France drops plan to cut diesel discount

The French government dropped plans to gradually reduce state subsidies on agricultural diesel but that seems not enough for angry farmers surrounding Paris and still threatening to converge on the capital in their tractors.

After two weeks of protests that have spread across France, with irate farmers on Friday blocking a major highway out of Paris, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal announced a series of measures to ease financial and administrative pressure on farmers.

“We have decided to pursue our movement. The prime minister had not responded to all of our questions,” Arnaud Rousseau, Head of FNSEA, France’s biggest farming union, told French TV station TF1.

Speaking earlier in a mountain village farm near the Spanish border, with his notes on a bale of hay, Attal said: “We will put agriculture above everything else.”

He said a plan to phase out state support on diesel would be scrapped, red tape simplified and an appeal lodged with the European Union for a waiver on bloc-wide rules on fallow land.

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“We will stop this Kafka-esque system,” said Attal, 34, France’s new prime minister, in response to the first big crisis of his premiership. “We will stop this planned trajectory of increasing tax on non-road diesel fuel.”

Attal also announced a raft of other steps designed to quell the unrest that has seen farmers spray manure over a public building and supermarket, dump hay bales in highways and empty the contents of trucks carrying fresh produce from neighbouring countries.

France would remain opposed to signing the Mercosur free trade deal, which farmers say will flood the country with cheaper Latin American meat and produce, he said. France will also push to ease European Union rules forcing farmers to leave some of their land fallow.

Ahead of Attal’s announcements, farmers had threatened to take their protest into central Paris. “We will go right into Paris to highlight our rage, our grievances,” said farmer Matteo Legrand.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 28^th, 2024.

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