What a strange country as ours where we announce the Monday, as the shortage looms, it is necessary to support the peasant world, and where it dictates to farmers, the Tuesday, because the environmentalists are lying in ambush, their way of producing.
Because the head of the State, to pay homage to the " second line ", has chosen to go to a serriste finistérien producing tomatoes off the ground, the national Federation of organic farming (Fnab) is quick to denounce " the total absence of ecological vision of the Elysium ". The Fnab which, you will recall, argued a few months ago for the production of tomatoes bio French is prohibited under heated greenhouses. As a result, no more organic tomato may not be marketed in our country before the 1st of may if it has been produced in this manner. During this time, we import tomato hollandaise heated pool and, of course, tomatoes from Spain or the smic monthly 1 108 euros against 1 539 this side of the Pyrenees. It is further clarified that 60 % of the tomatoes imported (in value) come from Morocco, where the minimum wage monthly in the agricultural sector is € 179... Or how, in turn, the speech of the less-telling technique encourages the importation of the least-called social.
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tomatoes organic account for 5 % of the national market
close again this parenthesis and return to the presidential visit is criticized by environmentalists and the press who regularly serves as a tribune. We produce today 520 000 tonnes of tomatoes in France and we import nearly as much. Does one point said that he had to regain food sovereignty ? A-t-on ways to feed this country with the bio, which should represent, for the production of tomatoes, about 5 % of the national market ? Why criticize a production model, the one crop off the ground, let alone using no pesticide, so that it is able to meet 50 % of national demand ?
Why criticize the move as a president of the Republic when he visits farmers who still have the courage to fight against the distortions of europeans, who still have the courage to invest, maintain an induction of economic and social, to respond to the needs of the market, adapting to the context of health at the moment ?
In effect, it is necessary to know what one wants in terms of the " day after ". Idealizing a form of diy that will make us even more dependent on the import. Or support the all production sectors, because we need an agriculture that is united and diverse at the same time. This type of agriculture that should be able to answer quantitatively, qualitatively, but also economically to the various components of the national market, taking into account the vast majority who do not have the means to eat organic and who should have access to productions that offers conventional agriculture. And this, while the consumer dreads is currently an inflation in the price of agro-food. The "visionaries of ecology" who want to direct the new consumer trends should, however, know that the paradise willful, did not exist in those who do not have the means to access them. A concept that should include those that derive red cannon balls on the agriculture. A notion that we were a few to predict, even before the crisis of the Covid, when we were talking about the disorders that could give rise to the risk of food shortages in the event of a pandemic, uplift social, blocking road or a major health problem on the productions.
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When the plates will ring hollow, and that it will take, to fill, to beg some lands just as far away that uncontrollable, then we will see whether or not to listen to those who are doing everything to impose a change of agricultural model. In spite of the good sense, in spite of the coefficients of economic, in spite of demographic changes.
Jean-Paul Pelras is a writer, former trade unionist and agricultural journalist. Editor-in-chief of the newspaper "Agri" of Pyrenees-Orientales and the Aude, he is the author of twenty essays, stories and novels, winner of Mediterranean prize in Roussillon for "A murder to memory" and the price Alfred Sauvy to " The Old Boy ". His latest book, " The Journalist and the Farmer ", was published by editions Talaia in November 2018.
