FARMERS staged a one-hour mass demonstration across the island yesterday causing traffic chaos after they blocked key routes with their combine harvesters and tractors.
The demonstrations, organised by the Farmers’ Unions PEK and EKA and Agrotiki, were a warning to the government of more to come, unless the Ministry of Agriculture yields to their demands regarding diesel prices, as well as employee benefits and compensation.
Hundreds of police officers were mobilised to redirect the vast lines of traffic through other routes and to ease the growing tension between the demonstrators and impatient drivers.
In Paphos, farmers blocked the Mandria roundabout and refused access to all vehicles except one carrying a sick child to the Paphos hospital. Temper flared and police had to intervene to ease the tension when an angry motorist exchanged harsh words with the farmers.
Addressing the demonstrators, PEK General-secretary Michalis Lytras demanded that the government take action.
“We are not here to beg, but to demand that the government finally sits with us in a productive dialogue that will see an end to our problems, or else we have not choice but to stay on the streets and demand what we are entitled to.”
The farmers shouted, “we are desperate,” and “we are ruined,” and demanded a lifeline from the government, which they accused of not taking them seriously.
Despite measures taken by police in Limassol to prevent the highway being blocked off, the farmers, using side streets, entered the highway and parked their tractors diagonally across the two lanes at the Avdimou flyover, causing a traffic jam many kilometres long.
In Famagusta, farmers blocked off the Larnaca to Ayia Napa road near the Liopetri River. Agrotiki president, Christos Mavrokordatos, said the one-hour demonstration was symbolic, but warned that more permanent and stricter measures would be adopted, should the government fail to take them seriously.
Representatives of the unions stressed the situation was critical, saying farmers faced annihilation if the government did not intervene.
In the Nicosia district near Peristerona, clashes broke out among demonstrators as tempers reached boiling point. Police had to intervene to stop a fight between two farmers.
A farmer’s union spokesman, Nicos Kouzoupis, told the Cyprus Mail that the main demand the government was refusing to address was that of colouring diesel used for industrial purposes. With rising fuel prices – especially diesel – farmers demanded that the government subsidise diesel used for agricultural purposes by supplying farmers with coloured diesel at a lower price.
It had been planned for coloured diesel to be distributed through specially modified pumps that would fit only in agricultural vehicles, but the spokesman said the government had scrapped the plan as too expensive since new tanks would have to be constructed to store the coloured diesel.
“Before the tax package, diesel prices were as low as 12 cents, but now they say that with the EU harmonisation, the prices could reach up to 36 cents by January 2003,” Kouzoupis said.
“They only accepted to see us after we announced that we would be demonstrating. This policy is unacceptable.”
The farmers are also demanding that less social insurance be paid to seasonal workers and that farmers’ debts to be written off because of damage caused by bad weather this year.
The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.
