Farmers are planning protests from Monday to oppose the EU-Mercosur free trade agreement, saying increased imports from South America will hurt the European Union's agriculture, the head of France's largest farm lobby FNSEA said on Wednesday.
This comes as farmers in Belgium have called for demonstrations close to the EU headquarters in Brussels on Wednesday.
"This trade agreement, which links part of the South American states to Europe, risks having dramatic consequences for agriculture," FNSEA's Arnaud Rousseau told France Inter radio.
"So we will be in all regions from Monday, for a few days, to make the voice of France heard at the time of the G20 in Brazil, and we hope that all the European countries will join us because the subject is not a country, a French subject, it is a European subject," he added.
However, French farmers do not intend to block roads and highways as they had done last year when anger at competition from cheaper imports, including from EU ally Ukraine, and a regulatory burden had led to large-scale protests across the EU.
"We are not here to bother the French people, we are here to tell them that we are proud to feed them and that continuing to produce in France," he added.
The country's agriculture minister, Annie Genevard, called the planned free trade deal between South American countries and the EU "a bad agreement," on Sunday as it would allow the entry into the country of "99,000 tons of beef, 180,000 tons of sugar and similar quantities of poultry meat" and would create damaging competition for local producers.
Weather-hit harvests and outbreaks of livestock disease along with political deadlock after a snap election at the start of summer have added to the grievances among French farmers.
