French police Saturday have removed demonstrators from the western port of \u201cLa Rochelle\u201d with tear gas, as environmentalists and small farmers mobilised against massive irrigation reservoirs under construction.
\nAround 200 people had entered the La Pallice port terminal on Saturday, including farmers with old tractors, setting up a street party with music and drinks outside a major grain trader’s facility.
\nMore than a dozen police vans and an armoured vehicle pushed them out during the morning in a cloud of tear gas, while other police vehicles blocked off access to the port.
\nActivists charge that the reservoirs, set to be filled from aquifers in winter to provide summer irrigation, benefit only large farmers at the expense of smaller operations and the environment.
\nSeveral dozen are under construction in western France, with backers saying that without them farms risk vanishing as they suffer th rough repeated droughts.
\nFrance’s top court later overturned an attempted government ban on the Soulevements de la Terre (Uprisings of the Earth, SLT) group involved in organising the protests.
\nThroughout this week more than 3,000 police have been deployed around a “Water Village” protest camp in Melle, a few kilometres from Sainte-Soline, with authorities warning of a risk of “great violence”.
\nOrganisers of two Saturday marches in La Rochelle itself \u2014 banned by city authorities \u2014 said they rallied around 6,000 people, with police numbering them at 3,500.
\n“Many individuals are equipped with balaclavas and protective masks,” a police source said, while the local prefecture warned that “several hundred radical individuals” were on the scene.
\nSome bus shelters, an insurance office and a supermarket were damaged and five people arrested by early afternoon.
\nThe law enforcement response was “totally out of proportion,” said Agnes Denis, who had travelled from Dijon in eastern France to join the protest with her partner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
French police Saturday have removed demonstrators from the western port of \u201cLa Rochelle\u201d with tear gas, as environmentalists and small farmers mobilised against massive irrigation reservoirs under construction. Around 200 people had entered the La Pallice port terminal on Saturday, including farmers with old tractors, setting up a street party with music and drinks outside …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":28402,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international","category-news-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28401"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28401\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28404,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28401\/revisions\/28404"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}