The French farmers’ protests are more complex than they seem
The French farmers’ protests are more complex than they seem
Farmers’ frustration over French and EU regulations are a new dimension in a longstanding problem.
Farmers’ frustration over French and EU regulations are a new dimension in a longstanding problem.
French farmers’ unions on Thursday called a halt to protests in which they’ve blocked traffic with their tractors and dumped manure and rotting produce in front of government buildings to make their point. The message: They can no longer earn a living due to cheap imports, a lack of subsidies, and increased production costs.
French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal announced a series of concessions, including an agreement not to import agricultural products that use pesticides banned in the EU as well as new financial subsidies and tax breaks. The new policies have — for now — appeased France’s two largest agricultural unions, the Young Farmers and the FNSEA (the French acronym for the National Federation of Farmers’ Unions).
While farmers throughout Europe have been protesting poor wages and bureaucratic policy within their own countries and the EU, the French context is slightly different from other countries. It’s partly because of France’s self-conception and the place of agriculture within its national consciousness, but also because of France’s politics, specifically President Emmanuel Macron’s unpopularity.
France is now on the same track as Italy and others now, with birth rates taking a nose dive from 2015 and again another 13% drop just from 2020. Their immigration system is just as much a mess as the U.S. too. It'll be interesting to see where they go from here. Sadly a good bet they move the same directly as Italy, into a population death spiral.
…population death spiral which will cause increased social and economic pressures. Which witless politicians will see, and refuse to make the hard choice today by making families and life affordable (at the expense of ‘the market’) and either;
- Refuse to do anything
- Abuse the ‘economic steroids’ that is immigration. Low and high skill migrants both grant economic benefit, but this usually leads to racist/xenophobic reactionary popular sentiment and politics
- Address the reasons why raising a family is increasingly becoming a financial death sentence, or a choice between having kids or being able to retire.
Almost everyone chooses option #2 because for politicians it’s easy, they get to show off “economy stronk, line goe up” and self congratulate on how they ‘solved’ economics by offsetting all developmental costs for an entire generation of their workforce. And then the next round of witless politicians see that short term success, and instead of actually solving the problem they…