Farmers set fire to the European quarter in Brussels

Brussels -Tensions in the streets of Brussels during farmers’ demonstrations as Agriculture Ministers met. Tractors tried to force a checkpoint near European institutions, setting fire to some tires piled up in the street and causing thick smoke throughout the area. Officers in riot gear intervened with water cannons. Farmers demonstrating in Brussels have occupied the entire neighborhood of European institutions, from rue de La Loi to Chaussée d’Etterbeek, where police in riot gear behind barbed-wire iron barriers blocked the road. Farmers are throwing firecrackers and eggs and are continuing to set tires on fire. A few tractors have run over the security barriers placed by the police.

While the protests have been going on for nearly four hours, the Belgian presidency at the helm of the EU and the European Commission decided to meet in the early afternoon, around 2:30 p.m., with farmers’ representatives after the EU Agriculture Council meeting at the EU Council premises.

Meanwhile, in his opening remarks at the ongoing Confagricoltura Assembly in Brussels, President Massimiliano Giansanti claimed that “we have blocked many of the European Commission’s crazy proposals” and stressed that “taking to the streets with tractors is very easy, bringing home concrete results is more complex.”

“We never liked this CAP. The only positive aspect we managed to change at the beginning was the convergence in values terms for all member states. We managed to defend it as far as it concerned an internal convergence for individual states, which are technicalities, with a significant fallout in terms of economic value,” said Coldiretti President Ettore Prandini at a press point in front of the European Parliament on the sidelines of ongoing farmer protests in the Belgian capital. “Having said all that, it is a common agricultural policy full of loopholes and red tape, full of constraints for agricultural enterprises that in many cases, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises, cannot be implemented as the Common Agricultura Policity historically conceived as a use of resources.” MEP Herbert Dorfmann (Südtiroler Volkspartei, EPP), speaking at the Confagricoltura Assembly said that “for the next round (of the European Commission, ed.), we must demand a strong, innovative commissioner of agriculture with a political vision for agriculture. We can no longer afford another five years like the ones that have just passed.” The MEP, who is the EPP coordinator in the European Parliament for agricultural policies, pointed the finger at the commissioner in charge of agriculture, Poland’s Janusz Wojciechowski, “who failed to get anything done,” and at the former vice-president of the EU Commission in charge of the Green Deal, Frans Timmermans, who “pushed very hard on some measures that are now proving to be absurd.”