French farmers continued their nationwide protests on Saturday, despite the government’s attempts to appease them with new measures.
Despite the government’s attempts to appease them, French farmers continued their nationwide protests on Saturday, claiming that the measures were insufficient to address their concerns about low income and poor living conditions.
Prime Minister Gabriel Attal’s government announced on Friday that it would scrap its plan to phase out state subsidies on agricultural diesel, and also unveiled other initiatives to ease the financial and administrative burden on many farmers.
However, the FNSEA, France’s largest farming union, said it would persist with its protests and many farmers stayed at the roadblocks they had erected on motorways and major roads on Saturday.
“Attal’s measures are inadequate, they will not improve our cash flow,” farmer Natacha Guillemet said to BFM TV. Some protesters also maintained their threat of blocking the roads around Paris.
In addition, protesters held a silent march in the northern French town of Beauvais to honour the farmers who had lost their lives in recent years, some of whom had taken their own lives due to the stress of their work conditions.
France is the European Union’s biggest agricultural producer and the French farmers’ protests are similar to those in other European countries such as Germany and Poland, where many protesters say they are suffering from globalisation and foreign competition.
