Emmanuelle Ducros 8:56 a.m., January 22, 2024

Every morning after the 8:30 a.m. news, Emmanuelle Ducros reveals to listeners her “Journey into absurdity”, from Monday to Thursday.

French farmers are angry and they have been increasing their demonstrations for four days, this will intensify in the coming weeks.

Why does the cup overflow?

There is not one reason, but undoubtedly dozens, which overlap.

Economic reasons, the difficulty of being correctly paid for production.

A crisis of meaning, too.

French agriculture has lost 20% of its workforce, 100,000 farmers in 10 years.

It’s a gigantic social plan without any support.

And then there's the rest.

They denounce the inconsistency experienced on a daily basis.

To be a farmer is to be Kafka on his tractor.

It means being confronted with absurd French and European standards accumulated over the years.

The idea is to do better, greener, more supervised, more administered.

The result is often disaster.

These astonishing stories, we just have to bend down to pick them up.

An example: it has become impossible in France to clean a ditch.

there are texts to regulate water flows and biodiversity.

Too many contradictory, vague, interpretable rules... farmers are giving up.

Not crazy, inappropriate cleaning of a ditch exposes you to criminal justice.

We saw what happened in Pas de Calais.

Floods.

Grasslands are also synonymous with anger.

The trend in Europe is the reduction of cattle breeding.

Brussels doesn't want it anymore.

Too much methane emitting.

But at the same time, Brussels wants to save the meadow.

it’s virtuous, it’s biodiversity.

So, Brussels limits the capacity to do something else, a field, to maintain a “grassland ratio”. Do you see the inconsistency coming? European rules force farmers who have sold their livestock to keep grassland. See to resow them, despite all logic. We will do nothing else with them, no production. One of the contradictory injunctions that drives you crazy.

In these crazy stories, there is also the obligation to leave 4% of the land fallow.

Without doubt one of the points that makes farmers the most angry.

It's a European green rule: to return land to nature, we oblige them to put 4% of land aside.

At the same time, cereal imports have doubled in Europe in one year!

40 million tonnes from Ukraine and Brazil.

We no longer produce here, we import the worst stuff.

That does not make any sense.

It never stops.

I could tell you a litany of crazy stories, sometimes French, sometimes European, which lead by different means to the same result: the destruction of entire sectors for good environmental intentions.

Poultry, for example.

volumes collapse.

They are replaced by imports obtained under conditions prohibited here, which destroy elsewhere.

I am going to repeat the sentence that a Rhône farmer said this weekend to Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, a good summary: “by washing it whiter than white, our agriculture becomes transparent”.

It is washed, twisted, wrung out, full of holes.

And it is we, the European citizens, who are stripped of our food sovereignty.