Despite the increased scale of anti-basin mobilizations, the government persists in pushing through. This emblematic battle for water as a common good and for peasant agriculture is still up for grabs. In this month of July, while the eyes of the whole world will be focused on the river parade of the Olympic Games in Paris, it will be a question of joining forces to win the most essential of challenges: finding collective actions so that water is finally protected in this country and everywhere else.

July 19-20 – Events

July 16-21 – Village for the defense of water 

We are here calling once again to converge around the endangered green Venice of the Marais Poitevin, the exhausted agricultural expanses of Poitou, but also its multiple landmarks and still fertile lands.

Mega-basins are giant craters with a surface area sometimes up to 18 hectares, covered with plastic and filled with water pumped from groundwater . They are the latest headlong rush of an agro-industrial model that has been degrading and drying out our living environments for too long. They are above all designed for crops requiring intensive irrigation, for the benefit of a small minority of farmers, and this at the expense of virtuous forms of storage and sharing of water, benefiting all farmers, population and biodiversity. 

Last summer, the scandalous 70% financing of basins with public money was strongly criticized even by the Court of Auditors. This notes that the government’s bias towards these infrastructures is dangerously delaying the necessary change in agricultural practices. Even within the institutions supposed to be in charge of the qualitative and quantitative protection of water, criticisms are coming to light and doubt about the viability of the basins is growing among irrigators. 

The ongoing struggles are about to bury a good part of the basins initially planned. During these last 3 years of mobilizations, 4 basins already filled were subsequently judged definitively illegal, 15 projects were canceled by the court after being judged unsuitable for climate change, 14 others were put out of order and construction site gates continue to fall. Many basins have already been abandoned thanks to pressure from the local opposition. 

And yet, they persist! The Minister of Agriculture recently ventured to announce a goal of building 100 new basins by the end of the year. On the outskirts of the Marais Poitevin, despite the legal appeals still in progress against the 16 mega-basins, the construction sites painfully continue to operate. Against a backdrop of conflict of interest, two of them started in recent months in Priaires and Epannes, while that of Sainte-Soline stagnated all winter.

The government is seeking, within the framework of the Agricultural Orientation Law, to have these infrastructures recognized as having a “major general interest” in order to bypass successful legal appeals and trample on environmental protections. Its selective response to the agricultural unhappiness expressed this winter was to favor – for the benefit of agro-industry bosses – the systems and sectors which poison farmers, rather than ensuring them decent work and income. It thus continues to submit to private interests rather than truly defending peasants and common goods. It finances the sterilization of land rather than the development of agro-ecology capable of confronting the climate crisis. It is for this transition that public subsidies should be granted today. But it is the prefects who, in a burst of authoritarian tension, are today appealing court decisions and pushing through the mega-basin projects promised to large industries, cooperatives and traders throughout France. 

We must therefore, for the moment, implement a popular moratorium on the ground and come together to support the need. While the anti-basin struggle now extends to other regions of the country and beyond borders, the challenge of this mobilization is that of a historic turning point: if we stop them here, we will stop them elsewhere ! If the basin system does not prolong the agro-industrial impasse – the export sectors of hybrid corn, soil-less breeding, monocultures – we will finally be able to move together towards the forms of agriculture which protect lands and waters. 

More than a year after the convergence in Sainte-Soline, meeting again massively in Poitou this summer is, for all social and environmental forces, the opportunity to demonstrate to this government that it cannot hope to stop a vital impulse through repression. From July 16 to 21, in our plurality of peasant and union presences, residents of all ages from the countryside and cities, we will reinvent our ways of demonstrating and protecting ourselves. We will find a thousand ways to mark our refusal of basin projects. 

No Bassaran! 

// July 19-20 – Demonstrations. The peak of this week of mobilization will be the two big days of intense demonstrations and massive actions on July 19th and 20th.

// July 16-21 – Village for the defense of water and land. Days to debate, share skills, celebrate our struggles and build the future. It will be held from July 16 to 21 with a host of round tables, workshops, trainings, walks, concerts, shows. Its program is detailed on the movement’s websites and in particular:  https://bassinesnonmerci.fr / https://lessoulevementsdelaterre.org

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