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"When will the farmer take back his place in your heart, citizen?"

2021-04-12T16:26:04.224Z


FIGAROVOX / TRIBUNE - As part of the new common agricultural policy, French breeders risk seeing their income decrease and the price of their nitrogen fertilizers increase under the climate law. The farmer Anne-Cécile Suzanne, urgently calls for a ...


Anne-Cécile Suzanne is a farmer in mixed farming in Orne and a graduate of Sciences Po Paris.

The new Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and our national agricultural strategic plan are being negotiated, to define what our agricultural priorities will be in the years to come.

A halving of aid to suckler cattle breeders is on the table.

Under the climate law, farmers are under the threat of seeing the price of their nitrogen fertilizers increase.

On a daily basis, the farmer is singled out, watched.

He is demonstrating in Clermont, in Normandy.

Dialogue is difficult between three worlds, that of the public decision-maker, that of the citizen, that of the farmer.

The tension mounts, the incomprehension grows whereas, more than ever, the time has come to agree and to think together the solutions to bring for tomorrow.

This forum is therefore intended to be an appeal.

An urgent call to fall back to earth, where life is made, undone and above all is built.

Today, the farmers of France need you, citizen.

Aid from the common agricultural policy is threatened to halve for suckler cattle breeding, while the price of meat is only going down.

These breeders who give birth to their calves, who make them grow up with their mother by releasing them in the spring in the fields.

These rapeseed growers where bees forage, with increasing regulatory and climatic difficulties, these cereal growers who cultivate your wheat, your barley, your oats, and who suffer from unfair international competition even though it is they, on a daily basis, who allow France to have the most sustainable agricultural model in the world.

These farmers in France need you, because the government is abandoning them, once again, in what for many is a final betrayal from which they will not recover.

And that concerns you, citizen, because by abandoning them, it is your mountains, your grove, your soil, your health, your sovereignty, which we sell off at the top.

Livestock is not considered to be a sector particularly penalized by the crisis.

He was not entitled to the solidarity fund during all these past months.

Aid from the common agricultural policy is threatened to halve for suckler cattle breeding, while the price of meat is only going down.

Read also:

"Breeder is looking for a butcher to save French agriculture with her!"

Political support fades, as popular support grows.

Industrialists take profit where it is today, without thinking about tomorrow.

And yet this sector, so vital to France, to its nature, to its culture, to its sovereignty, is already dying.

The closure of restaurants, canteens, it suffers the full force.

Households, confined to their homes, prefer to consume processed meat, already prepared, often imported.

Imports of processed Polish beef therefore jumped 46% at the first containment, while French farms, them, remain struggling to find outlets.

In this third confinement, the blow is only more severe.

The breeders, desperate, sell off their animals, which even at sacrificed prices, do not leave the farms to join their buyers for weeks.

These are 2000 farms giving birth and growing cows and calves which disappear every year, it is an entire generation of passionate farmers that we cannot renew.

The increase in raw materials, likewise, increases the cost of fodder feed.

Wheat and corn are 20% more expensive than last year, without farmers being able to do anything about it, without being able to charge this increase in cost to the prices paid to them.

The fodder harvested, due to the summer drought, is often insufficient to finish this winter which lasts.

Straw is selling at a gold price, 30% to 40% above its normal price, while the decline in the French cereal harvest was historic in 2020.

Field crops, oilseeds, cereals, are subject to increasing environmental and social constraints.

We criticize synthetic fertilizers, such as ammonitrate, and we criticize breeding as a source of organic fertilizer, to be sure that we have no solution to offer to the French farmer.

We no longer want glyphosate, thereby rejecting soil conservation agriculture which is dependent on it, but we no longer want plowing, to protect biodiversity.

We only want organic, but we want to eat a lot, and especially not to pay too much.

We don't want anything, and we want everything at the same time and like that, we don't move forward.

The reason is simple.

Of course, protecting the climate, biodiversity, our social protection, is absolutely essential.

But this has a cost and therefore a price to pay!

Who's next?

Read also:

“Let's not forget that our farmers are also on the front line!”

Farm income is only going down, the CAP with it, the farmer can no longer do it.

The citizen, in the midst of an economic crisis, will not accept to see the price of his food increase.

The French public debt ratio reaches 120% of GDP, the coffers are empty.

So who?

No one in reality finances our great agricultural ambitions.

Here it is, our dead end, the one that we have not been able to overcome for twenty years.

So the French farmer grits his teeth, but it is 2000 farms giving birth and growing cows and calves that disappear every year, it is an entire generation of passionate farmers that we cannot renew.

As passionate men and women cease to make a living from this profession, it is the summer pastures that are locked up under a thick layer of thorns.

These are the wetlands that cease to exist to be drained.

It is the flowers and plants, discreet but essential to our biodiversity that are threatened.

It is the farms that become silent as the barns have emptied.

It is our dependence on imported fertilizers that is growing, it is our competitiveness that is being massacred, it is entire varieties of crops that are being abandoned.

It is your health that is in danger, while we import hormone beef, contaminated sesame.

It is high time for politicians to start assuming the power they deserve, instead of letting what makes France sink and die in their hands.

When will the farmer take back his place in your heart, citizen?

Will we have to wait until the meadows and summer pastures have completely disappeared?

That half of the breeders hanged themselves?

When will you understand that to have biodiversity in France, you need busy cows to graze?

When will you understand that French agriculture is not the one we see in the movies, but that it is admired everywhere in the open air where we want to watch?

When will you understand that what we put in the fields is not poison and that each farmer is willing to improve even further, as long as it allows him to live, sustainably, from his profession?

When will you understand that the common agricultural policy, it is you who decides it, when you leave the supermarket, the greengrocer, the butcher, and that the worst you can do is claim without considering its feasibility?

There are times when taking the pen to write a tribune becomes painful, so many mistakes are repeated, resolutely, year after year.

There are times when impatience takes hold, when faced with so much misery, the elected officials answer us "

they just have to leave the animals in the meadows, they just have to stop treating!"

".

Times when it all comes down to a “

what's the point

?”.

It is in these moments that we feel that it is high time that the political leaders begin to assume the power which is due to them, instead of letting what makes France sink and die in their hands.

It is in these moments that we say to ourselves that no, resolutely, we must not let go and that we must resist, because collectively, with you, citizen, we will be able to defend what is essential to the construction of the world. of tomorrow.

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2021-04-12

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