The head of state is wasting time, according to him. The president of the majority agricultural union FNSEA called on Thursday Emmanuel Macron to express his vision for agriculture "without further delay", during the union's 78th annual congress in Dunkirk.
“The President of the Republic seems hesitant to make an appointment, the one he had promised us at the Agricultural Show, believing that the situation was not ripe,” underlined Arnaud Rousseau. “What about the ambition of the head of state? The speech
(of 2017)
of moving upmarket has lived, let him give us his vision without further delay,” he added.
“Stop wasting time”
The head of the FNSEA also called on the government to “regain control of its administration” in order to more quickly implement measures in favor of farmers. “It is unacceptable for a month to pass between a ministerial decision and the dissemination of the instruction to the territorial administrative levels,” he declared before the Minister of Agriculture, Marc Fesneau, who came to the Congress.
“We must now stop wasting time,” he added, also recognizing that “rarely, in the memory of a trade unionist, have so many subjects been opened up so quickly” at the end of a social movement.
“It would not be responsible to say that nothing is moving forward,” noted the president of Young Farmers, Arnaud Gaillot. “No one believed until a few months ago that we would be able to move the lines so quickly at the European level,” he underlined.
Topics “not to let go”
But “there are also still plenty of subjects that we must not let go of,” he added, mentioning in particular water, pesticides and especially how to facilitate the installation of young operators. Maybe some people don't want to farm their entire career, he noted.
The 78th FNSEA congress has been held since Tuesday at the Dunkirk convention center, under the guard of a discreet deployment of law enforcement. The events organized by the majority union are regularly the target of demonstrations by environmental organizations which denounce the model supported by the FNSEA, described as “productivist” to the detriment of nature and deemed unsuitable in the face of climate change.
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During a round table, representatives of several European agricultural unions shared common reasons for dissatisfaction, citing bureaucracy, environmental standards, competition from imported products, the influence of environmentalist lobbies in the upper echelons of power, decisions dictated by “ideology” rather than agronomy.
The revolt of the peasant world in many European countries was born largely from the accumulation of texts "which created among farmers a feeling of regulatory suffocation", thus estimated Christiane Lambert, president of the Committee of Professional Agricultural Organizations of the European Union and former boss of the FNSEA.