For the third night in a row, they maintained the barrage.
Since Thursday, angry farmers have been blocking the A64 motorway near Toulouse (Haute-Garonne) to warn of the deterioration of their working conditions.
They are not the only ones.
Elsewhere in France, but also in Germany, Romania and Poland, farmers' demonstrations have increased in recent weeks.
While they already have to deal with soaring production costs and the consequences of the war in Ukraine, the agricultural world has the feeling of being overwhelmed by standards.
European Union, national legislation… Which entity decides what?
Le Parisien takes stock.
A firstly European framework
“The working framework for farmers is first and foremost European,” immediately indicates Nicole Ouvrard, agricultural engineer and deputy director of the Agra agency.
It is defined by the famous common agricultural policy (CAP), provided for in the Treaty of Rome of 1957. Its objective is to regulate prices and guarantee the quantity and quality of European raw materials.
To do this, it conditions certain aid to farmers on the implementation of certain practices.
The CAP has adapted over the years to changes in the economic situation and consumer needs.
In this case, the version which came into force at the start of 2023 and which runs until 2027 subjects the payment of aid to the implementation of more ecological practices.
“All the reforms of the CAP since 1992 have been made with the objective of adding environmental constraints, but in this latest version, we have added an additional layer, these are the eco-schemes.
Farmers must use certain well-defined agroecological practices,” continues Nicole Ouvrard.
Among these constraints, she cites: the obligation to have a diversity of crops on its soils, to have a sufficient proportion of permanent meadows or even to cover its soils in winter.
VIDEO.
Anger of farmers: the A64 motorway blocked, actions planned throughout France
Added to this are “constraints on agroecological infrastructure”, such as the obligation to have fallow hedges, but also taking into account the notion of “surface of environmental interest, i.e. leave areas for biodiversity,” continues Nicole Ouvrard.
“There are lots of rules relating to the way they work the land,” she summarizes.
Beyond the CAP, the EU has been working for several years on an ambitious “Green Deal”, which contains around fifty laws to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on a European scale.
Certain laws concern agriculture and food and could add new constraints to farmers.
“There were big ambitions at the start, such as devoting 25% of land to organic farming or halving the use of pesticides.
But the Covid crisis and the war in Ukraine have changed the perception a little and certain texts have been simplified,” assures the deputy director of Agra.
National rules sometimes in contradiction
National legislation comes into play “as soon as we get into the details”, observes Nicole Ouvrard, and adds to or clarifies European standards.
In France, for example, there is the “Egalim” law, resulting from the General States of Food in 2018, which aims “to better distribute value between farmers, agri-food industries and distributors, and to ensure to better take into account the price of the agricultural raw material in the final price,” recalls the expert.
There are also rules which almost fall under national jurisdiction.
This is the case with the question of water reserves and irrigation.
“There are national regulations, but there are also decisions that take place at the local level, even very local since France is divided into large basin agencies,” she explains.
These questions often give rise to “very open conflicts at the local level between professionals who use water, including farmers, and NGOs and consumer associations”, as was the case in Sainte-Soline. recently.
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Sometimes European and national regulations contradict each other, which can lead to intense debates.
There is the emblematic example of glyphosate or dimethoate a few years ago, since the legislation is not the same at each scale, illustrates Nicole Ouvrard.
More recently, "the fact that the EU is asking farmers to reduce their cattle production to reduce greenhouse gases but on the other hand is asking to keep a significant area of grassland when they could using it to do something else is completely contradictory,” she comments.
This is also one of the reasons why farmers regularly call
“more coherence between national and European public policies”.