The French Government today announced two additional aid devices for farmers who represent a total amount of 230 million euros and showed its determination to get the European Union to renounce negotiations with Mercosur under current conditions.

Under the pressure of dozens of farmers’ blockade points throughout French territoryand particularly on the main access highways to Paris, the Minister of Agriculture, Marc Fesneau, presented two new aid devices in an interview with the Sud Radio station.

The first, endowed with 150 million euros, will be for the uprooting of vineyards, which may be temporary or permanent and which will have to receive the approval of the EU, for which France will negotiate in Brussels within a coalition that he intends to form with Spain and Italyexplained Fesneau.

The second, with 80 million euros, will be allocated on the one hand for specific problems of sectors that They have had specific crisessuch as mildew in certain wine regions, and also to the payment of interest on farm loans in 2024.

Regarding Paris’s categorical rejection of an agreement between the EU and Mercosur, the head of Agriculture said that The information he has is that the negotiations between the two blocks have been suspended, as France had requested.

He acknowledged that on this issue “France is quite alone” among the 27 EU countries, but He insisted that “if we don’t get what we want”that is, the famous “mirror clauses”, “there will be no agreement with Mercosur”.

The French position – he recalled – is based on the fact that “agricultural practices” of certain products in the Mercosur countries fail to comply with the health or environmental rules imposed on farmers in France, such as the use of hormones to fatten livestock or the use of certain phytosanitary products, and Furthermore, the climatic “path” of these countries “is not good.”

The Minister of Economy and Finance, Bruno Le Maire, in another interview with the Europe 1 radio station, assured that “France has enough strength in Europe” to impose its position on Mercosur: “That agreement cannot be signed as it is. And it will not be signed.”

The question of negotiation with Mercosur is one of the topics that the French presidentEmmanuel Macron, intends to address tomorrow at a meeting with the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen in Brussels, on the occasion of the extraordinary EU summit.

In June 2019, after almost twenty years of negotiation, the EU and Mercosur reached an agreement in principle to establish a free trade agreement, but since then France (and some other countries) have opposed continuing with the approval procedure. That agreement generates widespread opposition among French farmers who are in the blockades.