PARIS, Jan 26 Protesting farmers blocking the A64 highway between Perpignan and Toulouse, treated French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, who arrived at the barricades after the announcement of compromise measures to resolve the protests, with hot wine.
After addressing farmers in the Haute-Garonne department, Attal went to the highway blocked by farmers. There he talked with farmers who have been blocking the highway for eight days, after which he was offered to drink mulled wine.
As seen on the footage of the LCI TV channel, the prime minister and his entourage, including Minister of Agriculture Marc Fenot and Minister of Environment Christophe Bechoux, drank a glass of drink and continued communicating with farmers in a friendly atmosphere.
Jerome Bale, a farmer and activist who organized the protest movement in the region from where it spread throughout the country, said he believed «farmers have won,» calling on protesters to go home on Saturday.
Earlier, Attal announced that authorities had “heard and understood” the difficulties faced by farmers. Attal said that the authorities would refuse to increase the tax on diesel used for agricultural purposes, which was one of the reasons for the protests by farmers. He also recalled that France is opposed to concluding a free trade agreement between the EU and the Mercosur countries, which, according to farmers, will create conditions for unfair competition.
For a week now, farmers have been blocking the main transport routes in France, setting up barricades of haystacks, manure heaps and tires. Traffic is blocked by tractors crowding the highway. Highways are blocked in the area of large cities such as Toulouse, Strasbourg, Lyon, Bordeaux, Calais, Beauvais and others. In some communes, protests take place in front of prefectural and administrative buildings. Thus, for several days in a row, farmers watered the fence of the prefecture with manure in the commune of Agen in the south of France. The day before, they set fire to haystacks and tires dumped in front of her, starting a large fire. On Wednesday, it was reported that a mother and her 12-year-old daughter were killed during a protest in Ariège in the south of the country: they were sleeping behind hay barricades on a highway when they were hit by a car.
Earlier, the French National Federation of Agricultural Trade Unions (FNSEA) reported that more than 72 thousand farmers in France staged large-scale protests across the country due to dissatisfaction with government policies, and more than 41 thousand tractors were involved in the protests.
Farmers are demanding recognition of the importance of their activities and condemning government agricultural policies that they say make them uncompetitive. In particular, they oppose the import of agricultural products, restrictions on the use of water for irrigation, increasing the cost of diesel fuel, as well as restrictive measures to protect the environment and the growing financial burden on production.