France has told its farmers that any action to block access to Paris’s main market for fresh food would be crossing a red line as a tractor protest made good on a threat to blockade the city for an indefinite period, stopping traffic on eight main motorways into the capital in a row over regulations, pay and taxes, reports The Guardian.
As it became clear the farmers planned to encircle the city, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, held a crisis meeting with key cabinet ministers on what was being called “Operation Paris Siege”. Prisca Thevenot, a government spokesperson, said announcements would be made on Tuesday. “The whole government and the president are mobilised,” she said.
The interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, said 15,000 police and gendarmes had been mobilised to prevent the tractors from entering Paris and other cities where protests were happening, and to keep access open to Charles de Gaulle-Roissy airport north of the city and Orly airport in the south, as well as the region’s main fresh food market at Rungis, the largest in Europe. He warned farmers that blocking Rungis, which supplies 60% of Paris’s fresh food to about 12 million people, would be crossing a red line.
The first motorway barrage was reported shortly before 2pm when 30 tractors blocked the A4 20 miles east of Paris in both directions. Shortly afterwards, the A13 about 35 miles north-west of Paris was blocked in the direction of the capital. Tractors were reported to have blocked other main routes into and out of the city, forcing motorists to use increasingly congested side roads.
By Monday evening, there were 97 miles (156km) of traffic jams reported on the motorways. The National Federation for Road Transport confirmed that the blockages had hit deliveries but it was too early to quantify the impact. It stressed the importance of protecting transporters and their goods as well as the right for them to circulate.