ArcaMax

BUCHELAY, France — Even when desperate to get protesting farmers and their tractors off the highways, globalist Western “elites” can’t overcome their tone-deafness.

About 100 tractors from the Normandy and Greater Paris regions blockaded a major highway leading to and from the capital, about 50 km northwest of Paris, last Friday, joining not just their counterparts doing similarly all around France, but also farmers from 30 percent of the European Union’s 27 member states — Belgium, Italy, Lithuania, Germany, Poland, Romania, and the Netherlands — who are fed up with government demands to produce more while earning less, amid growing national and supranational constraints and challenges.

French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, paid a visit to farmers in the south of France, where he hoped to quell national unrest with a speech. (Spoiler alert: He failed.) Talk quickly turned to a blockade of Paris, home of the world’s second-largest wholesale food market in the world, Rungis. The French people know exactly who’s responsible, though. An overwhelming 89 percent of them wholly support the farmers and their protest action, according to the latest Odoxa poll.

One underreported issue that French farmers keep evoking is the vast amount of Orwellian monitoring being leveraged against them. The EU uses its Copernicus Sentinel satellites to take images of their farmlands three times daily, enabling comparisons to be made with their submitted paperwork. They say that they’re then harassed by government bureaucrats to explain discrepancies that are typically easily accounted for by changing realities on the ground from one day to the next. Yet they’re judged and browbeaten by suits whom they describe as having no understanding of those realities.

But ask the EU and they’ll praise their satellite spy system for its benefits to “farmers, administrations, and the environment,” calling it a “game changer.”

Yeah, it’s changed the game, all right. French farmers say they now spend as much, if not more, time doing paperwork than farm work, and that the French government even adds an additional layer of bureaucracy atop of the EU’s that makes French farm products less competitive than even those of their European counterparts. And the French government does nothing to contest EU legislation prohibiting any country from favoring one EU nation’s products over another’s — including one’s own. “But French” is literally against the law beyond mere suggestion.

Then there’s the price of the endless support offered to Ukraine by the European establishment at the cost of its member states’ taxpayers — including farmers. In “solidarity”, Brussels has authorized Ukraine to flood the EU with cheap Ukrainian products — none of which are beholden to the same regulatory or quality standards as those of EU farmers. The EU is also multiplying free trade agreements with everyone from Chile to Latin America, whose farmers they can’t control, all while tying their own farmers hands in the global market competition.

The impact of the Ukraine conflict and misguided Western government’s policies extend to even tractors and fertilizer. The price of tractors has increased as a result of the largely Russian-supplied steel being sanctioned by the EU, forcing it to be obtained by their German manufacturers more expensively from other countries like Turkey, which imports steel from … Russia.

Likewise, fertilizer formerly made with now-sanctioned cheap gas from Russia is now contributing to a cost explosion.

When Attal addressed the farmers, he proposed 10 immediate measures that would be taken while punting everything else down the road in favor of more “talks” with stakeholders — because, apparently, it’s obvious what the problems are to everyone in France except the country’s number two in charge. (French President Emmanuel Macron was on an official visit to India, conveniently necessitating the deployment of Attal as cannon fodder.)

Walking into the line of fire, Attal said that he’d immediately suppress the 3 cent per litre annual tax increase on farming fuel — which they can already barely afford because of the government’s anti-Russia energy policy. Canceling tax increases isn’t a tax break. Do they think people are that stupid?

What Attal didn’t say was that the whole idea of that particular tax in the first place was to fund green dreams of “ecological transition” and punish use of traditional fossil fuels in the same kind of way that the Netherlands punished its farmers whose cows produced too much nitrogen by pressuring them to sell their farms to the state.

Farmers who refuse to disconnect from the green fantasies concocted by soft-handed bureaucrats are left with what, then? Government “help”, of course! Virtually everything else that Attal offered fits into one of two categories: either “aid” that’s really just selectively giving farmers back a little bit of the massive tax that they’ve already paid to the state, or else proposing to make a few small dents in the massive bureaucratic and administrative behemoth with which the French state is synonymous.

Attal said that he wanted to show the government’s affection for farmers, and that “there are no declarations of love without real proof of love.” Then he pulled the rhetorical equivalent of offering to take the farmers to the local drive-thru for a romantic cheeseburger. France has become a mama's boy beholden to Brussels and living in her basement. And no one’s impressed by that.