Paris, Mar 12:
The French police have used tear gas to disperse a crowd of several hundred farmers protesting in front of the local council’s building in the city of Bordeaux in the country’s southern Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, French media reported on Monday.
The farmers have bombarded the territory around the building with uprooted vines and manure with the use of dozens of tractors and then dumped tires and straw near the fences with an eye to setting them on fire, forcing a law enforcement unit to interfere with the situation, the Ouest-France newspaper reported.
Delegations of farmers have kept arriving from all the corners of the region to Bordeaux in hope that the local council’s lawmakers would meet with them, the France Bleu radio station reported, adding that their actions had resulted in gridlock.
The current protest is led by the Coordination Rurale agricultural trade union, which is demanding that the regional authorities support farmers amid the ongoing decline in agriculture and winemaking. The trade union’s head, Veronique Le Floc, said in a video address on X that every fourth farm in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region had been shut down and the livestock had decreased by hundreds of thousands of heads over the past 20 years.
Farmers in France have been protesting heavily since January, blocking highways and dumping manure and waste in front of government buildings across the country. They demand recognition of the importance of their profession and denounce the government’s agricultural policies, which they say make them noncompetitive. In particular, farmers oppose the import of cheap agricultural products, restrictions on the use of water for irrigation, and the increase in diesel fuel prices, as well as restrictive measures to protect the environment and the growing financial burden.
