Rural Coordination continues its mobilization, the prefecture issues an ultimatum

“If we do not have answers from the government, we will attack the property of deputies, ministers and senators. » This Thursday, November 21, 2024 marked the third day of mobilization of farmers from Rural Coordination (CR) in the Landes.

After an introduction to the prefecture, CR 40, reinforced by its colleagues from Lot-et-Garonne, has blocked since Wednesday November 20, 2024 the Scalandes, the logistics platform of the Leclerc group, in Mont-de-Marsan, which centralizes the products of several thousand suppliers and supplies stores in five departments in particular.

Italian radishes

From this same site, a good number of demonstrators joined the fire brigade located next door, where a fire was lit again. A few exchanges of words, some procrastination, to finally decide to create a filter barrier on the departmental 932 just after the roundabout. Objective: to control the trucks and the origin of the goods transported. “Stop that one,” Nicolas says to his fellow farmers. The Spanish trucker cooperates and indicates that he has just loaded “fish guts intended for Spain”.

After more than forty-five minutes of combing through all the trucks, the farmers finally found only two crates of radishes from Italy. “I think that many trucks took another route,” says Nicolas, agricultural worker in Escource. Nevertheless, “yesterday, we checked foie gras labeled Bulgarian, we threw it in the fire,” explains Patrick Franken, first vice-president of the Chamber of Agriculture of Lot-et-Garonne.

Waste at Place Saint-Louis

After returning to the camp for lunch, more than a dozen farmers went to Avenue de Chourié at the beginning of the afternoon with the intention of dumping straw, tires and other waste in front of the house. the French Biodiversity Office. But their project aborted following indications from a local resident: the public establishment “moved”.

In all commotion, the farmers returned to their tractors and headed towards Boulevard d'Alingsas. Without really following a roadmap, they act “piecemeal”. “We are at the end of our tether, we came to lend a hand to the Landes farmers and now, it will also be up to them to show themselves,” says a member of CR 47.

Night is about to fall. The farmers go to Place Saint-Louis to the west of the city and dump various waste in front of the entrance to the Departmental Directorate of Employment, Labor, Solidarity and Population Protection, breaking the sign in the process. glass from this state service.

An ultimatum from the prefecture

The day before, other waste had been dumped in front of the Departmental Directorate of Territories and the Sea (DDTM) and the Mutuelle sociale agricole, an organization whose walls were also tagged. In a press release, the prefect Françoise Tahéri indicated that she “strongly condemned the damage committed” and announced that she was going to “file a complaint against the Rural Coordination”.

Asked about the subject, Patrick Franken reacted: “In any demonstration, there is collateral damage. I consider that the start of a fire at the DDTM – we are not in the enclosure – is part of the union actions which can sometimes boil over, because the farmers are exasperated. Despite our nationwide protests last winter, the authorities remain deaf to our demands. They must expect this kind of excess because we are fed up. That's how it is, there is a fire which has been brought under control, there has been no death, there has been no attack by the police, this has never happened at home. We know how to behave. We can't control everything, there is inevitably anger that transpires and it happened that way. »

Concerning the continuation of the movement, the Rural Coordination troops announce that they want to continue their blockade of Scalandes for an indefinite period. But the situation could be resolved this Friday, November 22, since the patience of state services seems to have reached its limits. This Thursday evening, the prefecture gave them an ultimatum: it gave them until Friday evening to leave the premises.