Erwan Le Méné is president and co-founder of EcoTree, European leader in Nature-based Solutions.
After several weeks of strong discontent and a week of strong tensions and intense mobilization of farmers, the government gave in, accepting a “pause” of the pesticide reduction plan and most of the farmers' grievances brought by the FNSEA and Young Farmers.
They cited the administrative burden and the accumulation of French and European standards and laws which prevent them from working.
It is not a business leader who will contradict them on this point.
But if punitive ecology has always seemed contrary to the interests of ecology, there must be no question of suddenly changing gear to deny the climate crisis which is affecting us head-on.
The crisis is always a moment of resolution of conflicts that have reached their climax.
Let us seize this moment to sort things out, rationally, scientifically.
The farmers have won a battle but the final victory must be that of life.
Also read: “At a time of climate change, foresters are more essential than ever”
Ecology does not belong to any party, to any political sensibility.
It is etymologically the language, the science, the deployment of the house, of the habitat, that is to say what is specific to each of us and at the same time common to all.
This is why it is a subject that must be discussed by law and politics, under the light of science and reason.
Treating the proponents of respect for soil, water and air as Khmer greens and bracing against a punitive ecology is no longer able to help us adopt a common position on what it It is appropriate to do anything other than sabotage agricultural or forestry machines, build ZADs all over the field or uproot crops.
Let each side scream at the hysterical madness of the other will not advance anything.
However, we must move forward, and quickly.
Because the crisis we are going through is unprecedented.
Farmers are going through a crisis that began after the war.
So to speak, they are at the end of it.
But they are not the only ones.
To tell the truth, an entire model of society is in crisis and requires us to reconsider our relationship to life.
In the fields of Europe, we have lost 800 million birds (60% of the population) in some forty years, according to a study carried out by the CNRS and cited by the LPO.
Erwan Le Méné
Since the debate will only advance by feeding it with facts, let's take some figures.
The French forest area has never been so large, for several reasons: agricultural abandonment, rural exodus, change in our way of life (wood is no longer a basic necessity), but also voluntarism of the State since the end of the 19th century.
However, in recent years, the forest inventory carried out by the IGN notes a slowdown in the biological production of trees, so much so that we could fear that forests will no longer, in the long term, be sinks but rather sources of carbon emissions.
Because of a mode of silviculture which has not promoted the resilience of ecosystems by resorting too systematically to monoculture and clear-cutting, we have initiated the conditions for the rapid development of diseases and pests which, combined with Periods of drought and repeated extreme heat are detrimental to the good health of forests.
In the fields of Europe, we have lost 800 million birds (60% of the population) in some forty years, according to a study carried out by the CNRS and cited by the LPO.
We understand that if birds disappear, the entire food chain collapses.
Why are birds disappearing?
On the one hand because the consolidation policy which, having caused the disappearance of 70% of bocage hedges since 1950 and almost the same proportion of wetlands, has largely worked to destroy bird habitat.
On the other hand, because the insect population has collapsed dramatically in recent decades.
The National Museum of Natural History puts forward the figure of 70 to 80% of insect populations having decreased in mixed agro-industrial European landscapes.
However, most birds feed on insects.
But we also need these insects to feed us.
Not to eat them directly as a substitute for meat, but because they pollinate nearly 75% of the plants grown for our food.
However, what kills them are essentially the phytosanitary products dumped for agriculture.
Already in 2020, the reinsurer Swiss Re estimated that with the decline of biodiversity, the ecosystems of a fifth of the world's countries were threatened with collapse.
Erwan Le Méné
Certainly, farmers have plenty to revolt about, since they are the first victims of this productivist system which requires them to produce ever more at ever lower costs with ever more regulation.
They are trapped in an infernal spiral, in addition to the international and often unfair competition that affects them.
But it is not by continuing to use so much glyphosate and other phytosanitary products on which France is very dependent that they will solve the problems facing us today.
The question of what we are going to leave to future generations crystallizes many tensions and even gives rise to a philosophical debate.
However, it seems to us that the question is not there.
It is not the following generations who are in danger but ours.
Given the speed at which things are moving, the ecological crisis is hitting us hard.
Faced with increasingly recurring serious climatic events (storms, floods, fires, etc.) due to climate disruption, insurers are increasingly reluctant to insure property.
As of January 1, 2024, around a hundred municipalities had lost their insurers.
But even more serious, it is our food security which is in danger and beyond that, our entire economic system.
Nature has value, that’s our leitmotif.
We call ecosystem services the resources and benefits that it provides “for free”.
In 2022, the OECD estimated them at $140,000 billion, or 1.5 times global GDP.
Thus, we understand that each time we impoverish nature in its complexity and diversity, it is our economy that we endanger.
Ecology and economics are two sides of the same coin and must go hand in hand.
What will businesses gain when we have so depleted the soil and reduced the number of cultivated species that the moribund land no longer produces anything good?
Already in 2020, the reinsurer Swiss Re estimated that with the decline of biodiversity, the ecosystems of a fifth of the world's countries were threatened with collapse.
In a globalized economy, this is a problem that concerns us all.
Hic et nunc
.
This is why if the victory of farmers against Brussels and Matignon is that of conventional agriculture against a profound change in our relationship to the land, it is a Pyrrhic victory.