“We want to see what changes on our farms.” The president of the majority union FNSEA warned, Tuesday February 13, that farmers were “ready to go back into action” if the concrete measures expected from the government were not there by the Agricultural Show, which will be held from February 24 to March 3. “When the government tells us ‘We are going to work on a major breeding plan between now and the Show’ and 15 days later, we have no news… If within 10 days there should not be this in-depth work, this software change, we would be ready to take action again”, insisted Arnaud Rousseau. Follow our live stream.
The unions received at Matignon and the Elysée. Gabriel Attal meets representatives of the FNSEA and Young Farmers in Matignon on Tuesday, in the company of the Minister of Agriculture Marc Fesneau and the new delegate minister, Agnès Pannier-Runacher. For his part, Emmanuel Macron will receive the Rural Coordination and the Peasant Confederation on Wednesday, before the FNSEA and the Young Farmers “next week”specified the Elysée.
Brussels adopts exemption from fallow obligations. The European Commission has adopted for the year 2024 a partial exemption from the fallow obligations provided for by the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), a key demand of recent agricultural protests. To receive CAP aid, farmers will now have to leave at least 4% of arable land in intermediate or nitrogen-fixing crops (lentils, peas, etc.) and no longer just in fallow and non-productive areas (hedges). , groves, ponds…). This threshold has also been lowered compared to 7% initially proposed at the end of January.
NGOs leave a meeting on pesticides. Eight environmental NGOs announced that they had left a meeting on the Ecophyto plan, which was held at the Ministry of Agriculture. This plan, which aims to halve the use of pesticides by 2030 (compared to 2015-2017), was suspended by Gabriel Attal. A decision which satisfied the majority agricultural unions and dismayed environmental associations.