About thirty tractors took to the streets of Geneva today to express the “rebellion” and demands of Swiss farmers, at the first gathering in Switzerland after the peasant movements started in Europe.

“As young people, it makes us very scared that we honestly don’t know if there is a future in our profession. It is quite sad to see the generation before us who were already struggling to make a profit and modernize the equipment to do what politics requires us to do: to produce in a greener and better way,” he explained to AFP. Antonin Ramou, 19, apprentice viticulturist.

Hailing the transition to green farming, this young protester calls for “more help”. “And most of all, we cannot compete with products that do not follow these same rules and this targeting,” he stressed.

The first farmers’ rally in Switzerland — which is not a member of the European Union — was organized by farmers’ organization Uniterre, after another farmers’ union, the Union suisse des paysans, announced this week a petition with a range of demands. , action that is considered insufficient by some.

The tractors, escorted by police, gathered in a large square in central Geneva, attracting a crowd of around 200 people.

“It is the first agricultural gathering in Switzerland after demonstrations and blockades all over Europe. In Switzerland, many people say that the situation is different and that we do not follow the policies” of the EU, “but in fact we are in the same fate”, Elin Miller, union secretary of Uniterre, told AFP.

“Our end will be your hunger”

Mounted on a tractor, Rudy Burley, another Uniterre official, said: “Farming in Europe is doing very badly, caught in a vice between the demands of sustainable agriculture and a pressure to be competitive, always at the cheapest price to make a profit the big chains and the agri-food industry’.

“This backdrop also applies to what is happening in Switzerland,” he said.

Among the slogans on the banners posted on the tractors, “No farmers, nothing in the mouth”, “Our end will be your hunger” or even “Big distribution chains must pay fair prices”.

Florian Bode, 50, a cow and chicken farmer, is calling for more “transparency” about supermarkets’ profit margins.

“Distributors have a bigger margin than the producer,” he told AFP. “It’s completely unacceptable,” he protested.

He also appeals to buy local products, but underlines that he does not want to “load everything on the backs of consumers, because it is complicated today to know the origin of products on the labels”.