Ifremer celebrates its 40th anniversary in a gloomy atmosphere

The public oceanographic research institute is faced with a historic lack of resources allocated by the State.

Aging fleet, dilapidated premises, salaries among the lowest in research, deteriorating working conditions: the French Research Institute entirely dedicated to knowledge of the ocean (Ifremer) is taking on water, to the point that More and more employees are slamming the door.

This is the case of this engineer who prefers to remain anonymous. He left Ifremer exasperated by the chronic lack of resources: “I began to be faced with the search for funding, having to respond to calls for projects, European or other funding. I had been hired to technically respond to the needs of scientists, not to seek out under to be able to carry out my missions, he said. Now I have moved to a private company. I find myself making the developments that I was looking to make when I arrived.”

This engineer also describes very dilapidated premises. “There was ivy growing in my office, it’s quite amazing.” All for around 2,000 euros net per month, which pushes more and more employees to leave the Institute. Around twenty left in 2022 out of Ifremer’s 1,400 employees. A figure from Franck Jacqueline, representative of the CGT. “We are regularly informed of colleagues who are leaving, quite simply because they believe that they no longer have the necessary conditions to work. So they are throwing in the towel. The establishment is crumbling.”

With a threat to the quality of research and the capacity to carry out the increasingly numerous missions entrusted to Ifremer. “They are waiting for us on a lot of conditions of environmental degradation, like microplastic, pollutants, fish stocks. Making efforts in terms of environmental monitoring in Polynesia, in the Pacific, he lists. We can always do more with less, but up to a certain limit. It is not possible.”

The CGT is therefore demanding more money immediately, in particular to renovate the very aging Ifremer laboratory ships. It’s up to the CEO to get an extension. We would need around ten million euros more per year, explains the boss of Ifremer, François Houllier, in the middle of negotiations with state representatives: “They are the ones who decided that this year it would be a year of the sea, that next year we would have a United Nations conference in Nice on the ocean. So I think that there is a perfect awareness of the importance of the ocean and the role of Ifremer There, we have a certain number of discussions with the State and I hope that this process will allow us to have positive signals in the coming months. .

In the meantime, Ifremer is drawing on its reserves with the risk of payment default from 2026. This is written in black and white in an internal document presented to the board of directors.