Mobilized for several weeks now, thousands of Polish farmers protested on Wednesday March 6 in Warsaw in front of the offices of Prime Minister Donald Tusk. Joined by the Solidarity union and hunters, the farmers lit fires, threw firecrackers and smoke bombs to the sound of sirens and trumpets.
They also blocked parts of the highways across the country with their tractors, including those leading to the Polish capital. Polish farmers are protesting against European regulations and imports of products that, according to them, “do not respect community standards” and come mainly from Ukraine.
Since the beginning of February, farmers have been blocking border crossings with Ukraine, damaging relations between the two countries. They have repeatedly dumped goods from trucks coming from Ukraine, whose import of products has been facilitated by the European Union since Russia's invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022.
“We’re not being offered anything.”
“I want to produce healthy food, but we import products of lower quality than ours with which we cannot compete in terms of price,” the owner of a farm in southwest Poland, Jan Kepa. We still have hope, but we have been protesting for over a month and, at the moment, there is no solution that satisfies us. In fact, we are not offered anything. »
To calm the anger of farmers, Donald Tusk did not rule out, last week, a temporary closure of the Polish border to trade in goods with Ukraine. He also called on Brussels to put in place “comprehensive sanctions” on Russian and Belarusian agricultural and food products which are not so far affected by the European embargo, a demand that kyiv supports.
