Farmers unsatisfied with government measures
Representatives of protesting farmers on Monday said that they are unhappy with the government’s proposals on addressing their various issues and will announce how their protests will proceed on Tuesday.
Following a visit by Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to protesting farmers in Western Greece on Thursday, in which he assured them that the government will assist them “at the national and European level,” farmers have said that the planned measures are not enough to resolve their problems.
Government representative Pavlos Marinakis said on Monday that the government’s resources are not “limitless, and thus no further measures are being planned.”
According to state-run broadcaster ERT, farmers attempted to make their way to the Ministry of Macedonia-Thrace in Thessaloniki in order to submit a resolution to be voted, but were stopped by police forces on the national highway and later decided to set up roadblocks elsewhere.
Their representatives did manage to submit a resolution to the regional authorities in Florina, and spread their tractors all the way to the border with North Macedonia.
They also set up road blocks around the Egnatia Odos highway near the northern town of Serres, where the head of the Pan-Serres Agricultural Association, Diamantis Diamantopoulos, announced that they will “escalate” their “struggle.”
Farmers from many surrounding territories and regions also protested and set up road blocks in Thessaly’s town of Trikala.
Afflicted by a major storm last September, farmers have been calling on the government to compensate their loss of crops, livestock, and destroyed machinery, and to drain the many still-flooded farms and crop fields, before this year’s planting and growing season. They warned that failure to do so will result in a massive drop of agricultural goods production this year.
Several countries in Europe, including the European Union’s biggest agricultural producers, have been experiencing farmer protests in recent weeks, from Greece to as far north as Finland, and even France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, and other countries and cities and highways are experiencing gridlocks due to massive demonstrations conducted by farmers and their supporters.
Farmers from across the EU also descended in front of the European Parliament in Brussels in order to protest their treatment by the bloc and their respective national governments.
