French farmers stage protests across France

Angry farmers burned tyres on the Champs Elysées and staged protests across France yesterday to demand action over plummeting prices that have slashed revenues in Europe's mayor agriculture producer.

Dozens of farmers from the cereal plains around the capital set up a barrier of straw bales and burning tyres on the iconic Paris avenue, causing traffic chaos.

"The farm world is dying," said Damien Greffin, head of the young farmers' association for the greater Paris region. "People have to be able to make a living from their work."

The FNSEA farmers' union said 52,000 people had joined the protests, with milk and meat producers driving hundreds of tractors into cities across the country.

Farmers are demanding a €400-million emergency plan from the state to shore up the sector, and a bank pledge to free up €1 billion in loans.

"There has been a state plan for banks, for the auto industry. Now we want one to save French agriculture," said the regional farm union chief in the western city of Poitiers, Dominique Marchand.

France is the biggest farm producer in the 27-member European Union, generating €64 billion in 2007, almost a fifth of the EU's production, and employing 770,000 people, government figures show.

But the sector is reeling from a collapse in agricultural prices, which fell 15 per cent this year, according to France's statistics agency INSEE.

President Nicolas Sarkozy's government has admitted farming is battling its worst crisis in 30 years, with revenues set to tumble between 10 and 20 per cent in 2009.

In an interview with Le Figaro newspaper yesterday, Mr Sarkozy pledged to take "strong action" this month.

Agriculture Minister Bruno Le Maire said Thursday France needed to support "a strategic sector, not only for France but for the whole European Union".

"Who is going to feed the world if not European farmers?" he asked.

Hundreds of tractors staged go-slow protests on highways around Toulouse, Montauban and Carcassonne in the southwest yesterday, causing long commuter tailbacks, before heading to a rally in the centre of Toulouse.

Other tractor rallies were held in the central city of Clermont-Ferrand, Nantes on the Atlantic coast, as well as Lille, Metz, Dunkirk and several other towns.

In Poitiers, tractors dumped more than 100 trailers of earth, turning the main road leading to the city hall into a fresh-ploughed field.