Édouard Philippe, central bloc presidential candidate, declared on Wednesday June 3 that he wanted to modify the Constitution if he was elected so that the needs of French agriculture were better taken into account in the Environmental Charter.
“I propose to complete the Environmental Charter (…) by indicating that agriculture is a legitimate objective that must be taken into account,” Mayor Horizons of Le Havre told the press during a trip to Ain, on the sidelines of the congress of the Young Farmers union.
This will be done through a “constitutional modification, which will have to be initiated after the presidential election,” he said from a fish and sheep farm. The Environmental Charter was integrated into the French Constitution in 2005 and defines rights and duties in environmental matters. In particular, it protects the principles of prevention, precaution and polluter pays.
A charter integrated into the French Constitution
“I think that at the time, the idea was to advance the political idea of the need to preserve the environment, and it was a good idea,” said Édouard Philippe. But, while French agriculture is going through a crisis comparable “to the steel industry in the 1970s”, “I think we can say that the objective is to preserve both, and not to favor one over the other”, he continued.
This summer, the Constitutional Council had censored in the name of the Environmental Charter the most contested provision of a law tabled by Senator Laurent Duplomb, which provided for the conditional reintroduction of a category of pesticides harmful to pollinators, but favored by beet producers.
At the beginning of April, the FNSEA (dominant agricultural union) called for a constitutional reform of the charter to replace the precautionary principle with a “principle of innovation” allowing the “benefit/risk calculation” to be assessed differently.
