Farm uproar spreads in EU as France seeks to quell protests
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Transcript
00:00 can now bring in France 24's International Affairs Editor Philip Terle and then later on
00:04 Charles Pelligran. Philip I want to start with you because we heard there from that farmer Nicola
00:09 and what he said struck me, he says we want to get back to our farms, we want to get back to work,
00:13 but there is this deep-rooted suffering at the heart of this problem which is not often discussed
00:18 and that's the high suicide rate which is above average amongst farmers. Why is this? Okay so a
00:24 couple of points that are important to underline. The first one is this is not a sporadic protest by
00:28 farmers, this is an underlying long-term suffering and I think difficulty on the part of the farmers
00:35 to understand exactly what the French government is doing, where it's coming from, what the EU is
00:40 doing, why they're not doing more to try to support farmers and why they seem to be continually
00:45 increasing the rules on top of them and making them do this and do that and obey new directives
00:54 from the EU without giving them the means to do that and that has led to increasing feelings of
01:00 unhappiness amongst farmers. The figures if you look at them are actually quite alarming,
01:05 there's not that many reports that have come up, there've been two in the last 10 years, the first
01:09 one in 2011 found that 306 farmers had committed suicide that year in France and even worse in
01:18 2016 that figure got up to 529 farmers who had committed suicide so that's even more than one
01:24 farmer per day in France doing that and in that report in the investigation which was carried out
01:30 by the French health body, it found that the basic rule, the reasons for this were first of all
01:36 isolation on the part of the farmers not really understanding why they weren't feeling more
01:40 surrounded and more supported by the government and by the EU. Second point was on rising costs,
01:45 not being able to reach to pay bills that they were being given, they're also fatigue over the
01:54 huge workload, a general feeling of burnout and then the loss of family life because they were
02:00 constantly going out having to work seven days a week and all of this has been compounded by what
02:05 we've seen over recent times, global warming on top of that, increased regulations from the EU,
02:11 unhappiness about prices, cheap imports coming in from other EU countries, just one example for you,
02:16 if you buy Spanish fruit and vegetable in France you might pay one euro a kilo but if you buy
02:21 French fruit and vegetables then you might pay three euros a kilo so they can't compete with
02:26 subsidies or goods coming in from even from other EU countries so all of this has made the farming
02:33 industry fragile and it takes one spark as we've seen to bring them out in the street and to
02:38 protest. This is unlike many other protests we've seen in the past, much more determination and I
02:43 think much more anger. There's a lot of anger clearly as we heard there in that interview
02:48 which Karras was doing but also what's happening here in France is having a knock-on effect in
02:53 other parts of Europe and we have seen other parts of Europe, farmers in other parts of Europe
02:58 protest long before French farmers were out in the streets. Yeah I think there are a few reasons
03:02 for that as well, I think there are reasons that are the same as in France i.e. rising costs,
03:08 inflation, particularly in Germany for example there was a pledge to do away with subsidies on
03:18 diesel fuel as in France that has been put on the back burner right now but you've seen other
03:25 farmers coming out in protests in Spain, in Italy, in the Netherlands, in Germany, here in France,
03:33 in Romania and in Poland so there is really I think across Europe a general feeling that the EU is
03:38 not working properly, that they are face to face with crises not only cheaper imports from Ukraine
03:44 and elsewhere also with global warming which is paying a big important cost. There are European
03:49 elections coming along this year I think that has also motivated farmers to come out to try to
03:53 protest before those elections take place and the one group that's doing well out of this and looks
03:58 well, looks set to do better is of course the far right because they are reaping in the benefits
04:03 from all of these protests. Philip thank you very much for that Philip Turrell.