
Annie Genevard officially took possession of her offices at the Ministry of Agriculture on Monday September 23. In her speech, delivered on the steps of the institution on rue de Varenne, during the transfer of power with her predecessor, Marc Fesneau, she acknowledged arriving “in a particular context”. And to add: “Worry dominates. The expectations are immense, I know. Impatience has been great for months. »
An observation that she should verify during one of her first trips to the field, to the Livestock Summit, which will take place from Tuesday 1er to Friday October 4 in Cournon-d’Auvergne, in Puy-de-Dôme. Unsurprisingly, she should be questioned on the hot issues of this summer.
Epidemics in sheep and cattle farms
Since the beginning of August, bluetongue fever (BCF) has been on the rise in France. A new serotype of this disease, also known as “blue tongue”, serotype 3, has made its first appearance in the North. Then the number of homes affected by this disease spread by biting insects, Culicoides, continued to grow and the affected area expanded. According to data published by the Ministry of Agriculture, on September 20, 2,812 outbreaks were now recorded in a perimeter of twenty-four departments. But a second wave, this time serotype 8, already known in the territory, swept from the South. Knowing that FCO affects cattle but especially sheep, and results in mortality in herds, fertility problems, miscarriages and reduced production.
At the same time, another vector-borne disease, still spread by Culicoides, epizootic hemorrhagic disease (EHD), which first appeared in France a year ago in cattle herds in the South-West, has reappeared.
In this tense health context, the Ministry of Agriculture has announced that it will support voluntary vaccination against serotype 3 in the affected area. An order for 6.4 million doses of vaccine was placed, and then an additional 5.3 million doses were ordered. Vaccination against serotype 8, however, remains the responsibility of breeders, even if the government finally decided, at the end of August, to reimburse the cost of PCR tests.
At the same time, a decision was made to order two million doses against MHE. “We need twenty million”says Patrick Bénézit, president of the National Bovine Federation, who believes that it was necessary to fight to obtain vaccine orders. However, he underlines the interest in financing vaccination rather than losses, when those linked to MHE, in 2023, cost the State nearly 80 million euros. Knowing that the lack of initial support for cattle breeders in the South-West affected by this new disease was one of the sparks of the farmers’ anger which was strongly expressed at the start of the year. Please note, however, that dairy cattle breeders benefit, for the moment, from more remunerative prices and suffer less from the effects of vector-borne diseases than the financially fragile sheep sector. For poultry farmers and pig farmers, the economic situation is also favorable today.
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