This is the best summary I could come up with:

French farmers’ unions on Thursday called a halt to protests in which they’ve blocked traffic with their tractors and dumped manure and rotting produce in front of government buildings to make their point.

French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal announced a series of concessions, including an agreement not to import agricultural products that use pesticides banned in the EU as well as new financial subsidies and tax breaks.

Meanwhile, Belgian farmers moved on Brussels to express their dissatisfaction with EU policies, including a major trade deal with Mercosur, the Latin American economic bloc, and cheap imports from Ukraine.

“In France, many people see it as opening the gates of Europe to foreign products, which is to the competitive advantage of those countries,” Patrick Chamorel, senior resident scholar at the Stanford Center in Washington, told Vox.

Given that the Mercosur agreement includes import quotas and that negotiations could be concluded before June, just ahead of this year’s EU Parliament elections, European farmers are now protesting in earnest, leading to this month’s mass demonstrations in France, Brussels, and elsewhere.

Since his first term, starting in 2017, Macron has had to balance environmental concerns within French politics and the EU with the needs of rural farmers — whose cause far-right politicians have been all too willing to capitalize upon — as well as the interests of powerful agribusiness tied to the FNSEA.

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