land grabbing
LE MUY (awp/afp) – The Peasant Confederation organized a wild harvest on Sunday morning in an area owned, according to it, by the luxury giant LVMH in La Motte (Var), to protest against “the grabbing of agricultural land” , noted an AFP correspondent.
Two hundred people answered the call of this minority agricultural union and took part in this action on a plot of vines belonging, according to the activists, to Château d’Esclans.
LVMH took control of this 267-hectare estate in 2019, including 74 hectares of AOP Côtes-de-Provence vines, by acquiring 55% of the shares through its subsidiary Moët Hennessy.
“The challenge is to denounce the land grabbing that is taking place today through large companies which sell financial shares to each other and which escape all the tools of regulation and distribution of agricultural land” , noted Sylvain Apostolo, spokesperson for the Confédération paysanne in the Var.
The action took place calmly, under the watchful eye of the gendarmes and the estate’s security guards who did not intervene to stop the harvesting of a few rows of vines. The activists then went nearby to the site of a cellar under construction to squeeze the juice from the harvested grapes.
Activists and sympathizers of the Peasant Confederation, supported by the movement The uprisings of the earth, had come from all over France to take part in this action, including singing songs targeting the leader of LVMH, Bernard Arnault.
“Finding land is very complicated, I spent two years there, there are a lot of things that pass under the eyes of Safer (agricultural land regulatory body, editor’s note) without it being able to do anything and that’s what we’re fighting against, the corporate arrangements mean that sales are made without us being able to regulate them,” said Gwenaëlle Le Bars, a thirty-year-old winegrower based in Saint-Maximin who also denounces the increase the price of land.
“In 2017, in an area where I worked, land was bought for 15,000 euros per hectare, today it is 30,000”, she added, estimating that prices can even reach 120,000 euros per hectare for land classified in Côtes-de-Provence.
“The increase in prices slows down the installation, especially outside the family like me, and even for the transmission it is complicated, the land has taken so much value that at the time of the transmission, the costs to be paid are so enormous that sometimes it is better to sell”, adds the winegrower.
The Confédération paysanne, which fights “against the opacity of the share market”, pleads to “provide the Safer with dedicated financial means, guarantors of their impartiality in the investigation of files”. Because, according to her, in 2019 for example, transactions by purchase of company shares represented only 6.5% of transactions related to agricultural land but nearly 60% of the areas sold.
Asked by AFP, LVHM could not be reached immediately.
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