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”.
Placing this responsibility on the unions 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 Paris agricultural show.
We are waiting for the breakdown of Gabriel Attal’s measures on pensions, water, phytos, lifting, cash flow, simplification… The rhythm is not there at all, details Mr. Rousseau in his post on X.
He nevertheless welcomed the progress made 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.
The French government, in an attempt to appease the anger of the profession, is involved in 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 grain producers are calling in particular for the re-establishment of customs duties for grain imported from Ukraine, through a reinforced safeguard mechanism mentioned by the president. Macron at the beginning of 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 Minister of Agriculture also launched a series of meetings on Friday on the delicate subject of overtransposition of standards in terms of pesticides, 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 indicated this week.