2023-07-16 03:53:39
Will we ever find out what happened? Several thousand apple trees were ransacked overnight from Thursday to Friday in the orchard of a Tarn farmer in conflict with environmental organizations, the Castres prosecutor’s office said on Saturday. No claim has been made for the time being, but several elected officials have already made a link.
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.
“We know that it comes from part of the demonstrators”
On Saturday July 1, a rally had again taken place in Lavaur at the call of the collective of local residents Vrais Nature Environnement (VNE) to denounce the downgrading of certain organic plots of the orchard, believing that the fruit grower was thus returning “to all chemicals”. 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, regretting “an obsession of radical environmental activists for a year against these orchards”.
The accusation is 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. “Obscurantism and the Police of Thought and Agricultural Choices. This is where verbal excesses and misinformation lead on subjects that do not support caricature, for his part reacted the Minister of Agriculture Marc Fesneau. We won’t give anything away. »
Obscurantism and the police of thought and agricultural choices. This is where verbal excesses and misinformation lead on subjects that do not support caricature. We won’t give anything away. https://t.co/1QNsMtCO2Q
— Marc Fesneau (@MFesneau) July 15, 2023
“It is not an action that has been carried out by the association, it is not our modus operandi”, defended Olivier Chollet, one of the representatives of VNE. “We deplore this action and it causes us harm, we call for appeasement,” he added.
No link for the authorities yet
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.
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