European Farmers Demand Aid as Produce Prices Sag

BRUSSELS — Thousands of farmers snarled traffic and pelted the police with eggs on Monday in a protest to demand emergency aid to offset falling prices for milk, pork and other agricultural products.

The daylong protests created chaos on the roads as convoys of tractors trundled along Brussels’s main arteries and past buildings where European Union agriculture ministers were holding a special session to consider an aid package worth 500 million euros, or about $560 million.

Dutch police in full-body riot gear reinforced their Belgian counterparts, who closed off entrances to the conference site with barbed-wire barricades. Farmers responded by sounding their tractor horns and building a vast bonfire that billowed acrid black smoke.

One reason for the protests is a disruption in Europe’s produce markets, which are oversupplied with milk in particular. Many dairy farmers blamed a decision by the European Union earlier this year to end a quota system that had helped buoy prices.

But geopolitical and macroeconomic factors have also had an impact.

Europe has imposed sanctions on broad sections of the Russian economy in response to President Vladimir V. Putin’s annexation of Crimea and the destabilization of eastern Ukraine. Mr. Putin has responded by banning imports of European produce, curbing demand for cheese and meat.

A falloff in demand from China, as its economy slows, is also a factor in the declining prices of European agricultural products.

At the same time, hot and dry conditions in certain European countries have reduced crop yields and raised the prices farmers pay for animal fodder.

According to the European Commission, the union’s executive arm, the average price of raw milk fell 20 percent from June 2014 to June 2015. The commission said Moscow’s import bans had reduced pork exports to Russia by 91 percent from 2013 to 2014.

“This situation is not our fault, yet it is our sector that is being hit the most,” Albert Jan Maat, president of COPA, the main European farmers federation, said in a statement. “Prices are below production costs in many countries and farmers’ incomes half the average level, forcing some out of business.”

In the case of the dairy sector, strong increases in production by farmers in countries like the United States and New Zealand have contributed to oversupply.

On Monday, dairy farmers stopped short of calling for a reinstatement of production quotas across Europe, but insisted that some limits had to be put in place again.

The quota system had helped support prices but was ended in March as part of efforts to make the European Union’s farm subsidy program, which costs €50 billion a year, more responsive to market forces.

“If the politicians refuse to reduce the E.U. volume, it is the duty of us all to take to the streets and force political changes,” Romuald Schaber, president of the European Milk Board, which represents about 100,000 milk producers, said in a statement. Mr. Schaber said farmers who voluntarily cut production should receive bonus payments.

Some protesters said incomes in rural communities across the European Union were being badly squeezed.

“I’m young,” said Clément Lambillotte, 25, who drove his tractor from Gozée, Belgium, where he has 450 beef and milk cattle. “I just took over my parents’ farm. But by the end of the year, there’s almost no money left in the accounts because of these falling prices.”

Mr. Lambillotte, who was driving his tractor up Rue Belliard, one of the main thoroughfares that crisscross Brussels, said Russia’s import ban “may have aggravated the situation, but it’s not the main problem.”

Arnaud Sauvage, 27, who drove his tractor from Filot, Belgium, where his mother and father run a farm with 90 cows, said there was “so much milk on the market that we are selling for less than it costs.”

Mr. Sauvage was driving his tractor in a noisy convoy through Square Ambiorix, a well-heeled Brussels neighborhood dotted with grand townhouses built at the turn of the last century.

Agriculture ministers gathered on Monday to consider proposals by the European Commission to relieve the situation. The goal was to get “upward pressure on price,” Simon Coveney, Ireland’s minister of agriculture, told reporters. But there were no expectations of price increases until next year, he added.

Jyrki Katainen, a vice president of the European Commission, said the plan would help farmers with cash-flow difficulties by providing new funding to national governments and by making advance payments from existing subsidy programs. He also said the plan was intended to halt price decreases by temporarily removing from the market quantities of products like skimmed milk, butter, cheese and pork, and putting them into storage.

Mr. Katainen said he would increase the amount of money set aside to promote European farm products in China and other export markets.