The project resumed under high police protection. The detractors of the project, which they describe as “forward” of the “productivist” model, announce a new gathering.
Le Monde with AFP
It was expected, ten days after a demonstration of thousands of opponents, enamelled with violent clashes with the gendarmes: the site of a contested agricultural water deduction in Sainte-Soline (Deux-Sèvres) Resumed Tuesday, November 8, noted a journalist from the France-Presse agency. It is the Coop de l’Eau, a group of 400 farmers, which carries this project supported by the State, intended to build large reserves to allow irrigation in summer thanks to the pumping of superficial water tables in winter.
For the moment, nothing has come to disturb the activity of the excavators. The Sainte-Soline “basin”, a nickname given by the opponents, is the second of the sixteen reserves of several hundred thousand cubic meters which must see the light of day in this department. The first has already been put into service.
The beneficiaries of the reserves were committed in return, in a protocol signed in 2018, to adopt practices turned towards agroecology. Their detractors see it, on the contrary, see a “forward leak” of the “productivist” model.
During the October 29 rally, some opponents had managed to briefly force the site grids, before being pushed back by part of the 1,500 gendarmes deployed on the site. Demonstrators and police had deplored dozens of injured, a handful of them having been hospitalized.
According to the Coop de l’Eau, “we had to repair a hundred barriers put on the ground by the demonstrators”, but that “will have no impact on the calendar”, which provides for a commissioning of The reserve in spring 2024.
“Absolute inconsistency”
“Firmness has paid, no ZAD [” Zone to be defended “, the expression popularized by activists opposed to the airport project in Notre-Dames-des-Landes in Loire-Atlantique] did not settle” , we commented Tuesday in the entourage of the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin. Six gendarmerie squadrons, or 400 to 500 gendarmes, were maintained around the site.
After the demonstration, the opponents had built wins on a land located 2 kilometers from the site, but specifying that their objective was not to organize a ZAD. On the other hand, they had claimed a moratorium from the government.
Jean-Jacques Guillet, one of the spokesperson for the collective “Bassines, no thank you”, told AFP not to be “really surprised by this resumption of work”. “The State persists in wanting to go into force, while this project is an absolute inconsistency, it is not the right method,” he added. And to promise a “new gathering which will be of an even more important magnitude”.