French and Spanish farmers resumed protests on Wednesday, days ahead of a national agricultural fair, the start of which has become a de facto deadline for the government to meet their demands.
On Wednesday, they blocked a section of about 70 kilometers (43 miles) on a highway in the south of the country. Already on Tuesday, farmers had blocked milk shipments in protest at wholesale prices they say are too low.
The FNSEA and the Young Farmers Association (JA) also announced they will lead a tractor column at the Paris agricultural fair on Friday ahead of a visit by French President Emmanuel Macron.
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Επανέρχεται το "φακέλωμα"... Ειδικός μηχανισμός "τέρας" παρακολουθεί όσους Ελληνες χρωστάνε
Macron will visit the Salon de l'Agriculture exhibition on Saturday, as is traditional for French presidents.
However, farmers' unions have made it clear they want ironclad assurances that their complaints about product prices and bureaucracy have been addressed before then.
"The time has come for political decisions," Arnaud Rousseau, head of France's largest farmers' union FNSEA, said late Tuesday.
"Expectations are high."
French Prime Minister Gabriel Atal on Wednesday presented details of the "major measures" included in an upcoming farm law, which will include a passage on French "food sovereignty", officials said.
He was also due to give an update on government promises made earlier this month after farmers blocked roads across the country for days.
In some of the angriest protests in Europe, French farmers were out in force for more than a week in January, using tractors to block key roads to Paris and other major highways across the country.
Issues farmers want to tackle include burdensome environmental rules, the threat of cheap imports from outside the EU and measures to tackle the low incomes many of them still suffer.
There is information about the import of products from Turkey, Morocco and other countries, but in which we have the use of dangerous pesticides, according to earlier reports in the EU, which some now ostentatiously ignore.
EU elites label protesting farmers as "far-right" supporters
The ruling elites of the European Union and their friendly media are afraid of losing political control in the run-up to the European Parliament elections and are therefore labeling the farmers who have come out to demonstrate in European cities as supporters of the "far right", he writes the European Conservative.
At the same time, desperate farmers are voicing their opposition to Brussels' aggressive green climate agenda, which is blindly cutting farmers' incomes and destroying rural communities.
The labeling in the media is a deliberate attempt to portray the situation as if the farmers have crossed the lines of "respectable" political debate and entered the dangerous path of extremism.
The idea is that their protests should not be seen as a "normal" part of democratic politics.
Trying to accuse farmers of being "far right" is a sure sign that the EU's technocratic elites fear losing control of the political agenda there at EU headquarters.
Current EU agricultural policy has been swayed by green ideology, which requires farmers to cultivate less land and use less intensive methods to reduce emissions.
However, this means less farming and less food production.
The disdainful attitude of the EU's ruling elites towards farmers confirms the real gap between the elite minority who look down on the continent through the Brussels bubble and the real world where at least 90% of Europe's population lives and works" concludes the same in a reality which risks bringing rebellion in Europe.
