INTERVIEW
Should our agriculture change models? This is one of the debates of the year in the spans of the Paris Agricultural Show. The use of the common agricultural policy, the CAP, is notably discussed in a vast national debate, called "ImPACtons", which should last three months. For the Confédération paysanne, the third union representing farmers in France, and NGOs such as Oxfam, Les Amis de la Terre or Greenpeace, public aid must be cut for industrial agriculture.
>> READ ALSO - NARRATIVE - "Yellow Jackets" and agricultural malaise: the day of the Macron Agricultural Show
At the microphone of Europe 1, Nicolas Girod, spokesperson for the Peasant Confederation, justifies this position and considers that "this is the time to reorient the agricultural model and to say that CAP aid must mainly go to transition agricultural and food and go to the active peasants who will allow this transition there ".
"Linking the social emergency and the climate emergency"
Asked about the attractiveness of the farming profession, while half of them will retire in the next ten years, Nicolas Girod wants to be confident. "For us, the challenge is to link the social emergency with the ecological and climatic emergency by saying that if tomorrow we want to respond to these food and climate challenges, we will not need 200,000 managers, but a million peasants" , he explains. "This is the direction that the future common agricultural policy must give by allowing the attractiveness of the farming profession and seeing how we manage to relocate our production and our transformation to rural territories [...] It seems to us that action is still largely possible. "
>> Watch Matthieu Belliard's morning show in replay and in podcast here
Another lever for action: the mindset of consumers. While the time is rather agri-bashing, Nicolas Girod recognizes that the links with consumers "have sometimes been strained". "But this is also the challenge of this plan: managing to bring agricultural unions into discussion, but also salaried unions and agricultural training to cultivate living together on our territory that will allow us to respond to all of these issues. "