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 to be presented next week. To add some regulatory measures – there are still legal issues that need to be raised – let’s give ourselves a few weeks,” he declared during the program “Le Grand Jury” RTL/Paris Première/M6/Le Figaro, specifying that the objective was to see the text debated in Parliament “in the first half of 2024”.
The successive postponements had annoyed the unions
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 ministry 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, a “bachelor agro”, and establish a “France services agriculture” network, a single window or 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, to the Agricultural Show, which will be held from February 24 in Paris. Recognizing the need for a “simplification” of the multitude of standards and regulations imposed on farmers, Marc Fesneau considered that it was necessary to seize the opportunity of this law to “accelerate” on this subject and “give credibility to the public speech.
“Three subjects of simplification”
“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 the rules and stopping the “overtransposition” of 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.