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French press review 22 July 2015

There's not a Greek to be seen on a French front page this morning. The space is almost entirely occupied by angry farmers. Libération gives the honours to a smiling pig for whom the dispute over the price of beef and pork represents at least a temporary reprieve.

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It is clear that French meat producers are unhappy.

Communist L'Humanité quotes one farmer as saying those in the sector can no longer live on the tiny profits they make raising cattle and pigs for French supermarkets.

Le Monde focuses on efforts by President François Hollande to appease the protesters who are once again blocking roads in western France this morning.

Right-wing Le Figaro says the protests have shaken the government. The conservative paper laments the lack of foresight which has allowed this crisis to build to the point where 22,000 French farmers are on the verge of bankruptcy.

Le Figaro accepts that the market for meat has shrunk, that competition has increased. But the conservative paper accuses the Socialist government of adding ridiculous norms and obigations to the burden of producers, simply to keep the ecologists off government backs.

Germany allegedly produces meat more cheaply because German farmers make use of cheap labour imported from Poland. France, says the Le Figaro editorial, should campaign for an end to such labour imports, completely legal under existing European law.

Emergency measures are all very fine, concludes Le Figaro, but they do nothing to address the underlying problems facing French agriculture.

Le Monde's editorial is devoted to the extraordinary silence with which the world has reacted to the slow torment of Yemen, a poor, nearly insignificant nation caught in the conflicts currently ravaging the Middle East.

With a million internal refugees, bombing raids on urban areas, a bewildering network of chiefs and factions, this territory at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula offers strategic dominance of the narrow strait linking the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, vital for the export of much of the region's crude oil. Says Le Monde, only the currently modest casualty toll - 3,000 dead, 10,000 injured over the past four months - distinguishes the conflict in Yemen from that in Syria.

Very broadly speaking, former president Ali Abdallah Saleh, with the support of Houthi militia and elements of the national army, is fighting forces loyal to more recent president Abd Rabo Mansour Hadi, who has the advantage of support from a regional coalition headed by Saudi Arabia.

The Houthis may be fighting a proxy war for Iran; the Saudis do not want to see their crude oil, already worth half what it was 18 months ago, arrive on the world market with additional transport costs.

Yemen's 25 million people are caught in that clash, with Al Qaida, the Islamic State armed group and other jihadist operations profiting from the general confusion to add their own layer of mayhem.

Since Washington doesn't want to further offend its Saudi allies, still reeling from the recent Iranian nuclear deal, the US has decided to leave Yemen to its fate. According to Le Monde, we, the world's media, with worse and more news-worthy horror stories to report, have done exactly the same.

On its inside pages, Le Monde suggests that this week's trial on war crimes charges of Chadian former dictator, Hissène Habré, has at least helped to strengthen justice in Africa.

The drama in a courtroom in Dakar, where Senegalese and Burkinabé judges are trying a fellow African, is probably not over yet. But at least it's all happening in Africa, not in Belgium or Holland.

And, even if the African Union court still has to prove its efficiency, at least it represents a potential alternative to the Hague-based ICC and constitutes another link in the chain intended to remind dictators everywhere that impunity from justice is increasingly difficult to ensure.

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