If we had to make a hit parade of a despised profession, farmer would actually come out on top.
To my knowledge, it is the only profession where, in the media, we give voice to a whole bunch of people who have the common characteristic of never having worked on a farm in their life, of knowing nothing about what is happening. passes in France in agricultural matters, in Europe, and even less elsewhere in the World, and who surprisingly declare themselves experts in agricultural practices. I remember with delight the debate where Yannick Jadot, who is nevertheless an intelligent and charming man, wanted to explain neonicotinoids to Christiane Lambert, under the pretext that he knew about them since he came from Aisne, and the response truculent of the president of the FNSEA that she was at the time: “That doesn’t give you a degree in beets”.
We must also salute the resilience of the agricultural world with associations like FrAgTwittos, which have seized the opportunity for direct communication offered by social networks to organize themselves, show their profession, and react to current events.
To my knowledge, it is the only profession treated with such condescension by elected officials, with special mention for the European elected officials who vote “for” on Monday in Brussels and go on TV once they return home to say that they are ” against “. The most cunning combine the art of the empty chair with that of justified abstention, less costly politically than the swimming pool pony. It is not just the elected officials, we must also talk about the big administration, the deep state, all the representatives of the camp of good and virtue who, from the comfort of their office, invent risks that do not exist than in France, creating an overtransposition against which they are nevertheless supposed to fight. This point is important. We have a single market, a common agricultural policy, the free movement of goods and people. This should provide farmers with peace of mind in production and marketing. In France, however, overtransposition, incessant even if it must stop, adds uncertainty.
A French farmer, a European farmer, now, before doing his work, his CAP declarations, must ask himself questions: does he or not have the right to still use this stock of pesticides which remains from his previous campaign? , as product bans follow one another, at a higher rate than that of authorizations of alternative solutions.
The same for fallow areas, if we have less than 30 hectares that's one rule, between 30 and 100 another, with crop rotation formulas which would require our farmers, rather than being trained in agriculture , are at Polytechnique. A farmer must ask himself these questions, and when he goes shopping to see products that have not overcome all these virtuous standards gain space on the shelves and in the shopping carts, with lower price benchmarks. This is how we killed our sheep sector, with the distribution of frozen lamb from New Zealand which created a reference price for consumers that was untenable for our French and European farmers.
To my knowledge, it is the only profession that we are asking to set an example, the rest of the world will follow us, while at the same time we are negotiating trade agreements which not only do not respect the production rules that we ask them, but with a virtual absence of control when the products arrive.
To my knowledge, this is the only profession that is systematically indicted for health problems for which they are only the producers of part of our food, the rest being imported from third countries with different production rules. .
The anger that is exploding at the moment, if it is centered around the signature confirmed before the end of the year of the trade agreement with Mercosur, is indicative of a despair linked mainly to income, but also to uncertainty and the cumulative injustice of all these elements. And I haven't talked to you about the PAC payment delays, even if the situation is improving, the complexity of the thing makes it impossible for farmers to have accurate cash flow forecasts, and of course the banks charge the first day for bank overdrafts.
Mercosur has the potential to permanently kill our poultry, sugar and beef sectors. It is improbable, not to say totally disrespectful, that the content of the agreement is not known by professionals, or even co-constructed with them. The compensation fund is not a good idea. Our millions of farmers know what it means in concrete terms: to fight so that a file can be submitted, to fight with your administration so that a payment takes place. They want to live from feeding us, and from all the positive amenities they bring us.
Curiously, the solution will be European or it will not be. But for this, we must change Europe, so that we do not lose our agriculture, our farmers, our landscapes, our culture.
What is at stake with the forced signing of Mercosur is the survival of a European project to which all Europeans adhere, and not just the electorate of urban bobos for whom agriculture is represented by the series Little House on the Prairie.
Even though as a winegrower in a vintage that will benefit from Mercosur, in light of all this, I am fiercely against it, and I am impatiently waiting for the content of the agreement renegotiated since 2019 to be revealed to farmers. Let's respect them.
