions, as well as Damien Greffin, president of the FDSEA Ile-de-France came to present the results of the interview to the Ministry of Agriculture in front of the hundred demonstrators still present on the Champs Elysees. "There have been a number of advances," said Greffin, stating that "we are heading for an exit from the action in the minutes and hours ahead. ".
Certain groups of farmers present on the peripheral had however more difficult to give up the mobilization door Dauphine (west) and near the door of Orleans (south), where Mathieu Garnotel (farmer in the Marne) remained thus in his tractor . "We find that there is no real progress". "We are wondering if we go Avenue Foch", in any case "there is a 80% chance we stay there tonight," he assured.
The movement also touched the regions of Lyon, Le Mans, Clermont-Ferrand and Toulouse.
bur-im-etr-cd / ak / cam
© 2019 AFP