Agricultural bill: the government suffers a setback in the National Assembly

The government suffered a setback during the night from Friday to Saturday on a contested article of its agricultural bill, which intends to create “agricultural land investment groups” (GFAI), to, according to it, remove obstacles to the installation new farmers. According to the executive, these groups must make it possible to raise money from public or private investors in order to buy land, and rent it to new farmers, then relieved of the need to finance the purchase. “In the coming five to ten years, a large number of agricultural areas will become free, will change ownership,” insisted the Minister of Agriculture Marc Fesneau, arguing that more and more land was leaving the circle. family, and that the new arrivals were faced with difficulties in financing the purchase of land.

General rapporteur Éric Girardin (Renaissance) called for the creation of a tool to “capture savings and allow this group to buy land and rent it to new settlers”. Faced with the fears raised by the entire opposition and certain Macronist elected officials, he had planned to submit a rewrite of the article to integrate more safeguards, in particular a period of ten years before the group can resell the land, to limit the phenomena of speculation. But the deputies adopted the deletion amendments by 24 votes to 16.

“The priority for land would be to repair deregulation”, declared the socialist deputy Dominique Potier, when the Insoumise Aurélie Trouvé castigated a “scoundrel article” which “aims to kill family farming in favor of capitalist agriculture” . “The French will not understand that private actors, sometimes foreign, invest in agricultural land with the sole aim of profitability,” added environmentalist Lisa Belluco. “We are going to make farmers tenants for life of a production tool that they will no longer own,” judged RN deputy Grégoire de Fournas.

Francis Dubois (LR) and Charles de Courson (Liot) both spoke of their fear of an “increase in the cost of agricultural land”. “There is no intention of the government to deregulate land,” replied the minister, stressing that “the increase in the (price of) land is already existing.” A new rewriting of the article could be proposed for the passage of the text in the hemicycle, expected from May 14.