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Friday, February 2, 2024

The Peasants Are Revolting: Farmers Protest In Europe

You may have heard of various protests in France, Belgium, and now Germany, mostly by farmers against the edicts by the EU that hamstring their farmers when competing against foreign imports, with the lifting of restrictions and import duties on products from Ukraine being particularly galling.

    Paul Joseph Watson has a video on the subject, below:

Paul Joseph Watson (9 min.)

And here are some articles:
    ... [The protests] started before Christmas with farmers throughout the country turning road signs upside-down to express their exasperation at how the European Union and its French lackeys have been making life impossible for farmers through a mixture of over-regulation and unfair competition. ‘On marche sur la tête’ (‘we’re walking on our heads’) is the phrase used by these hard-working men and women to describe the absurd, upside-down world of the EU’s biggest agricultural producer.

    For example, one of their biggest gripes has been the fact that, European bureaucrats having banned the use of various pesticides and hormones by growers and herders in Europe, farmers are forced to compete with producers from countries where such things are legal. When farmers are then forced out of the market by the regulations, France imports what it used to grow itself; produce containing all the banned chemicals it refuses to allow its own producers to use.

    As a result, up and down France for a week, farmers have been blocking motorways in an attempt to get themselves heard by their cloth-eared Brussels-loyal government. While President Emmanuel Macron’s European protégé Pascal Canfin MEP champions synthetic meat with the goal of reducing livestock farming by 15 per cent, smallholders broken by the EU and committing suicide at a rate of one every two days, have had enough of bureaucratic bullying and have taken to their tractors to protest.

    They were left hungry and asking for more last Friday when the new Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, perched on a bale of hay on a farm in the south of France,  announced a few tweaks to the rules which amounted to ‘simplifying’ (rather than just getting rid of) the red-tape restrictions. He failed to impress his national audience of rural workers gathered around their smartphones. The head of the biggest farming union, the usually ultra-moderate FNSEA, nudged into militancy by its membership, then promised the press that his members would head to Paris and that this week would be ‘full of danger’.

    Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin has taken him at his word and mobilised 15,000 police officers and armoured cars to prevent farmers from blocking access to the world’s biggest fresh food market, Rungis, ten miles south of Paris. Though he described the action as ‘defensive’, farmers have naturally been shocked to see military vehicles deployed to stop them protesting. A confrontation between armed police and unarmed tractor drivers is now a real possibility.

    This would horrify the 92 per cent of French people who love their farmers with a passion that is hard to appreciate from outside. ...

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