More than 80 official visits, 3,500 accredited journalists and hundreds of thousands of visitors: the president of the International Agricultural Show, Jean-Luc Poulain, hailed this Sunday, March 3, a “beautiful” 2024 edition of the major event French people with the agricultural world, in the midst of a period of anger in the sector. More than 603,000 participated in this 60th edition, organizers told AFP. In 2022, the year of reunions after the health crisis, the Show welcomed 503,000. The record dates back to 2014, with more than 700,000 people.
Two years after the start of the war in Ukraine and while climatic hazards are weighing on agricultural production, the Show has made it possible to show the expectations of these professions, says Jean-Luc Poulain, himself a farmer in Oise. “What was taken for granted – abundant and inexpensive food – is confronted with a series of constraints: inflation, geopolitics, the climate, which raise the question of France’s food sovereignty,” he said. he assures.
The president of the Chambers of Agriculture, Sébastien Windsor, for his part noted a “particular sensitivity of political leaders this year to the agricultural subject”, with more visits than usual “even though we are not in an electoral period “. This Show took place in a particular context, in the midst of a crisis in the sector. To try to remedy this, more than 400 million euros in emergency measures have been announced by the government. The executive promised a shock of simplification, the strengthening of Egalim laws to protect farmers’ income and placed agriculture at the rank of a “major general interest”. He also promised to ease constraints, particularly environmental ones, at the cost of concessions criticized by NGOs and scientists on pesticides.
“Nothing is over”
For its part, the majority union FNSEA regrets “a missed meeting” with the executive during the Agricultural Show, due to lack of a clear “strategy”, and warns that the mobilization will continue, its leaders indicated this Sunday . “We will continue to have actions on the ground” after the Show because “on the political level, things are clearly not over,” declared the president of the union, Arnaud Rousseau, on BFMTV.
After the government’s promises, farmers are expecting “very concrete achievements” on their farms. And even if the FNSEA does not call for a national mobilization, “each department retains the initiative to be able to take a certain number of actions”, he explained. “The embers are hot”, “nothing is finished”, underlined the union leader.
“We consider that we missed an appointment. We expected from the President of the Republic a strategy and the definition of a course for agriculture”, added to AFP Jérome Despey, first vice-president of the union. While he welcomes Emmanuel Macron’s commitment to recognizing agriculture “as a major general interest of the nation”, he regrets a political message muddled by “verbal jousting and clumsiness”, and a lack of consideration for the “intermediary bodies” that are the unions. When the Elysée, on the eve of the Salon, announced a major debate where it was briefly considered inviting the environmentalist collective Earth Uprisings, it was “provocation” too much for the union.
The FNSEA has taken note of the government’s numerous announcements, “many of which are going in the right direction”, but is awaiting “precise elements” on simplification and competitiveness in particular, before the expected presentation at the end of March of a major orientation law agricultural. Some announcements “are not very clear”, particularly in terms of simplification, said Arnaud Rousseau, who also denounced “a form of cacophony” around the European Green Deal.
“Everything will not be settled”
Friday morning, two days before the closing of an Agricultural Show without clashes except for the first day, Saturday February 24, a surprise action by Rural Coordination at the Arc de Triomphe, in Paris, took place. The same day, in the afternoon, the Ministers of Ecological Transition and Agriculture, Christophe Béchu and Marc Fesneau, were targeted by whistles and egg throwing during their visit to the exhibition center in the Porte de Versailles. At the end of the Show, “Sunday evening, everything will not be settled and everyone knows that,” declared Marc Fesneau on France Bleu Occitanie.
Road blockages have been lifted in the country since the beginning of February and farmers largely took a break during “their” Show, but Friday’s actions illustrate the capacity for initiative of the grassroots of the agricultural movement. At the forefront of the mobilization, alongside the FNSEA, the Young Farmers are also not considering, at this stage, returning to the streets. “We have never broken the dialogue, we must continue to work,” their president, Arnaud Gaillot, told AFP.
For its part, the Confédération paysanne, the third union classified on the left, does not plan “no mobilization in the days to come”, but is not calling for demobilization either, Stéphane Galais, one of of its national secretaries.