This Monday, January 31, expect to cross your path, in the streets of Nîmes, angry farmers. They meet at 8 a.m. at the Mas des Agriculteurs, before driving around town with tractors and cars for a journey that should end on avenue Feuchères in front of the prefecture. The call to demonstrate is launched by the FDSEA Gard, the departmental Federation of farmers’ unions. They denounce the agricultural policy of the government.
“We must preserve the agricultural area in our department, in viticulture, arboriculture, market gardening, livestock, field crops… We all eat bread, we drink wine, we all eat meat (or almost) fruits, vegetables, rice. So let’s keep our agricultural land and support our farmers” FDSEA Gard
Their four main demands : the ZNT, zones without treatment; over-administration; the continuous increase in costs and finally the slowness of the State in responding to the massive freeze of last year.
The results, for example, on the question of freezing, according to the FDSEA: for France, this represents 164 million euros paid out of the billion promised by the State. In the Gard: 14 million paid for 250 million losses. 30% of the agricultural surface of the Gard has been frozen, vitrified, even say the farmers, vitrified by the extension of the ZNT. The ZNT, the non-treatment zones, are places where it is forbidden to spread fertilizers, whether natural or chemical, and to spread phytosanitary products, whether chemical or authorized in organic farming. This untreated zone is a strip of 10 to 50 meters along waterways or along houses. The problem denounces Pierre Jauffret, president of the independent winegrowers of the Gard, is that the criteria have changed and that part of the Gard will find itself uncultivable.
The peasant works in his fields or near his animals and a little in his office. But – and this is one of the causes and demands of the demonstration – he now works more and more in his office, to fill out files. “We are over-administered“, they denounce, following the example of Anthony Bafoil, the president of the federation of cooperative cellars of Gard