Farmers’ revolt has turned France into a tinderbox

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

No battle plan survives contact with the enemy,” said Bismarck’s great field marshal Count von Moltke, a piece of wisdom Emmanuel Macron (who’s just given a funeral oration for the late Wolfgang Schäuble in serviceable German) might want to ponder. His brand-new cabinet and brand-new 34-year-old PM, Gabriel Attal, were supposed to bring relief, and a breath of fresh air, to government.
Instead, after the own goal by new education minister Amélie Oudéa-Castera, who has attracted controversy over her reasons for moving her son from a state school to Paris’s poshest, private Catholic Lycée, le Président is facing a much more serious crisis: farmers are rising in anger.
As in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and Poland, columns of tractors blocking roads, and demonstrations barring access to préfectures across the country, are giving rise to a fear of a gilets verts revolt, akin to the 18-month 2018 gilets jaunes popular rebellion that scarred the fabric of politics for far longer than it actually lasted.
“Being a farmer in France amounts to reading Kafka on a tractor,” the environmental journalist Emmanuelle Ducros wrote this week in L’Opinion, a centre-Right daily, in a piece detailing in excruciating detail the thicket of rules and regulations blighting French farmers.
These come from local, regional, national and European agencies, often contradict one another, and each require their own field of application (a farm can be “zoned” in as many as five different areas, operating under different rules managed by different bodies, almost all empowered to fine and ban).
There are norms for everything: for a chicken farm producing eggs, the rulebook is 167 pages long, and includes the minimum width of a chicken cage (30cm), the inclination of the bottom part (14 degrees), the trapdoor size (40cm wide, 35cm high), and more rules on dust, ventilation, and shape of perch. There are 14 separate regulations on how to properly trim a hedge bordering a field, depending variously on the zoning code, national heritage code, environmental code, and so on.
Subject to whether a ditch is classified as such, or as a small brook, you either must, or are forbidden, to clean it up. The Common Agricultural Policy investigators require timestamped and geo-localised pictures of each field to prove cultivation on the right dates, and use a channel on an EU satellite to spot any deviation. Days when work is banned, to allow birds to nest, clash with those mandating trimming.
France is known for the “over-transposition” of EU regulation: to placate the French Green party (who join the politics of Jeremy Corbyn with the bolshiness of Extinction Rebellion), many rules have been pushed further by the government. No wonder that French farmers spend 20 per cent of a very long working week on paperwork.
As a result, they watch with fury their produce being priced out of a market that has been hit by inflation like everywhere else, while competitors from countries France has free trade deals with undercut them. Morocco, which isn’t bound either by the French employment code or most of the Brussels sanitary or green regulations, can sell 420,000 tonnes of tomatoes a year at €2.49 a kilo, while the French ones cost €4.50, earning centimes for the growers. Brazilian or Thai chicken goes at €5 a kilo, against €11 for a French-raised bird. France waived import duties for Ukrainian grain when the country was invaded by Russia, but this doesn’t help French wheat growers.
The situation turned nasty this week, with a family of farmers demonstrating peacefully mowed down by a car running a roadblock. It was described as an accident, with the driver charged for involuntary manslaughter. But the issue has become a tinderbox.
So far, Attal has spent a lot of time sweet-talking farmers. His one stroke of luck is that, unlike the Yellow Vests, farmers traditionally have unions and professional organisations who seem determined not to raise the stakes unless they see clear provocation. They, as well as the government, are careful not to alienate the public: the French love their farmers and the countryside, which they see as the base of France’s traditions, from gastronomy to landscapes, and even greatness.
But the danger remains that a mishandling of such an electric situation may yet add votes to the extremes, mostly on the Right. There’s no general election scheduled in France before 2027; but the June European elections could become a life-size poll on Macron’s loss of the people’s trust.