Catalan farmers offer pears and apples at the French border to protest against the fruit boycott

La Jonquera (ACN).- This Thursday at noon and for one entire hour, Catalan farmers have been offering apples and pears to all the drivers coming from France through the La Jonquera border, at the AP-7 highway. Around 50 farmers took over the highway toll and approached all of the stopped cars to offer them their fruit for free. In addition they explained to them the reasons for their action and distributed a leaflet written in four different languages. It was their way to answer back to the French farmers’ boycott, when trucks transporting fruit and vegetables from Spain to supply European markets were stopped and their charge offloaded and destroyed it, in front of a passive French police. Last week Catalan farmers were protesting against their products’ French boycott, pressing public powers to react and announcing possible retaliations to pay back their products’ destruction. Finally, they have decided not to undergo a radical protest but a “friendly” one, as they say; an action not harming drivers nor French products. By offering fruit for free and insisting the drivers to consume European products, Catalan farmers want to protest against the French boycott but also against the low prices they are paid for their products. “We are all suffering from the same crisis”, was claiming Joan Caball, the Coordinator of the farmer union ‘Unió de Pagesos’. Caball expains that this year there have not been large climate disasters, therefore production was very high when consumption has decreased due to the economic crisis but also due to the cucumber crisis. The result is that prices have dropped and many fruit and vegetable producers are losing money.

Catalan farmers’ protest has been a vindictive and pacific action. Road traffic has only been interrupted for 10 minutes and drivers were approached in a friendly way. Farmers took the opportunity, the moment that cars were practically stopped, to go through the highway toll and contact them to offer them some fruit pieces. “French farmers said that Spanish fruit is low quality and we want to prove that it’s not true”, one farmer from Catalonia explained. “No, no, this fruit has a better taste than the French one”, answered a woman in a car who was offered an apple. In another part of the toll, a Spanish truck driver celebrated the action whilst complaining about last week’s French protests: “In France we are treated like dogs”, he stressed. An Italian tourist underlined “agriculture is the most important thing”.

Joan Caball asked for an agreement between French and Spanish farmers. He explained “we have the same problems with the [low] prices; what we have to do is go united without fighting between us”. According to Caball, prices dropped because of several factors: no natural disasters happened this year in Western Europe, provoking large stocks of product and thus a large supply of fruit and vegetables on the market. In addition, in places where harvesting took place later in the year, the good weather brought it forward, coinciding with other productions. In addition, the summer was not very hot, and combined with the economic crisis caused fruit consumption to be lower than other years. In addition, Caball insisted that the oligopoly of commercial food distribution abuses fruit and vegetable producers and imposes low prices. In Spain, the main commercial distributor of food is the French group Carrefour. For all those reasons, Caball asked French producers to stop destroying fruit and vegetables coming from Spain. Furthermore, the ‘Unió de Pagesos’ coordinator asked the European Union to find solutions to help the agriculture sector. They ultimately ask for a modification of the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).