Spanish farmers join Europe-wide protests.

Hello, you're listening to the Marketplace Morning Report live from the BBC World Service.

I'm Leanna Byrne and a very good morning to you.

Spanish farmers have joined a wave of protests sweeping

across Europe. They're demanding more support from the EU and their government. They're

also saying they're fed up with high costs, red tape and what they call stringent environmental standards.

The BBC's Guy Hedgeco is in Barcelona where tractors are set to block roads and ports.

Spanish farmers are angry about many of the same things that their European counterparts have been angry about in recent weeks, which is mainly EU regulations.

So for example, controls, sanitary controls, environmental controls on their produce, which farmers say creates an enormous amount of red tape for them, makes their life very difficult and pushes costs up.

They also say that the costs of things like fertilizer and fuel is too high.

In Spain they're also angry about countries from outside the European Union

which they say are not subject to the same kinds of sanitary and environmental controls as European farmers.

So for example they say Moroccan farmers are able to skirt those kinds of controls and undercut their produce.

Yeah, a lot of those issues they align with what some of the other farmers are protesting

against across Europe.

What about the protests themselves?

Are we seeing very similar blockades happening?

Yes, I mean they've only just really started in earnest in the last day or so.

We saw a number of towns and cities, mainly across northern Spain, but also across other parts of Spain yesterday,

being occupied by farmers who driving their tractors through these towns and cities.

I was in Randa de Guero, a small town in northern Spain,

and there was several hundred tractors driving through it.

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