Europe: Spanish farmers maintain their mobilization against European policies

Spanish farmers continue to be at war against their Government and against the European Union. At the center of their complaints, the ecological transition policies and open doors to products of foreign origin. This Tuesday they mobilized and caused traffic cuts in the region of Catalonia.

The farmers arrived from various points in the Catalan region with their now famous tractors to cut off some of the accesses to the port of the city of Tarragona, located south of Barcelona. Protesters also caused roadblocks leading to France, near the border. In addition to the interruption of traffic with agricultural vehicles, farmers set up some barricades.

According to AFP, one of the accesses to the general food market in the city of Barcelona was also blocked. The platform in charge of organizing the protests was the Unión de Pagesos, a translation of peasant in the local Catalan language.

According to this group, "unfair competition" from products of outside territories that "do not meet European standards." Since the beginning of their protests, farmers have mainly pointed to Morocco as the origin of a large number of products with which they cannot compete due to their much lower prices. During the previous week, there were scenes in Spain in which farmers entered supermarkets to remove products of foreign origin from the shelves and dump them on the street.

Protests across Europe

Farmer protests throughout the European Union have been going on for more than two weeks. They took on greater scope when in France, the agricultural sector managed to put the Government of the recently appointed Gabriel Attal in check.

They were repeated in Poland, Italy, Belgium, Spain, Portugal. From the European institutions, the president of the Commission, Ursula von Der Leyen, announced last week that the standards for the use of agricultural pesticides would be reviewed to reduce their harshness and give more margin and freedom to producers.