In the midst of a historic drought, nearly 4,000 demonstrators gathered this Saturday in Sainte-Soline, despite the ban from the Deux-Sèvres prefecture, against the project for a new water reserve intended for agricultural irrigation, whose construction began in September.
Divided around 2 p.m. into three processions, the demonstrators very quickly came up against the 1,500 gendarmes deployed to protect the site. The objective of the organizers? “Succeeding in reaching the basin, removing all the grids that protect the site, filling in the beginning of the hole, preventing the resumption of work”, according to a leaflet distributed on the spot. Tear gas was fired. Many demonstrators are, according to France Bleu and France 3, dressed in black and hooded.
The collective “Bassines Non Merci”, which brings together nearly 150 environmental associations, trade unions and anti-capitalist groups opposed to this “grabbing of water” intended for the “agro-industry”, hoped for 10,000 people. According to Julien Le Guet, spokesperson for the collective, more than 2,000 people had already arrived on Friday evening. Some have pitched their tent in the camp set up since Tuesday on the field lent by a peasant, near the site. Most protesters arrived on foot to circumvent traffic restrictions in the area.
The prefect of Deux-Sèvres Emmanuelle Dubée spoke on Friday of around “5,000” demonstrators expected from 10 a.m. in this village of around 350 inhabitants, which has become the new epicenter of an ecological conflict over the use of the water. At the beginning of the week, she banned “any demonstration and crowd” in a dozen municipalities around Sainte-Soline, until Monday morning, to “limit” possible “acts of violence”, she justified Friday, confirming the deployment of 1,500 gendarmes. “These demonstrations presented as festive and educational are degenerating,” she warned, saying that her proposal for an alternative route had not elicited any response from the collective of opponents.
A breach of “the fundamental freedom to demonstrate”
Damage and clashes between gendarmes and demonstrators had marred a previous rally in March, and the authorities fear that opponents of the mega basin will settle permanently, as others had done on the ZAD of Notre-Dame- Lands. A ban on driving and parking for people coming from outside was therefore added on Wednesday. The summary proceedings brought by the CGT and the Solidaires union against the decrees of the prefect were rejected on Friday by the administrative court of Poitiers.
About 200 elected officials, lawyers or professors denounced a breach of “the fundamental freedom to demonstrate” in a column published by Liberation. Among the signatories, elected rebellious or environmentalists such as Mathilde Panot, Clémentine Autain, Alexis Corbière or MEP Yannick Jadot, who is in Sainte-Soline this Saturday, accompanied by Sandrine Rousseau and Lisa Belluco, the EELV deputy for Vienne. “We have to get out of this agriculture which monopolizes water for a few corn farmers”, reproached the former presidential candidate on Twitter. “Their words are agro-industry, productivism and factory farms. Ours are nature, biodiversity, the water cycle, respect, sharing, ”supported the MP for Paris.
The Sainte-Soline reserve is the second of sixteen replacement reserves to be created in the Sèvre Niortaise and the Mignon, in the Deux-Sèvres, the Vienne and the Charente-Maritime, at the heart of a project drawn up by a a group of 400 farmers united in the Coop de l’eau, to “reduce water withdrawals by 70%” in this region, which is still experiencing irrigation restrictions after an extraordinary summer drought.
These open-air craters, covered with a plastic sheet, are filled by pumping water from surface groundwater in winter and can store up to 650,000 m3, the equivalent of 260 Olympic swimming pools. This water is used for irrigation in the summer, when rainfall is less.
Opponents denounce “mega basins” reserved for large export-oriented grain farms and defend the implementation of other measures to better share and preserve water.
The Minister of Ecological Transition, Christophe Béchu, estimated this Saturday on France Inter that it was an “alternative”, the time that water consumption drops. “The mobilization is understood in relation to the purpose” but “as we speak, in half of the departments of France, we have situations of drought”, he said. Recalling that agriculture consumes “about half of water withdrawals”, and that it has undertaken to reduce its punctures “by at least 10% in three years”.
Necessary “alternatives”, according to Béchu
“At the same time, we need to have alternatives that allow us to continue to feed the French,” he argued, expressing surprise at the “new tensions as we enter the construction phase” four years later. a “plan signed by everyone”, farmers, elected officials, authorities and associations, following consultation which conditioned access to water to changes in practices (reduction of pesticides, planting of hedges, conversion to agroecology).
“The protocol that was signed by the socialists, the republicans, is: you change your uses, you reduce your inputs, you profoundly modify the way you behave and in return you will have individual authorizations to access these detentions, ”he hammered.
But out of ten farmers using the first deduction, “none has subscribed to a pesticide reduction”, according to Vincent Bretagnolle, agroecology specialist at the CNRS in Chizé (Deux-Sèvres) and member of the scientific and technical monitoring committee (CST) of the project, interviewed by AFP. In response, several associations have already withdrawn from the protocol.