There are elections without suspense. That of the new president of the National Federation of Farmers’ Unions (FNSEA) is a perfect illustration. Arnaud Rousseau, 49, should take the chair left free by Christiane Lambert, Wednesday March 30, at the end of the congress organized in Angers. Unrivaled, it is true. As obvious. However, he will have to wait until April 13 for his term to officially begin, after the formal vote of the members of the board of directors, responsible for electing the office and its president.
Paradoxically, no one sees Mr. Rousseau as Mr.me Lambert, a pig farmer in Maine-et-Loire, who embodied the FNSEA for six years. All inevitably evoke the filiation with the predecessor of the latter, Xavier Beulin, who died suddenly on February 19, 2017.
The commonalities between the two men are not lacking, in fact, to support the comparison. Both can be defined as cereal growers. Or, to use the accepted terms, field crop producers. Mr. Rousseau thus cultivates rapeseed, wheat, sunflower, beets, corn, barley and field vegetables. Both held the same positions. Mr. Rousseau having conscientiously followed in the footsteps of Mr. Beulin, a figure in agribusiness.
He was first dubbed president of the French Federation of Oilseed and Protein Crop Producers by his mentor. He died just two weeks later. Fate then propelled Mr. Rousseau, the same year, to the presidency of Groupe Avril, left vacant. This armed arm of the rapeseed and sunflower sector in France, created in 1983, has become a powerful agro-industrial firm present in oils, agrofuels, animal nutrition and chemicals. Little known to the general public, except for its brands Lesieur and Puget, it posted, in 2021, a turnover of 6.9 billion euros.
The man sees himself first as a business leader
There the comparison ends. If the takeover of Mr. Rousseau at the head of the FNSEA has a little taste of a return to the past, it also has a strong coloring of a great leap forward. The new strong man of the agricultural union is not, like his mentor, a self-made-man, forced to take over the family farm located in the province, in the Loiret, by stopping his studies. Mr. Rousseau, a graduate of the European Business School, took the time for some professional experience in Paris, before settling in the family business, in Trocy-en-Multien, in Seine-et-Marne, at 28 years. He who had little taste for agricultural studies, however, had to pass an adult professional certificate, as the law requires him to do.
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