A La Rochenard, a mobilization has collected thousands of opponents of these giant water reserves for agricultural irrigation.
Le Monde with AFP
Sporadic clashes between gendarmes and demonstrators marked on Saturday, March 26 afternoon, in La Rochenard (Deux-Sèvres), a mobilization that brought together thousands of persons opposing “megabassines”, these giant water reserves intended for agricultural irrigation.
The “marker spring”, protest planned to last until Sunday, brought together Saturday between 4,200 (according to the prefecture) and 7,000 people (according to the organizers).
The clashes have opposed in the afternoon some protesters with the police for an hour, with exchanges of stone jets, mortars of artifice, and tear gas and grenades of deencellement.
The first clashes occurred when groups of protesters went to an area prohibited by the authorities. Shortly before, some had to dig, with shovels and picks, pipe elements “intended to be connected to the network of future basins”, according to the uprisings of the earth, co-manager of the mobilization.
Around 6 pm, the procession regained, in the calm, the starting point of the manifestation in La Rocheanard.
“A privatization of the water”
Constructing the call of the collective basin no thanks, the spearhead of the opposition to the projects of these deductions of water, and the peasant confederation, the protesters claim “the cessation of all projects of” megabassines ” “”, that they consider “a privatization of water”.
Also supported by the League for the Protection of Birds (LPO), Europe Ecology-The Greens (EELV), the association for the taxation of financial transactions and for the citizen action (ATTAC) or France unsuitable, They denounce “the grabbing of water by agro-industry”, “require the judgment of the works” and “the establishment of a moratorium on” megabassine “projects”.
“The water is very common, share it”, “recharge the groundwater before storing the water”, could be read on the Brandie banners in a crowd composed of young adults and retirees, families , associative and trade union activists, as well as people from working blue or aframe.
A very important gendarmerie system had been put in place, the authorities fearing that the overflows already occurred in previous events are repeated.
Two helicopters flew over low altitude gatherings and many van and gendarmerie squadrons had been arranged in the surrounding fields.
Many white weapons, including big knives and artifice mortars, were seized during preventative excavations in the morning, according to the prefecture which, like that of Charente-Maritime, had prohibited demonstration a perimeter of a dozen kilometers in neighboring municipalities.
To respond to opponents of “megabassines”, about two hundred farmers have also gathered in Cramchaban (Charente-Maritime), a few kilometers away, to the call of rural coordination, for a “defense gathering” near degraded withholding during a demonstration in November.
The “megabassines”, excavations covered with a plastic membrane, must be powered by watercourses and water tables in winter to serve summer with irrigating farmers when the resource is missing.
In recent years, the opposition to these projects has crystallized in the two sevres, notably in Mauzé-sur-le-Cute, where was dug the first of the sixteen deductions planned on the niortoise Sèvre basin , crucial for the feeding of the Poitevin marsh.