This excellent issue of the magazine presented by Elise Lucet stages with humor the results of an overwhelming survey on the distribution in France of the 9 billion euros perceived from the European Union under the CAP.
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The CAP is 60 years old: The age for the common agricultural policy of a deep overhaul! While it was established in 1962 to support agricultural production and allow the European Union (EU) to regain its food independence, Brussels opted, over the decades, for a policy coupled with the opening of the markets, Pushing the sector to industrialize ever more. Until the environmental crisis calls into question this productivist, polluting and deficit model, which values large farms infused with European aids.
Should you laugh or cry? Elise Lucet and the documentary maker Véronique Blanc chose humor. It is necessary to try to see clearly on the distribution of the 9 billion euros collected by France – for a total of 55 billion annuals distributed by the EU to all twenty -seven, which makes it First beneficiary.
Daring a fictional introduction, “Cash Investigation” sets the foundations for this redistribution in the form of a real cake, the “Pac Cake”. The opportunity to note that Elise Lucet manages both the pie shovel and the microphone to question Pierre Bascou, director general of agriculture and rural development at the European Commission.
Three eloquent reports
Behind the light shape, the investigation is overwhelming. If it is not abnormal that France affects the most subsidies – it has the most farmers and cultivated land – it is at least curious that half of the “PAC Cake” returns to 20 % of beneficiaries And that some have nothing at all. This is the case of Gwénaël Floch, organic producer, who has not touched a penny in twelve years of activity. He also prefers to smile, as the administrative explanations of this failure make one think of the sketch of the humorist Roman Frayssinet on the payment of a fine.
Véronique Blanc draws for her part, in three eloquent reports, another heat pump: with a p like “green payment” – financing name created in 2015 to preserve biodiversity and fight against agricultural pollution and which, since then, has engulfed 96 million euros for changes in practice on only 5 % of agricultural land -; One A like Andrej Babis (this Czech billionaire, owner of agriffert, the largest beneficiary of the CAP, took advantage of taxpayer’s money to appropriate land and subsidies); and a C like Corse.
In 2015, on the island of beauty, the Minister of Agriculture then, Stéphane Le Foll, decided, to compensate for the under -assessment of extensive exploitation – in Corsica, we say that cows “Divague” – to increase the endowment of the CAP, creating at the same time a boon’s effect, whose local population has been able to seize with inventiveness.
The examples of this opportunism provided here are akin to gags, between a recalcitrant beneficiary who brings together the two journalists to go and a real estate agent who would have unduly touched more than 115,000 euros in three years …
Elise Lucet resumes her seriousness: it is still taxpayer money. A new PAC allocation system must come into force in 2023. The occasion for a second volume for “cash investigation”?