As soon as Michel Barnier was appointed to Matignon, farmers warned him: “agriculture must be placed among the immediate priorities of his government”.
After the crisis this winter, when farmers had partly blocked the country, emergency aid was released, but the majority unions deplore the halt to the vote on an agricultural law, left aside in the Senate after the dissolution.
Farmers, including Jérôme Bayle, a leading figure in the angry movement in the agricultural world, are waiting for the new Prime Minister to step in and want the emergency plan negotiated with the former government to be implemented.
“It’s an emergency. We’ve been waiting for two months, the country has been at a complete standstill. We opened a dialogue, made proposals on the future of agriculture to the government,” the farmer explained to BFMTV, from his farm in Montesquieu-Volvestre, in Haute-Garonne.
“If things don’t go well, farmers will mobilize”
Michel Barnier is all the more the focus of expectations as he was Minister of Agriculture between 2007 and 2009, under the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy. “I hope he will create a healthy agriculture but not an extremist one,” adds Jérôme Bayle, meaning one that does not favour large farms and that allows the use of pesticides.
“My farming counterparts in other European countries use products to protect their crops. I can’t do it,” laments Luc Mesbah, cereal grower and general secretary of the FDSEA of Haute-Garonne.
If they are not heard, the agricultural world promises a new mobilization. “If things do not go well with this new government, farmers will mobilize, that’s for sure,” assures Luc Mesbah.
Jérôme Bayle, for his part, predicts a movement “perhaps more structured, organized and of an even greater scale.” “I think it won’t take much for the fire to start again,” he points out.
- BFMTV.com
