Farmers demonstrate against changes to legislation that would ease restrictions on pesticide and water use in farming.
French farmers have disrupted highway traffic around Paris and rallied in front of parliament to protest against amendments filed by opposition lawmakers to a bill that would loosen environmental regulations on farming.
Members of France’s leading farming union, the FNSEA, parked about 10 tractors outside the National Assembly on Monday to put pressure on MPs, who began debating the legislation in the afternoon.
The legislation, tabled by far-right MP Laurent Duplomb, proposes simplifying approvals for breeding facilities, loosening restrictions around water use to promote irrigation reservoirs and reauthorising a banned neonicotinoid pesticide used in sugar beet cultivation that environmentalists say is harmful to bees.
The proposed law is part of a wider trend in numerous European Union states to unwind environmental legislation as farmers grapple with rising costs and households struggle with the cost-of-living crisis.
More than 150 farmers from the Ile-de-France, Grand Est and Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur regions gathered peacefully in front of the National Assembly, drinking coffee and eating croissants, after blocking the main roads around the capital.
“This bill to lift the constraints on the farming profession is very important to us,” FNSEA Secretary-General Herve Lapie told the AFP news agency.
“What we are asking for is simply to be able to work in a European environment: a single market, a single set of rules. We’ve been fighting for this for 20 years. For once, there’s a bill along these lines. … We don’t have the patience to wait any longer.”
The FNSEA and its allies say the neonicotinoid pesticide acetamiprid, which has been prohibited in France since 2018 due to environmental and health concerns, should be authorised in France like it is across the EU because it is less toxic to wildlife than other neonicotinoids and stops crops from being ravaged by pests.
Environmental campaigners and some unions representing small-scale and organic farmers say the bill benefits the large-scale agriculture industry at the expense of independent operators.
President Emmanuel Macron’s opponents on the political left have proposed multiple amendments that the protesting farmers said threatened the bill.
“We’re asking the lawmakers, our lawmakers, to be serious and vote for it as it stands,” Julien Thierry, a grain farmer from the Yvelines department outside Paris, told The Associated Press news agency, criticising politicians from the Greens and left-wing France Unbowed (LFI).
Ecologists party MP Delphine Batho said the text of the bill is “Trump-inspired” while LFI MP Aurelie Trouve wrote in an article for the French daily Le Monde that it signified “a political capitulation, one that marks an ecological junction”.
FNSEA chief Arnaud Rousseau said protests would continue until Wednesday with farmers from the Centre-Val de Loire and Hauts-de-France regions expected to join their colleagues.
Protests are also expected in Brussels next week, targeting the EU’s environmental regulations and green policies.
Farmers across France and Europe won concessions last year after railing against cheap foreign competition and what they say are unnecessary regulations.
