Niort welcomes from this Tuesday September 21 and for three days the 75th FNSEA congress, the main French agricultural union. Annual congress which was to take place in Deux-Sèvres initially in March 2020 but which was postponed due to the coronavirus. More than a thousand people are expected to the acclameur. The first part of the congress takes place behind closed doors until late Wednesday afternoon. The event ends Thursday, September 23 with the announced arrival of the Minister of Agriculture Julien Denormandie.
During this congress, it will be of the future. How to organize unionism in the years to come? FNSEA is 212,000 members claimed, around 2000 in Deux-Sèvres. A slightly lower figure, “a few dozen fewer memberships every year”, notes Nicolas Touchard, director of the union in the department, in a context he specifies of reduction in farms. The FNSEA, created in 1946, “has changed a lot but we are sometimes still presented as bad productivists”, regrets Christiane Lambert, the president of the union questioned by AFP.
This congress is also an opportunity for the organization to make itself heard in a few months of crucial deadlines, the presidential and legislative elections. The FNSEA should talk about its first proposals.
“Méga-basin tour” Wednesday September 22
The issue of basins and agricultural irrigation will also no doubt be included in the debates, as work on the controversial Sèvre Niortaise basin project started in early September in Mauzé-sur-le-Mignon, in the Poitevin marsh. A mobilization is scheduled for Wednesday September 22 from 12 noon place de la Brèche to the call including Bassines no thank you. In the program : “peasant banquet” followed by a “manif’action, the mega-basins tour”. Opponents of the project want to take advantage of this moment to make themselves heard as well.
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