French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal is to meet the leaders of the powerful FNSEA farming union on Monday, January 22 evening – a day after his agriculture minister announced that a long-delayed reform package had been postponed again.
The growing anger of farmers is shaping up to be the first major challenge of President Emmanuel Macron's newly appointed government.
Attal will meet both FNSEA and young farmers' leaders at his Paris offices at 6pm, at a meeting that was scheduled before the latest delay was announced. He will face demands for concrete action to address their problems.
Over the weekend, Attal insisted that he was on their side. "Our farmers are not bandits, polluters, people who torture animals, as we sometimes hear," he told a meeting on Saturday in the southern Rhone region.
But the latest action by farmers in the southern Occitanie region shows the strength of their anger, after they started a blockade of the A64 motorway late on Thursday at Carbonne, some 45 kilometres southwest of Toulouse.
Among their grievances are the ever-increasing costs the sector faces and what they say is the choking effect of over-zealously imposed environmental regulations. They are also angry about progressive tax increases on the non-road-use diesel that is essential to their work.
Similar issues have led farmers in other European nations to also take action. Fleets of tractors have brought traffic to a standstill in Germany and Romania, and farmers have also protested in the Netherlands and Poland.
They all face the challenge of inflation, and what some see as unfair competition from Ukrainian agricultural imports. In the UK, fruit and vegetable producers will again demonstrate in front of parliament on Monday against what they say are the unfair terms of their contracts with the main supermarkets.
The French government's relations with the sector have not been helped by the repeated postponement of farming reforms first announced by Macron more than a year ago. Agriculture Minister Marc Fesneau announced yet another delay Sunday to a package that had been due to go before the government later this week. "Give us a few weeks," he told RTL radio and other news media.
More work is needed to be done to simplify the measures, he said, an issue raised by many of the farmers currently protesting. In comments to AFP, FNSEA vice-president Luc Smessaert made it clear they would need to hear "very concrete" measures.
Less than five months out from the European elections, opposition parties are already courting the farmers' vote. Political leaders on all sides have leapt to the defence of farmers over the issue of rising diesel costs.
If the FNSEA does not emerge satisfied from its meeting on Monday, they have not ruled out further action to hammer home their grievances. Macron's visit to the annual Agriculture Show in Paris – which begins on February 24 and has historically seen farmers speak their mind directly to French leaders – might not go as smoothly as he hopes.