“Several complaints” were filed after the blocking on Saturday of a train carrying cereals intended for the manufacture of animal feed and the dumping on the tracks of part of the cargo, near Pontivy, by about fifty demonstrators opposed to industrial agriculture, the prefecture of Morbihan said on Sunday.
“Several complaints have been filed, it will be up to the judicial authorities to provide the appropriate responses and to characterize the criminal offense of these acts”, indicated the prefecture in a press release. “This act of food waste is scandalous at the very time when France must consolidate its food production capacity in a difficult international context”, considers the institution. “The attack on this train generated the loss of a significant tonnage of wheat and heavy financial damage”, specifies the prefecture, which “condemns this act in the strongest terms”.
They thought they were intercepting soybeans
About fifty activists, gathered at the call of the Collective “Brittany against factory farms”, supported by Extinction Rebellion, blocked Saturday morning, in Noyal-Pontivy (Morbihan), a freight train intended for a nearby food factory for livestock, belonging to Sanders, a subsidiary of the Avril group. The activists thought they were intercepting a shipment of soybeans, they explained, when it was wheat.
These activists built a cinder block wall across the railway tracks to symbolize “a wall across the tracks of agribusiness”, they said.
“The off-ground system is going straight into the wall, we have to put agribusiness down,” they said in a statement.
In off-ground farming, without sufficient land around the farm to be able to cultivate and produce the necessary feed for the animals, the cattle are partly fed with imported proteins, including soybean cakes from South America in particular. South.
The Collective advocates “peasant agriculture, living, agro-ecological, territorialized, job-creating and remunerative”.
“Scandalous”, “unacceptable”…
This action elicited many reactions. Late Saturday evening, the Minister of Agriculture, Julien de Normandie, tweeted: “Simply inadmissible! But also totally irresponsible: destroying cereal production when many countries are lacking it at the moment… it’s distressing. Justice must pass”.
A little earlier in the evening, the Regional Federation of Farmers’ Unions (FRSEA), the Regional Chamber of Agriculture as well as Crédit Agricole and Groupama in particular, had denounced “a scandalous action on the part of activists disconnected from reality and acting against the general interest”, by calling for “a reaction from the State to put an end to acts of all forms calling into question our agriculture”.
Yannick Jadot does not “support” this action
Sunday, in “Sunday in politics” on France 3, Yannick Jadot also criticized this action: “I do not support actions which today put cereals which we need everywhere on the way. I do not support this action. What I wear is a model of food sovereignty. For years and years, politics has been under pressure from the FNSEA (National Federation of Farmers’ Unions) which has decided for this government of our agriculture”, affirmed the EELV presidential candidate, adding: ” It is a problem when government policy is made by lobbies”.
Several sectors of Breton agriculture, the leading agricultural region in France where livestock farming dominates, are going through a deep crisis and inducing negative effects on the environment, whether it is the phenomenon of green algae or the quality of the air.