The UFC-Que Choisir, the National Federation of Organic Agriculture and other associations are attacking the High Environmental Value label for deception.
Through Jacques Dupont
© National Association for the Development of HVE Certification
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VS’is a pretty name HVE, a group of words that makes you dream – High Environmental Value – of a better world with cherry blossoms, green plains, clear rivers full of fish… A bit like this “quiet force”, the poster designed by Jacques Séguéla for François Mitterrand’s campaign in 1981. Church, steeple, village for the future president; butterfly, sun, farmhouse, fruit trees, well kept fields for the HVE logo. All this is deception, say in chorus the associations which demand its prohibition before the Council of State.
For many consumers, argue its detractors, HVE creates confusion with AB, the organic label that is much more demanding in terms of the environment. Created about ten years ago in the wake of the 2007 Grenelle de l’Environnement, HVE had the ambition to attract the agricultural world who wanted to engage in a sustainable mode of production without committing in organic.
From the start, one could detect an embryo of confusion. Was it a gateway to organic, a step in short defined in time, or a kind of “red label” where the applicant would settle permanently? Depending on whether one sides with the first hypothesis or the second, the look is different. In the first case, it is understandable that the Ministries of Agriculture and Ecology at the time deliberately chose to validate a fairly lax content so as not to frighten those concerned. In the case of the second hypothesis, the laxity in question is indeed an artifice, not to say a deception.
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HVE, the points label
The label was issued after obtaining a certain number of points in four sectors: biodiversity, phytosanitary strategy, management of fertilization and water resources. Said like that, the case seems reasonable, but on examining the requirements more closely, we realize that it is quite inspired by the school system and the calculation of averages: the planting of a hedge, for example, will add points in biodiversity if elsewhere in this same sector we are not really at the top. While an AB label, framed by very strict regulations, requires performance everywhere and for everything, HVE makes it possible to “compensate”. From there to conclude that it encourages tinkering, there is only a small step, taken by the various associations which have seized the Council of State. More seriously, in its original version, HVE does not prohibit the use of CMR-type phytosanitary products (carcinogenic, mutagenic and toxic to reproduction substances) even if their non-use earns points…
In autumn 2022, a new version of HVE was released, more demanding but still with this compensation system. For example, adopting a few beehives or insect houses adds biodiversity points. But on the one hand, the readability of this new “contract” with nature is strongly contested by a certain number of label holders who see part of their efforts devalued due to a more restrictive scale. On the other hand, and this is what annoys the bios, it is hardly more restrictive as regards the use of certain phytosanitary products and non-natural fertilisers.
READ ALSOThe prof on the loose – Is your wine atramentary?A somewhat heartbreaking story. It would undoubtedly have been possible in each wine-growing area to make the HVE label a little more restrictive for producers, but also more rewarding and more understandable for consumers. Instead, to spare the ecologist goat and the “conventional” cabbage, we created a new gas factory, an administrative product that no one understands much anymore and the passage before the Council of State, regardless of the verdict, will not reassure consumers. Which, at first, seemed the purpose of the maneuver.