Charles Guyard // Photo credits: Amaury Cornu / Hans Lucas / Hans Lucas via AFP 8:49 a.m., March 18, 2024

A new mobilization of farmers is planned for this Monday, March 18, in Occitanie.

All the farmers in the region are expected in front of the Services and Payments Agency in Balma, near Toulouse, to demand payment of all CAP aid, as promised by Gabriel Attal. 

Help that is long overdue.

This Monday, March 18, farmers from the Occitanie region plan to meet in Balma, near Toulouse, to demonstrate in front of the Services and Payment Agency.

The wait is starting to be untenable for farmers and in particular for professionals in the organic sector who have invested crazy sums in order to make this conversion.

A few hundred kilometers further north, Charles Chevalier, member of an agricultural group in Loire-Atlantique, is exasperated.

“We try to be as resilient as possible. If it’s still the same, next year, it’s over,” declared the latter at the microphone of Europe 1.

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Aid that is slow to arrive

Aid for organic reconversion is still slow to arrive, and for this farmer, more than 60,000 euros are missing.

“We are trying to compensate for the State's failure to pay, we are delaying all the expenses that we can delay. It is our income which is declining first, so it is our families and our children,” reports Charles Chevalier.

While the State has encouraged the switch to organic, the support seems lacking and this is nothing new.

Every year, or almost every year, aid is in fact paid several weeks or even months late.

In Pays de la Loire, there are currently more than 1,200 waiting for payments, like Brice Guyot in Vendée. 

“These are people who have invested in biodiversity, in permanent meadows or in systems by reducing phytosanitary plants who, today, will make choices to stop organic, while behind them, rapid support for them would perhaps make it possible to hold on", insists the farmer from Vendée at the microphone of Europe 1. The practice of organic farming concerns 2.8 million hectares in France, or almost 10% of the surface area.