While tensions around these major projects to counter future droughts have multiplied in recent days, the Minister of Agriculture invoked the need to deal with “rainfall disruption”.
On the antennas of Radio France this Sunday, the Minister of Agriculture Marc Fresneau assured that other “basins of water“, intended to cope with droughts, would be built. “Ouihe answered a journalist’s question asking him if there would be other water storage projects of this kind in the future.
«Climate change produces a rainfall change that will have to be taken care of“, he justified. The Minister considered that with periods of drought but also floods, such structures would better regulate periods of high water and drier summers. “It’s an implacable logic, it’s a question of adaptation“, insisted Marc Fresneau.
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The Minister also castigated this “philosophy that is developing a little, the return to the state of nature, you have to let everything happen“, even though with global warming, “the climate of Toulouse will be that of Rennes within 20 or 30 years». «We must think about systems that are water efficient on the one hand and at the same time that allow us to have water“, he added.
Sixty police officers injured
Tensions around these water reserves have increased in recent days. Violent clashes on Saturday left around sixty injured on the gendarmes’ side and around thirty on the demonstrators’ side, during a rally banned by the Deux-Sèvres prefecture against the construction of a water reservoir for agricultural irrigation. This reserve is the second of 16 replacement units, at the heart of a project developed by 400 farmers united in the Coop de l’eau. Used for irrigation in the summer, these basins are filled in the winter, by pumping from the water tables and rivers.
The opposition, made up of ecological and scientific movements, criticizes these “mega basinsto be reserved for large export-oriented cereal farms and highlights other solutions to better preserve water. Collectives have not hesitated in the past to vandalize some of these agricultural basins, as in Vendée, last August.
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While Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin condemned after the incidents in Deux-Sèvres the “ecoterrorism“, government spokesman Olivier Véran castigated for his part”more and more radical people». «I think the French are a bit fed up – and I understand them – that every time we talk about making projects, there are people who are more and more radical in the methods of intervention and in the protest“, he condemned.