Five months after the violent clashes in Sainte-Soline around a controversial mega-basin project, a gathering, dubbed the “water convoy”, set off, on bicycles in particular, towards Paris on Friday August 18, in the Deux-Sèvres.
In Lezay, a neighboring town of Sainte-Soline, between 500, according to the authorities, and some 700 cyclists, according to the organization, and about twenty tractors found themselves in the afternoon in a field in the middle of workshops of bike repair or a disc jockey turntable. The colorful and good-natured procession, with cyclists in fluorescent chasubles, old bicycles or tandems, horse-drawn carriages and decorated tractors, set off around 3 p.m. from Lezay to Jazeneuil in Vienne, noted Agence France-Presse (AFP).
“Respecting the itinerary” planned by the demonstrators allowed a “good progress of the demonstration”, the prefectures of Deux-Sèvres and Vienne said in a press release, at the end of this first stage in the early evening. .
“The idea is to do a positive activity after what happened in Sainte-Soline (…), to say that we are still here, that we are still against this mega-basin project,” said declared to AFP Annick Huet, facilitator of ecology workshops in Melle (Deux-Sèvres), bicycle loaded with a foam mattress and topped with a blue flag “Water is a common good”.
“It’s better than the Tour de France!” one of the participants shouted out loud, before another echoed her: “It’s the Tour de l’avenir!” »
Important safety feature
At a rate of around fifty km per day, the journey planned over a week crosses five departments (Deux-Sèvres, Vienne, Indre-et-Loire, Loir-et-Cher, Loiret) to denounce “the hoarding of water” and its public funding, according to the organizers.
It should reach Orléans next Friday, headquarters of the Loire Bretagne Water Agency, which co-finances this type of project aimed at storing up to 6 million cubic meters of water drawn from groundwater in winter in vast cavities in outdoors, in order to irrigate crops in summer when rainfall is scarce.
After the high-profile clashes between protesters and security forces in March, with two activists for a time in a coma, the authorities have planned an important security device. A helicopter and a drone patrolled the skies of Lezay, roads were closed to traffic and several motorcyclists had to ensure the opening and closing of the convoy.
More than a hundred gendarmes were mobilized around the departure, we learned from a source close to the police, against 3,200 during the stormy demonstration in March.
Declared to the prefectures concerned, this “water convoy” is intended to be “a joyous procession” which will stop near several locally contested agricultural projects, promise the collective Bassines non merci and the agricultural union Confédération paysanne, which co-organize it.
The Earth Uprisings collective present
The Uprisings of the Earth, which had co-organized the last demonstrations in Sainte-Soline, were present after the suspension in justice of the dissolution of the collective pronounced by the government. “It’s a special emotion to be there, and we’re there without being threatened with the league being dissolved,” smiled Benoît Feuillu, spokesperson for the Uprisings of the Earth, welcoming the “symbolic” of leaving very close to Sainte Soline.
The organizers wanted to build a cairn there, a pile of stones intended to mark the memory of a place, in “tribute to the wounded of Sainte-Soline”. The procession will be punctuated by a “surprise” mobilization on August 26 in Paris.
“We are calling for a moratorium on all bedpan projects throughout the national territory”, Julien Le Guet, the leader of Basins no thank you, told AFP on Friday. “This convoy is the way we think is the most effective to carry the message at this time. It does not bode well for the future. We must be very clear: if tomorrow there is a start of construction while the basin committee asks for appeasement, how can we predict what the reaction of the people of this territory will be? “, he added.
At the beginning of July, the Loire-Bretagne basin committee, a kind of water parliament bringing together users, elected officials and the State, voted a motion to “promote dialogue”, review the governance of this type of project or even better take into account the consequences of climate change, in particular the evaporation of water. Extremely rare, it was hailed by irrigators and opponents.
The Sainte-Soline reserve is the second of sixteen planned in the Marais poitevin. Its promoters – 450 farmers supported by the State – defend essential crop insurance and a tool for the transition to agroecology. Their opponents denounce them a “leak forward” of the “productivist” agricultural model, at the time of climate change.