They can no longer stand the successive attacks of avian flu. About twenty breeders and trade union activists occupied, on Thursday morning, the premises of the departmental directorate for the protection of populations (DDPP) in Pau, to protest against the management of these crises.
“We are here because the state has failed, crises follow one another, we have the same causes for the same effects”, denounced Sylvie Colas, national secretary of the Peasant Confederation, an agricultural union which had called for action with its Basque counterpart ELB and Modef. Outside the premises, about thirty supporters and peasants were also present. Trade unionists demand their integration into the decision-making bodies of health directives and demand differentiated protocols between open-air peasant farms and the industrial sector.
The mobilized people asked to meet the prefect on the spot. “Despite this modus operandi, the latter agreed, for the sake of appeasement, to receive a delegation at the end of the afternoon (7 p.m.), in return for a voluntary and immediate evacuation, explains a press release from the prefecture. This proposal having been refused, the representative of the State was forced to evacuate the administrative premises by the police around 12:30 p.m. »
“We have reached the end of a model”
“It is the activity of the long sector, with very dense areas of poultry and confined animals, which makes everything explode”, advances Julen Perez, breeder in the Basque Country and member of the ELB union. “We have reached the end of a model. »
The government confirmed this week that a vaccination campaign against bird flu would not start before the fall, the time to ensure that the operation takes place in good conditions from a health point of view.
At the end of May, the chambers of agriculture of four departments of the South-West as well as the interprofessions of foie gras and lean poultry in the region had called for the deployment of the vaccine this summer to ensure the “survival” of farms, faced with a restart early in the epizootic since May.
On Monday, the ministry reported 85 outbreaks of disease distributed between Gers, Landes and Pyrénées-Atlantiques. The unions estimate that more than a million ducks and poultry were slaughtered in the space of a month.
As of June 7, the ministry had identified 400 outbreaks detected in livestock since the start of the current crisis on August 1, 2022. During the previous one, between August 2021 and May 2022, around 21.8 million animals had been slaughtered in France.