A meeting planned for Tuesday at the Elysée with the main agricultural union was “
postponed
”, announced Saturday evening the president of the FNSEA Arnaud Rousseau, according to whom “
the conditions to emerge from the agricultural crisis are not met
”.
“
Holding the unions this responsibility demonstrates the gap between declarations and actions
,” adds the union leader in a post on X (formerly Twitter) about the postponement of the meeting.
It targets in particular comments reported by the press, according to which the public authorities have castigated “unions
incapable of agreeing on 4 or 5 strong measures
”.
The FNSEA insists on all of its 62 requests and wants them all to be taken into account.
They were formulated after the major peasant protest movement which took place at the end of January and beginning of February, before and during the agricultural show in Paris.
“
We are waiting for the implementation of Gabriel Attal's measures on pensions, water, phytos, breeding, cash flow, simplification... The pace is not there at all
,” explains Arnaud Rousseau.
He nevertheless welcomed the “
advances
” obtained in Brussels, where legislative revisions were proposed on Friday to drastically ease the environmental rules of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) around fallow land, hedges and crop rotations in particular.
Actions continue
The government, in an attempt to appease the anger of the profession, has undertaken several projects.
The protest movement has subsided since the beginning of February but actions are still carried out sporadically and the unions remain demanding.
Faced with the fall in wheat prices, to their lowest level in three and a half years, French cereal producers are calling in particular for the re-establishment of customs duties for cereals imported from Ukraine, through a “
reinforced safeguard mechanism
” mentioned by the President Macron in early February, but not implemented since.
Among the measures under discussion, the government indicated Thursday evening that a draft orientation law for agricultural sovereignty and the renewal of generations in agriculture would be presented to the Council of Ministers on March 29.
The Ministry of Agriculture also launched a series of meetings on Friday on the delicate subject of over-transposition of pesticide standards, of which French farmers consider themselves victims.
The final version of a new strategy for reducing the use of pesticides, Ecophyto, should be presented at the beginning of April, Matignon said this week.