They are fed up with successive avian flu attacks. About twenty breeders and union activists occupied, Thursday morning, the premises of the departmental directorate of the protection of populations (DDPP) in Pau, to protest against the management of these crises.

"We are here because the state has failed, crises follow one another, we have the same causes for the same effects," denounced Sylvie Colas, national secretary of the Peasant Confederation, an agricultural union that had called for action with its Basque counterpart ELB and Modef. Outside the premises, about thirty supporters and farmers were also present. Trade unionists are demanding their integration into the decision-making bodies of health directives and demanding differentiated protocols between open-air peasant farms and the industrial sector.

Those mobilized asked to meet the prefect on the spot. "Despite this modus operandi, the latter agreed, for the sake of appeasement, to receive a delegation in the late afternoon (19 p.m.), in return for a voluntary and immediate evacuation," explains a statement from the prefecture. This proposal having been refused, the representative of the State was forced to evacuate the administrative premises by the police at around 12:30 p.m. »

"We have reached the end of a model"

"It is the activity of the long chain, with very dense areas of poultry and lapped animals, that makes everything explode," says Julen Perez, a farmer in the Basque Country and member of the ELB union. "We have reached the end of a model."

The government confirmed this week that a vaccination campaign against bird flu would not start until the autumn, the time to ensure that the operation takes place in good conditions from a health point of view.

At the end of May, the chambers of agriculture of four departments of the South-West as well as the interprofessions of foie gras and lean poultry of the region had called for a deployment of the vaccine this summer to ensure the "survival" of farms, faced with an early restart of the epizootic since May.

On Monday, the ministry reported 85 outbreaks of disease spread between Gers, Landes and Pyrénées-Atlantiques. Unions estimate that more than one million ducks and poultry were slaughtered in the space of a month.

As of June 7, the ministry identified 400 outbreaks detected in livestock since the beginning of the current crisis on August 1, 2022. In the previous one, between August 2021 and May 2022, about 21.8 million animals were slaughtered in France.

  • Society
  • Avian influenza
  • New Aquitaine
  • Aquitaine
  • Pyrénées-Atlantiques
  • Prefect