By CATHERINE FIELD
PARIS - Angry protests in France at the rising cost of fuel jammed motorways and blocked ports, stranding thousands of cars, trucks and holidaymakers and triggering fury in Britain.
Fishermen outraged at the cost of boat fuel that has risen by 250 per cent in just 20 months ended a three-day blockade of all the main Channel ports yesterday after the Government offered them major concessions.
The protest had been joined by truck drivers, who sealed off access to the ports and staged disruptive action on several motorways, as well as farmers and Paris taxi drivers.
Chaos and a bitter anti-French mood prevailed on the other side of the Channel as an 8km tailback of traffic built up at Dover and British holidaymakers who had scheduled a holiday in France made detours via Belgium, took a plane or headed sadly back home.
Freight companies suffered losses of more than $NZ3.5 million a day.
Britain's Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, egged on by the tabloid press, angrily warned France that Britain was fed up with being held to ransom by striking French workers. He called on the European Commission to ensure that vital transport links between Britain and France would not become a pawn in future disputes involving fishermen, air controllers, train drivers and truckers.
Faced with an explosion of the annual end-of-summer anger, the Government did what the authorities in France since the Revolution have always done in the face of powerful agitation: it gave ground.
Agriculture Minister Jean Glavany announced cuts of up to 100 per cent in fishermen contributions to the welfare system, and big reductions in port charges.
Economy Minister Laurent Fabius unveiled tax reforms in which he scrapped the annual road tax for private uses and reduced the tax on domestic heating fuel by 30.4 per cent.
To appease the protesters - and prove that the French saying law is made on the streets, not in Parliament is still true - he pledged that a special tax on diesel would mark time next year instead of being increased as scheduled, and if the worldwide price of crude rose by 10 per cent over a given period this tax would fall in compensation.
To pay for all this, France will levy a one-off tax of around 3.5 billion francs (more than $1 billion) that the oil companies have made in windfall profits.
Members of the Greens, which is a junior partner in the tripartite coalition of the left, were dismayed. Negotiations take place in Lyon, from September 11-15, to breathe life into the Kyoto Accord, a framework agreement on limiting fossil-fuel emissions that cause global warming. France, as host country of the talks, has been preening itself on its green credentials, including high taxes on petrol that are intended to wean drivers on to cleaner fuels.
But a climbdown seemed inevitable, given the weight of the protests and the two crushing factors over which France has no control - the rising cost of crude oil and the plummeting value of the euro against the United States dollar, the currency in which this vital commodity is billed.
Those two factors led to a small push in inflation in the euro-zone that prompted the European Central Bank to increase interest rates.
France has the costliest fuel in the European Union with the exception of Britain. A litre of lead-free 95-octane petrol retails for around $2.20. Diesel sells for around $1.5 a litre.
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