Grandstand. As the International Agricultural Show opens its doors on Saturday February 26 for a week, we, agricultural, environmental protection and international solidarity organizations, are addressing the candidates for the presidential election who have planned to scroll through it: faced with an agricultural and food system that is out of breath, inaction of complacency or technological headlong rush are not adequate responses.
We call for a radical transformation of policies, essential to claim a desirable future for peasants and citizens, in France and throughout the world. The current agricultural system has caused social and economic drama: the number of farmers and farms has collapsed while the economic pressure weighs heavily on the shoulders of those who remain.
Constantly pushed into a frantic race for overproduction, expansion, and over-indebtedness, farmers are subject to fierce competition on international markets to produce ever cheaper. Increasingly dependent on agro-industrial multinationals, they are now struggling to make a decent living from their activity. At the other end of the chain, more and more consumers are faced with food insecurity.
An inability to change course
The right to chosen, sufficient and healthy food for all citizens is constantly violated. The situation is hardly more satisfactory from an environmental point of view. The industrialization of animal production, also a source of many excesses in terms of animal welfare, contributes massively, among other things, to the proliferation of green algae, climate change, the collapse of biodiversity and deforestation.
The extreme simplification of plant production and the cerealization of entire territories are also the cause of serious environmental degradation. In spite of this disaster, the governments follow one another and persist in the way of the industrialization and the liberalization of our agriculture.
Unable to assume a real change of course, the government team favors, in its last choices, practices that target short-term profit, to the detriment of the smallest and most diversified farms, the environment and citizens. . The year 2021 alone was marked by four glaring failures by this government: the fiasco of the attempt to control prices, the return of neonicotinoids, the postponement of the release of glyphosate and a national version of the agricultural policy. municipality (CAP) catastrophic both for agricultural employment and for the environment.
You have 58.37% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.