The bill on the installation of new farmers, which was to be presented to the Council of Ministers on Wednesday, will be postponed for “a few weeks” to be supplemented with a “simplification” component, against a backdrop of demonstrations, declared Sunday the Minister of Agriculture, Marc Fesneau.
The bill was due to be presented next week. To add some regulatory measures, there are still legal issues that we need to ask, let’s give ourselves a few weeks, he declared during the show Le Grand Jury RTL/Paris Prémire/M6/ Le Figaro, specifying that the objective was to see the text debated in Parliament in the first half of 2024.
Already postponed several times, the law in favor of generational renewal in agriculture is awaited by farmers, at a time when the population of nearly 500,000 farm managers is aging.
The minister estimates that a third of farmers, or 166,000 farmers or co-farmers, will retire in the coming decade.
The bill must in particular create a new bac+3 level diploma, an agro bachelor’s degree, and establish a France agricultural services network, a counter or single entry point for applicants for installation under the aegis of the chambers of agriculture.
The successive postponements of the text, ultimately less ambitious than the agricultural orientation law announced last year, had annoyed the unions, arousing in particular the ire of the powerful FNSEA which had threatened, without rapid progress, to disrupt the visit of the Head of State, Emmanuel Macron, at the Agricultural Show, which will be held from February 24 in Paris.
Recognizing the need to simplify the multitude of standards and regulations imposed on farmers, Marc Fesneau believed that it was necessary to seize the opportunity of this law to accelerate on this subject and give credibility to public discourse.
Instead of taking a few months, we will try to do it in a few weeks, he said, listing three subjects for simplification: the need to shorten administrative deadlines, the simplification of rules and stopping the overtransposition of rules. European standards when it threatens French competitiveness.
Farmers’ demonstrations have been increasing in recent weeks, in France as elsewhere in Europe, against financial charges and environmental standards considered too heavy.