The FT needs to be much clearer when it reports on the farmers’ protests currently sweeping Europe. The protests are farmer-led, even though politicians of the right try to co-opt them. The French Communist leader Fabien Roussel is the only politician on the left who articulates the grievances of thousands of small farmers whose monthly income is under €1,000 and who work very long hours, perhaps 80 hours a week, something unthinkable for city dwellers.
Headlines like “EU tries to placate farmers as far right fans flames” (Report, January 26) are misleading, at least in France. Farmers are decent people who do not give a monkey’s about the extreme right. They just want to make a living. The conditions they work under simply do not resonate with a tin-eared narrowly Parisian elite whose knowledge of the countryside is limited to weekends in country houses and boasting to foreigners that France has the best “cuisine” in the world!
The respected economist Philippe Dessertine is just one commentator who has explained the farmers’ fury, pointing out the overzealous implementation by the French bureaucracy of rules enacted in Brussels. Your reporters should get out of Paris and Brussels and speak to ordinary farmers.
Francis Ghilès
Visiting Fellow, King’s College London, Paris, France
