Novel tractor protest by French farmers to highlight burning issues

French farmers have been hit hard by falling prices of livestock and dairy products and, they have resorted to a novel tractor protest to highlight the burning issues. Accordingly, hundreds of farmers with more than 1,300 tractors have converged on central Paris. The protest is against collapsing incomes. The protesters did block major arteries into the capital, but that has not caused any significant disruption in traffic.
This has been reported in bbc.com dated 3 September 2015.

Livestock and dairy farmers have been hit by tough competition between supermarkets as well as a Russian embargo on EU food imports. The protest was a noisy, eye-catching, disruptive protest of farmers in the center of the capital.
The protesters want to pressurize President Francois Hollande's Socialist government because, in the opinion of the farmers, French agriculture is on the verge of collapse. The tractors were spray-painted with "Anger" or "Enough Bureaucracy" and they had come from all parts of the country to participate in the demonstration.
Dairy farmers have seen incomes collapse because of over-production on the world market coupled with changing dietary habits apart from slowing Chinese demand.
As far as pork farmers go, they face competition from the vast piggeries of Denmark and Germany, where production costs are much lower.
(Image courtesy wikimediacommons.org)

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