“Several complaints” were filed after the blocking, on Saturday March 19, of a train transporting 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, said Sunday, March 20, the prefecture of Morbihan.
“The attack on this train caused the loss of a large tonnage of wheat and heavy financial damage”specifies the prefecture, which “Condemns this act in the strongest possible terms”.
The activists thought they were intercepting a shipment of soybeans
advocating “a peasant agriculture, living, agro-ecological, territorialized, job-creating and remunerative”, around fifty activists, gathered at the call of the Brittany collective against factory farms, blocked on Saturday March 19, in Noyal-Pontivy (Morbihan), a freight train intended for a neighboring animal feed factory, belonging to Sanders, a subsidiary of the Avril group. They say in a statement: “The off-ground system is going straight into the wall, we have to put agribusiness down. »
To do this, they built a concrete block wall across the railway tracks to symbolize “a wall across the tracks of agribusiness. » The activists thought they were intercepting a shipment of soybeans, they explained, when it was wheat.
In an off-ground breeding, without sufficient land around the farm to be able to cultivate and produce the necessary food for the animals, the cattle are fed in particular with imported proteins, including soybean cakes which come in large part from America. from South.
Yannick Jadot: “I do not support this action”
This action elicited many reactions. Late Saturday evening, the Minister of Agriculture, Julien Denormandie, tweeted: “Simply unacceptable! But also totally irresponsible: destroying cereal production when many countries are short of it at the moment… it’s distressing. Justice must pass. »
Simply unacceptable! But also totally irresponsible: destroy cereal production when many… https://t.co/1e1UaQHerI
Sunday, in “Sunday in politics” on France 3, Yannick Jadot also criticized this action: “I do not support actions that today put grain that is needed 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 [Fédération nationale des syndicats d’exploitants agricoles]who decided for this government of our agriculture”said the candidate of Europe Ecology-The Greens for the presidential election, adding: “It’s a problem when government policy is made by lobbies. »
Several sectors of Breton agriculture, France’s leading agricultural region, 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 water pollution. ‘air.