Awaited for more than a year, the draft orientation law on agriculture, placed under the sign of “food sovereignty” and intended for “renewal of generations”, arrives on Wednesday in the Council of Ministers, for a hoped-for adoption in the summer. Reworked after the agricultural crisis which shook France, to take into account certain demands of farmers, who are drowning in red tape and sometimes reluctant to comply with certain environmental standards, this text comes at the end of a stormy political sequence.
After numerous meetings with the unions, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal announced more than 400 million euros in emergency aid and opened work on 62 then 67 “commitments”, placing agriculture “above everything “. That hadn’t been enough. Booed at the Salon de l’Agriculture, President Emmanuel Macron finally acceded to a strong demand from the majority union FNSEA, affirming the “major general interest” nature of agriculture in the law.
This is the subject of the first article of this new law, which makes food sovereignty “a structuring objective” of public policies.
Food and agricultural sovereignty
Agricultural sovereignty is defined as linked to “sustainable biomass production” and “decarbonization of the economy” and food sovereignty as France’s capacity to ensure its “food supply”. The government will submit an annual report to Parliament on the subject.
This text aims to provide a simplified framework of action for the agricultural world to meet two major challenges: attracting workers – it does not, however, give any quantified objective, recalling that a third of farmers will be able to retire within ten years – and adapt production systems to climate change. By aggregating questions of training, measures on hedges or the valorization of “wool by-products”, it remains qualified by many as a “catch-all”.
The FNSEA regrets a lack of ambition on competitiveness and expects numerous amendments in Parliament. The Peasant Confederation, the 3rd agricultural union heir to the anti-globalization struggles, deplores a “diversion of meaning” of food sovereignty, which for it is not linked to production capacity or the trade balance but corresponds to the freedom of a country to choose its food system.
Training and facilities
The text, since its first versions, contains the creation of a new bac+3 level diploma, a “bachelor agro”, and the establishment of a “France services agriculture” network – a single window or entry point for applicants for installation under the aegis of the chambers of agriculture. It also establishes the principle that each schoolchild benefits from at least one “action to discover agriculture”, such as a farm visit.
Accelerate irrigation and livestock projects
The government had committed to granting a “presumption of emergency” in the event of litigation surrounding the construction of a water reserve for irrigation. Objective of the executive: reduce procedural delays and “purify the litigation in less than ten months”. This “presumption of emergency” will also concern livestock building projects, including “certain installations classified as agricultural environmental protection”, which concerns for example large pig and chicken farms which are the subject of authorization from state services due to their potential environmental impact.
Fewer penalties for environmental damage
The government wants to adapt the scale of penalties and replace criminal sanctions with administrative sanctions in certain cases of damage to the environment or biodiversity. “We are not going to send a farmer to prison because he trimmed his hedge at the wrong time,” summarized the Minister of Agriculture Marc Fesneau, deeming it more relevant to establish ecological restoration obligations. The text must also contain “a provision on herd protection dogs”: breeders ask to be relieved of criminal and civil liability in the event of litigation, for example if a dog has bitten a walker.
A “unique” regulation on hedges
The FNSEA estimated that the main obstacle to planting hedges was administrative red tape, with “14 different regulations”. This “corpus” will be unified in a “single regulation”. The text must affirm the prohibition of the destruction of a hedge while providing conditions for derogation from this principle (replanting for example).