A few days before the opening of the Agricultural Show in Paris (February 24-March 3), the Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, tried to give assurances to farmers by providing “a progress update” of the 62 projects launched by the government, during a press conference on Wednesday February 21.

For Mr. Attal, among all the measures announced by the executive, “100% of construction sites have been opened. And for half of them – 31, precisely, those where an immediate response was possible – the measures were taken, and the commitments kept. While the question of agricultural income is one of the main demands of farmers, Gabriel Attal notably announced the presentation “by the summer” of a new bill to “strengthen the EGalim system”.

Adopted in 2018, then strengthened in 2021, this law aimed to prevent farmers from selling their products at prices lower than their cost of production. However, certain powerful French agricultural and agri-food organizations – FNSEA, Ilec, Ania – are calling into question the European purchasing centers, which allow the distributors thus brought together to carry out certain negotiations abroad, bypassing the law. “The law itself constitutes progress compared to the pre-existing regime, that is to say the 2009 law which gave full powers to large-scale distribution,” said Mr. Attal.

Ahead of the presentation of a new bill, the Prime Minister announced Tuesday evening in Le Figaro the launch of a parliamentary mission – led by the Renaissance deputies, Alexis Izard, and the MoDem, Anne-Laure Babault – on this evolution of the EGalim law so that it better takes into account the “farmers’ cost of production”. During the press conference on Wednesday, he also returned to the sanctions against “fraudsters”. “Controls are increasing, and sanctions will be there,” he assured, before giving the floor to his Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire.

The latter announced that “1,400 checks” had been carried out on “the 200 largest manufacturers and five distributors”, making it possible to reveal “150 cases of non-compliance”. Following these controls, two European mass distribution purchasing centers are targeted with “pre-fines” amounting to several “tens of millions of euros”, which they have two months to contest, it was reported. Mr. Mayor. In addition, the Minister of the Economy announced that 1,000 establishments were checked for the French origin of the products sold, and 372 were found to be non-compliant.

Mobilization at the Agricultural Show

After two weeks of mobilization in January, the main agricultural unions – the National Federation of Farmers’ Unions (FNSEA), the Young Farmers (JA) and the Rural Coordination (CR) – announced the end of the movement, while making an appointment with the government to check the concrete progress of the application of the executive measures. “If ultimately we were not considered, or if all this was just a flash in the pan, we will do it again,” warned the president of the FNSEA, Arnaud Rousseau. “The time for political decision” has come, Mr. Rousseau warned again on Tuesday, after meeting Emmanuel Macron and Gabriel Attal.

To carry weight to the end, the FNSEA and the JA have planned, in Paris for Friday evening, a “procession” of farmers, led by a few tractors, ending in front of the doors of the show, where several of them could camp until the president came the next day. Rural Coordination, the second largest union in the sector, has planned a demonstration for Friday in Paris.

At the same time, actions have resumed on the ground. As a reminder of the start of the movement, some 70 kilometers of the A62 motorway are closed to traffic between Agen and Montauban due to a farmers’ blockade. In Pas-de-Calais, around twenty farmers from the FDSEA (departmental federation of farmers’ unions) and JA carried out operations on Tuesday morning in supermarkets in Calais to check the places of production of food products.

And on Tuesday evening, near Vesoul, around thirty farmers blocked the road to a Lactalis tanker truck with a capacity of more than 20,000 liters. The farmers extracted the milk from the truck – which was finishing its tour of farms in Dampierre-sur-Linotte – in order to redistribute it to nearby breeders, “to feed the calves”, several dairy producers explained to Agence France. Press (AFP). “The objective is to bring Lactalis back to the negotiating table so that they can discuss the price of milk with producers,” explained Xavier Jarrot, dairy farmer in Velesmes (Haute-Saône).