The presidential candidates will again pass a great oral whose theme this time will be that of agriculture. A month after the Agricultural Show, several candidates are setting foot in the stirrup this Wednesday by going to Besançon for the FNSEA congress.
At 11 days of the first round, they will be six to speak in front of 1,500 farmers at the initiative of the Council of French Agriculture (Caf) and the main union, the FNSEA. Five of them are expected in Besançon: Valérie Pécresse, Marine Le Pen, Eric Zemmour, Fabien Roussel and Jean Lassalle. Taken by the presidential agenda, with a Defense Council in the morning followed by a Council of Ministers, Emmanuel Macron will address farmers by video.
The food safety file
From short circuits to the withdrawal of free trade agreements, via the total abolition of pesticides, the 12 candidates for the Elysée are teeming with ideas to lend a hand to an agriculture hit by soaring production costs and agricultural raw materials caused by the war in Ukraine.
“We are still feeling the upheavals of the health crisis, and one crisis is now adding to the other”, according to the president of the Caf and the FNSEA, Christiane Lambert. “We thought that food security was no longer a subject (…) but we need a strong paradigm shift and a strong comeback of food sovereignty as a major element of policies”, she pleaded. Most of the candidates defend this objective, which covers different meanings according to their political color and has imposed itself in the public debate in recent weeks.
In Besançon, everyone will present their ideas for about ten minutes, before engaging in a half-hour of questions and answers with the public, made up of the main players in the agricultural world: cooperatives, banks and insurance companies.
Christiane Lambert, on the other hand, “regretted” that Yannick Jadot, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Anne Hidalgo “declined the invitation”. Struggling in the polls, the PS mayor of Paris told the union that she could not go there for scheduling reasons. According to the president of the FNSEA, the environmental candidate would have accepted the invitation before changing his mind. He goes, on the other hand to Margny-sur-Matz, in the Oise, on the theme of rurality, whose mayors have been very solicited by the candidates to obtain the 500 sponsorships and want to make their demands heard in the campaign.