The most powerful French agricultural union, which is launching legal proceedings against a town that does not host any farmer?
The FNSEA has just intervened in the fight that Gennevilliers has been waging for several months with a hundred French municipalities, including ten in Ile-de-France, united within a collective of anti-pesticide mayors.
On April 26, the agricultural union seized the administrative court of Cergy-Pontoise (Val-d'Oise), with a request for annulment against a municipal decree taken on March 3 by the mayor of Gennevilliers.
On the same day, the nine other municipalities of Hauts-de-Seine, Seine-Saint-Denis, Seine-et-Marne and Val-de-Marne (Arcueil, Bagneux, Cachan, L'Ile-Saint- Denis, Malakoff, Montfermeil, Nanterre, Savigny-le-Temple and Sceaux), have nevertheless adopted the same measures, relating to “the obligation to eliminate waste from the use of plant protection products or pesticides”.
So why attack this city of Hauts-de-Seine in particular?
“We took Gennevilliers to give an example, but we could have taken another town,” admits Damien Greffin, president of the FNSEA Ile-de-France.
"They defend glyphosate and not the farmers"
After several victories before the administrative courts, in particular that of Cergy-Pontoise, the hundred or so municipalities which had initially issued decrees prohibiting the use of pesticides had failed before the Council of State.
On December 31, 2020, the highest administrative court decided to cancel the orders, considering that the regulation of these substances was the responsibility of the Ministry of Agriculture, under its "special police".
The texts of March 3 enabled the ten municipalities in Ile-de-France to relaunch the dossier, by assimilating plant protection products to waste, the management of which is a municipal competence. This trick has not escaped the FNSEA, however, which defends the use of fertilizers and other chemicals. In its procedure, the union considers that “the intention of the mayor is strictly similar within the framework of the two decrees, which necessarily have the same effects. "
Enough to make Patrice Leclerc, the Communist mayor of Gennevilliers, jump.
"The FNSEA reproached us for our orders because we have no farmers in the city and there, they attack us?
This is proof that they are defending glyphosate and not farmers, the elected official strangles.
They have a conception of agriculture dating from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a conception that is solely productivist, without respect for people and the land.
"
"A procedure is expensive," says the FNSEA
Curiously, Gennevilliers is the only target of the powerful federation.
"We've had enough of agribashing," scolds Damien Greffin.
We believe that the administrative court of Cergy is unfavorable to us, given the first decisions it rendered.
We therefore wanted to put the subject back on the table before this court.
"
The reason is also financial: a procedure is expensive.
"If we had had the means, we would have attacked all the municipalities," adds Damien Greffin.
If the decision of the administrative tribunal is favorable to us, that is what we will do.
What these cities are doing with their bylaws is harassment and political politics.
When we can do without phyto products, we do without.
"
In the meantime, five communes of Hauts-de-Seine have a first meeting at the administrative court of Cergy-Pontoise, Monday, May 10, the prefecture having filed a request for interim relief against the decree of March 3.
Here again, the reactions of the administration vary according to the departments.
In Seine-Saint-Denis, the prefect wrote to the mayors concerned, giving them two months to withdraw their orders. “Yet we all did the same,” comments Patrice Leclerc dubiously. I cannot understand this difference in treatment. "