The French Biodiversity Office (OFB) rarely comes to light. The spotlight is often against one’s will, when the tension is maximum. The agricultural crisis confirmed this. In recent weeks, the environmental police have seen their premises sprayed with manure, and some of their officers threatened. Management filed a complaint for each deterioration. Enough to calm the OFB-bashingbashing” denounced by the unions? “The agents felt let down, designated as scapegoats”, complains Véronique Caraco-Giordano, general secretary of the SNE-FSU.
Why, among their demands, do farmers have in their sights these 1,700 civil servants responsible for the management of water resources, natural spaces, hunting and fishing controls… and farms? The farmers consider them abusive. On occasion, they even compare the agents to cowboys. If pedagogy may sometimes have been lacking, appreciation comes up against the test of figures. “There are less than 3,000 annual administrative checks for 390,000 farms. We therefore come back once every one hundred and thirty years. And one check goes badly every two hundred and sixty years, on average. The pressure exerted is low”, notes Olivier Thibault, the general director of the OFB.
No matter: the majority unions – FNSEA in the lead – are demanding a reduction in controls and the disarmament of agents. To defuse the crisis inexpensively, Gabriel Attal went in their direction. “Do you really have to come armed when you come to check a hedge?” he asked himself on January 26 in Haute-Garonne. “Are we asking the gendarmes to go out without weapons?” retorts Véronique Caraco-Giordano.
“The OFB is an easy fuse”
The sentence, to put it mildly, went down badly internally. “He let himself be taken in with his straw bales. The OFB is the easy fuse: we hit it, and we divert attention,” regrets Guillaume Rulin, of the EFA-CGC union. Matignon has increased the number of announcements aimed at farmers, without a word of support for the OFB, which has been asked to keep a low profile. “It was difficult to rationally pose the problem in the middle of the crisis, but dialogue and communication were able to resume at a later stage,” specifies the general director.
Cuddle therapy has been delegated to Christophe Béchu, the Minister of Ecological Transition. During a video with all the agents on February 15, disarmament was no longer a subject. This measure did not appear in the Prime Minister’s announcements on February 21 either. To ease the tension during controls, its services, however, evoke a future agreement between the OFB and the chambers of agriculture. But the latter have already made it known that their signature will be conditional on certain points, including… disarmament.
The OFB, the “totem of incomprehension”
This debate illustrates the way in which the OFB has become “the totem of incomprehension, deplores Olivier Thibault. The agents take all the regulations for granted”. The sociologist Léo Magnin, co-author of Environmental policies under constraints (ed. Rue d’Ulm), agrees: “With few resources, they try to bring about an environmental order that does not exist, and find themselves managing the contradictions between economic and ecological imperatives.”
The Office, above all, is entangled in an intertwining of power relations: it is under the dual supervision of the Ministries of Agriculture and Ecological Transition and, locally, of prefects and prosecutors, depending on the activity of the agents. “The Prime Minister’s announcements were a way of highlighting agricultural unions, the Ministry of Agriculture and the prefects. In short, the conciliation of local, corporatist and political interests, to the detriment of the implementation of the law of the environment”, continues the researcher at the CNRS.
The unions are worried about “a undermined reputation and legitimacy”, as well as a breakdown in trust with farmers, with whom they work on good terms in the majority of cases. For Guillaume Rulin, “the crisis will leave its mark, for them as for us. Ultimately, controls risk being even more tense.”
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