the HVE label before the Council of State

The reform at the end of 2022 of the HVE label – High Environmental Value – to make it more restrictive will not have been enough to calm the organic sector and environmental associations.

According to Le Parisien, the National Federation of Organic Agriculture (FNAB), Future Generations, the Health Environment network or the UFC-Que-Choisir are preparing to seize this Monday, January 23 the Council of State in order to request the pure and simple prohibition of HVE certification, defended by the Ministry of Agriculture.

This certification, born in 2012, in the wake of the Grenelle de l’environnement, to encourage and recognize the efforts of farmers in favor of biodiversity and water management, has been in the sights of defenders for a long time now. organic, who denounce institutionalized greenwashing. Contrary to what the logo, with a butterfly fluttering above a field, suggests, its detractors believe that the latter is not a guarantee of environmentally friendly practices.

A label that is not demanding enough

To take advantage of the HVE logo, farmers had until now the choice between two options: provide proof that purchases of inputs represented less than 30% of their turnover, or have their good environmental practices certified (diversification and crop rotation, recovery of rainwater or recovery of manure rather than fertiliser, etc. by a certifying body (such as Afnor).

Except that, as its detractors pointed out, it was quite possible to obtain the label without giving up all pesticides, including the most harmful, and without respecting the basic rules of the CAP in terms of the preservation of biodiversity, such as maintaining hedges or grass strips between crops.

In April, the European Commission was also moved to see the French government grant the same level of CAP aid to HVE farmers and organic farmers, even though the specifications for the former “are much less restrictive “.

The organic sector in great difficulty

Faced with criticism, the Ministry of Agriculture ended up reviewing its copy at the end of November, removing the label for farms choosing the first option, the most contested. A reinforcement of the requirements considered however very insufficient by the FNAB and the environmental associations, which hope from now on to have the skin of the HVE in justice.

Last October, a report by the French Office for Biodiversity, which went relatively unnoticed, also recommended “modifying the High Environmental Value designation”, in order to place environmental certification in an “intermediate” position between conventional agriculture and organic farming.

Will this be enough to restore the image of organic? After years of double-digit growth, the sector is going through an unprecedented crisis. In 2021, the market fell by 68 million euros, and is expected to fall sharply for 2022. For their part, HVE-certified farms have literally exploded in recent years: there were 29,898 in July 2022, compared to 19,215 a year earlier. year earlier.

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