Several thousand apple trees were ransacked overnight from Thursday to Friday in the orchard of a Tarn farmer in conflict with environmental organizations, AFP learned from the Castres prosecutor’s office, but no claim was made. The Castres prosecutor’s office opened an investigation for “damage in a meeting”, considering that the extent of the damage was such that it could not have been carried out by a single individual.
The damage was observed on three hectares, according to the prefecture, while the prosecution specifies that a count of the number of trees concerned is in progress. The manager of this orchard located in the town of Lavaur has been in conflict with local environmental organizations for around two years: in April 2021, he had lit brazier fires to protect his trees from frost and the fumes had intoxicated around twenty residents. , leading to a mobilization and a complaint from the mayor Les Républicains, Bernard Carayon.
Saturday, July 1, a rally had again taken place in Lavaur at the call of the Vrais Nature Environnement (VNE) collective to denounce the downgrading of certain organic plots of the orchard, believing that the fruit grower was thus returning “to all chemicals”.
Save the fruits and vegetables of France
Mayor Bernard Carayon maintains that this demonstration has “a direct link” with the uprooting of apple tree scions. “We know that it comes from some of the demonstrators,” he assured AFP, regretting “an obsession of radical environmental activists for a year against these orchards”.
An accusation taken up in particular by the collective Save the fruits and vegetables of France, which brings together market gardeners and arboriculturists. “It is time to make these environmental activists pay every euro of the damage suffered”, indicated the collective on Twitter.
“It is not an action that has been taken by the association, it is not our modus operandi”, defended Olivier Chollet, one of the representatives of VNE, to AFP. “We deplore this action and it causes us harm, we call for appeasement,” he added.
For its part, the prefecture “strongly condemns this act” but does not make any connection with the demonstration two weeks earlier, any more than the Castres prosecutor’s office, which considers that the elements “do not make it possible to determine” whether environmental activists in are the authors.