The image has gone around all over Europe. Just a few days ago, a picket of French wine producers blocked French roads in the vicinity of Boulou, blocking the way to trucks carrying Spanish wines. A memory that seemed forgotten on the continent, reliving those tense situations in the mid-nineties when French farmers attacked strawberry trucks coming from Spain.
So much so that the situation has not pleased either Marc FesneauFrench Minister of Agriculture, insisting in statements to the French media La Vigne Vitisphere that “there can be no violence even when there is desperation” and that what happened “is an image that does not help the cause.”
A situation that leaves France in a bad place and that, at the same time, demonstrates that there is a double-speed situation between Franco-Spanish relations that, to date, showed total agri-food harmony.
Proof of this is what Fesneau also remembered, alluding to the opening of borders for the transport of live French cattle towards Spain, despite the situation that the continent is going through with the epizootic hemorrhagic disease. Disease that, by the way, we already explained in DAP which should not be known as the covid of cows.
Considered enemies by certain winegrowers in the French Languedoc area, the southeastern part of the country, Spanish wines have become the object of angers of certain producers in the Aude department, in what they have called “an economic war against economic criminals who abuse ruined winegrowers.” Which is why several Spanish trucks were attacked at the Boulou toll, one of the most common gateways for trans-Pyrenean transport.
The situation, as has been proven, has to do with an overproduction of wine – a problem to which Spain is no stranger – in certain regions that is causing a drop in prices that adds to a decrease in consumption. A new paradigm for which France, for example, has taken action on the matter by encouraging the uprooting of vineyards that offer worse quality wines and thus balance supply and demand.
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As is evident, In this situation it does not rain to everyone’s liking, Because French winegrowers have found in Spanish wine—usually cheaper than French wine—the perfect target on which to lay their blame, believing that it is simply a situation of unfair competition.
Images | Xavier Remongin/agriculture.gouv.fr
In DAP | 500 French winegrowers block the border and empty the load of three Spanish trucks. They ask for “severe” sanctions
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