Farmers in southwestern France blocked roads and burned bales of hay on Saturday to protest against the slaughter of cows due to skin diseases, as the government said it would vaccinate one million cattle.
French farmers are furious at the government’s harsh response to an outbreak of nodular dermatitis, commonly known as lumpy skin disease.
Veterinarians culled more than 200 cattle on Friday after discovering a case of the disease in the village of Lesbolds-sur-Ariz near the Spanish border. Police had to disperse the angry farmers as they escorted them for culling.
Some unions said slaughtering entire herds was ineffective and called for lockdowns across France to “put an end to this madness”.
Dozens of tractors blocked traffic on Saturday, while others were parked in front of public buildings and farmers burned bales of straw and tires.
Nearly 150 kilometers of the A64 motorway between Bayonne and Tarbes is closed to traffic due to a blockade that started on Friday night.
Lumpy skin disease, which is not contagious to humans but can be fatal to cattle, first appeared in France in June.
-“Work for a lifetime”-
The official strategy to stamp out what authorities say is a highly contagious disease is to slaughter all animals in affected herds and conduct “emergency vaccinations” of all cattle within a 50-kilometer (30-mile) radius.
“This is the annihilation of cows and farmers,” said Leon Thierry of the hardline farmers’ union Rural Coordination (CR), who staged a protest in the town of Briscus with a dozen farmers and about 40 tractors.
“In the Pyrenees, there is no doubt that we should slaughter healthy animals that are not sick because they belong to a herd that is said to have sick animals,” he said.
About a hundred farmers gathered in Carbonne, about 40 kilometers southwest of Toulouse, and camped beside the A64 motorway.
“They deployed riot police to kill 200 cows, but you didn’t see them at the drug dealing site!” said Benjamin Kalanquin, 24, who works not far from the farm where the entire herd was slaughtered.
“Outright massacre is not the answer,” he said, vowing to camp out on the highway until Christmas “if there is no convincing response”.
“People are tired of it,” added Benjamin Roquebert, 37.
“You can’t build a herd in five minutes,” the cattle breeder and grain producer added. “It’s a life’s work, spanning generations.”
Protesters also say the government is not doing enough to protect them.
The European Union is expected to sign a trade deal with South America next week that farmers say will outcompete them by flooding the market with cheap produce.
Another protester, Aurelien Marti, said: “We are in dire straits, we don’t have food to eat and we don’t even earn 1,000 euros a month.”
– Vaccination –
About 70 farmers blew horns, set off firecrackers and smoke bombs in front of the agriculture minister’s former parliamentary office in the eastern town of Pontarlier. They hung a dead calf on a tree with a sign that read “Our Animals, Our Lives.”
The government plans to vaccinate 1 million cattle in the New Aquitaine and Occitany regions, Agriculture Minister Anne Geneva said on Saturday.
“In the coming weeks we will vaccinate almost a million animals and thus protect farmers,” she told Ici Occitanie radio.
The vaccines are in addition to the million cattle that have been vaccinated since July, the agriculture ministry told AFP.
The culling has divided farmer unions.
Coordination Rurale and Confederation Paysanne unite to oppose widespread culling and call for a vaccination campaign.
Leading farming union FNSEA supports a blanket cull of affected cattle.
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