MADRID: Police escorted petrol tankers into Barcelona yesterday as a protest strike by thousands of truckers against rising fuel prices caused food and fuel shortages and huge tailbacks on the Spanish-French border.
Tens of thousands of truckers in Spain, France and Portugal are on strike or joining the protests to demand government help to offset the higher fuel costs. French railway workers launched their own stoppage, increasing the transport chaos.
While new talks with trucker representatives were held in Madrid, authorities in northern Spain ordered emergency measures after many petrol stations in the Catalonia region ran out of fuel.
“Twenty tanker trucks escorted by the regional police left an industrial zone this morning for Barcelona port to help supply and distribute to petrol stations in the region,” a regional police spokesman told AFP.
Forty per cent of petrol stations in Catalonia have run out of fuel, according to Manuel Amado, president of the Catalonia Federation of Service Stations.
Police said trucks parked at petrol pumps or on the road after the strike started at midnight on Sunday were stoned and many had their windscreens shattered.
Arrivals of fresh meat, fish and fruit in Madrid have come to a near halt, according to officials at the Mercamadrid market, Spain’s biggest wholesale market. They said that fish would be in short supply from tomorrow but stocks of other foods should last until the end of the week.
Markets in Barcelona were also expected to be in short supply from tomorrow.
Spain’s Association of Car and Truck Makers said four factories had been hit by a shortage in parts because they rely on daily deliveries and that the problems would become severe by today.
The Seat company’s factory at Martorell in northeast Spain has had to cut production since Monday because of the truckers’ strike, a spokesman for the Volkswagen subsidiary told AFP.
About 1,000 cars had been lost to the strike, the official said.
Truckers have stopped lorries from crossing the French-Spain border and caused major tailbacks around major Spanish cities, including Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia.
Spanish and French truckers staged pickets on either side of the frontier between the two countries. They blocked a bridge on the border at Bidassoa in the western Basque region and other main crossing points.
On the French side, service areas on motorways were packed with trucks from the border right back to Bordeaux, about 200km away.
Spain’s second largest hauliers’ union Fenadismer, which claims to represent 70,000 out of Spain’s 380,000 truck drivers, launched an open-ended strike on Monday. It said it was “peaceful” but followed “massively”.
Talks on Monday between the hauliers and the government ended in failure, Fenadismer said.
The Portuguese government said it hoped to have an agreement with its truckers by the end of the week. – AFP
|
