Rachel Marsden: Tear-gassed cows and a president fleeing irate farmers mark agriculture show marred by globalism

Farmers protest during the Agricultural Fair opening by French President Macron, in Paris, France, on February 24, 2024. A group of French farmers stormed into a major Paris agricultural fair amid anger over costs, red tape and green regulations. Photo by Kelly Linsale/bePress Photo Agency/ bppa.be/ ABACAPRESS.COM.

PARIS — The Paris International Agricultural Fair is historically a convenient photo op for French presidents. They get to walk around and sample the Made in France delicacies while petting livestock and promoting France’s entrepreneurial farming. But this year, we’re a long way from the days of former President Jacques Chirac smiling down from the driver’s seat of a tractor. Why? One word: globalism.

Never before, in the history of the 60-year- old show, have the many farm animals present ever been subjected to tear gas — until now. Don’t worry, though – the cows know exactly what to do: fart up a storm and derail the globalist climate change agenda in revenge. Their farts and belches are already blamed for 15 percent of greenhouse gases, per the United Nations.

The commotion started when French President Emmanuel Macron showed up and the farmers — who currently enjoy 91 percent popular support in the country — wanted to have a little word. In January, French farmers took to the streets and blocked major highways around the country for days to draw attention to their inability to earn a living amid increasingly crushing European and French bureaucracies, the European Union’s climate change diktats, and its insistence on flooding of the European market with cheap Ukrainian products that don’t suffer from the same EU labor and regulatory constraints. The tractors headed back to the farms under the pretext that things had to change for the better by the time this trade show rolled around.

The snapshots of Macron running through the trade show, away from angry farmers with several members of his security detail, as riot police unloaded tear gas, eventually gave way to an improvised confrontation. He took off his dress jacket — because that’s how you show that you’re a man of the people — even though Chirac didn’t ever seem to suffer from keeping his on. He then implored the assembled protesters — who evoked 100-hour workweeks, zero revenues, and a farmer committing suicide on average every two days — not to say that the government has done nothing. He spoke of its recent decision not to raise the farm fuel tax even higher in the future — despite fuel prices being high as a result of Europe’s failed policy of trying to deny Russia energy revenues. Macron also underscored his opposition to the EU’s latest free trade deal with Latin America’s Mercosur bloc. But both of these examples just happen to underscore France’s real powerlessness in an EU-straitjacketed system in which unelected bureaucrats make policy decisions for 27 countries.

Rachel Marsden

Unfair competition is one of the French farmers’ top gripes, and it’s already been established that there aren’t enough bureaucrats to run compliance checks, however much the government invokes them as a solution. It’s also clear that Ukrainian farm products are going to continue to be prioritized over the bloc’s own.

The EU trade commissioner came out at the end of January and said, right as farmers were protesting all this across the EU, blocking roads and highways with their tractors, that the measures “struck the right balance” between supporting Ukraine against Russia and protecting EU farmers’ interests. He would have at least been better off just shutting right up completely until the June renewal date of Ukraine’s customs exemption. He blurted all this out even as more than 1,000 tractors converged on his workplace in Brussels. You’d think that this esteemed commissioner worked in a windowless basement of the place.

On the frontline of this issue right now — and geographically, with Ukraine — is Poland, which sees that Brussels is useless and isn’t even going to defend its interests against a non-EU country, Ukraine. So Warsaw enacted a unilateral Ukrainian import ban, along with Hungary and Slovakia. So now foster kid, Kyiv, is duking it out directly with the EU family’s most needy child, Warsaw, while mother Brussels conveniently pretends to be busy doing her nails in the other room.

In the meantime, the Polish Foreign ministry is now wielding the pro-Putin label, accusing their own farmers, tractor-blocking the border with Ukraine, of anti-Ukrainian slogans that glorify Russian President Vladimir Putin, effectively diminishing their power and legitimacy. Or hey, maybe European farmers really do feel that Putin was onto something when he said way back in 2022 that the Ukrainian food was largely ending up in Europe, and wasn’t making it down to feed the poor in developing countries like Brussels said it would if he let it get shipped out of the war zone.

Macron used a similar tactic at the agriculture show, trying to conflate protesting farmers with the far-right opposition. And the German government did the same when tractors and trucks converged at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate in January. It’s like they’re all exactly the same guy — totally interchangeable “Globalist Ken” dolls with a wind- up string in their backs to spew nearly identical talking points.

Farmers are salt-of-the-earth people who don’t deal in focus-grouped talking points or political smears. As one French farmer told me recently in explaining why they don’t speak the same language as the globalist-dominated political class: “We farmers may have our feet in the dirt, but at least the dirt is clean.”

(Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist and host of independently produced talk shows in French and English. Her website can be found at http://www.rachelmarsden.com.)

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