Account of the 3 October “Stop pesticides” march: 15,000 people, farmers and victims united to block Syngenta
Translated from French.
This Saturday, 3 October, in Gaillon, in the Eure, nearly 15,000 people and more than twenty tractors set off at 3 p.m. towards the Syngenta pesticide production plant in Saint-Pierre-la-Garenne and the neighbouring Nufarm site, at the call of Cancer Colère, the Confédération paysanne, the Western France Pesticide Victims Support Collective (CSVPO) and Les Soulèvements de la terre, backed by more than fifty trade union, farmers’ and environmental organisations.
The speeches at the roundabout
Despite the authorisation to march finally granted by the prefecture, and the organisers’ refusal to be forced onto a route far from the site, protesters had to face numerous checks at the station and on the roads. But little by little the big roundabout on the way out of Gaillon is submerged by the crowd and turns into a teeming agora of messages. In the middle, a tractor has set up its flatbed trailer. Farmers and people sickened by pesticides, pressed up against one another, take turns speaking from it. What is striking, as rarely before, for more than an hour, is the silent listening of thousands of people, regularly punctuated by great collective cries of anger and encouragement.
After an opening message of support to the country’s high school students in revolt and a call to come and join them on the tractor blockades, Fanny Métrat, spokesperson for the Confédération paysanne and a livestock farmer from the Ardèche, launches a furious attack on the agro-industrial model: “It wrecks the soil, it wrecks life, it wrecks the water, but it also wrecks our know-how and our autonomy. If we want to keep producing, to keep feeding ourselves, quite simply to keep living tomorrow, the convergence is going to have to be immense.”
Denis, from the Western France Pesticide Victims Support Collective, which helps farmers get their illnesses recognised as occupational diseases, is one of those calling for people to desert agrochemistry: “I feel guilty coming here to speak to you, because I’m a fruit grower and I’ve sprayed pesticides, but I tell myself this has to be denounced, and that staying silent would be worse.”
Laure, a florist and the mother of a little girl who died of leukaemia, accuses: “I’m speaking to you, Syngenta. You’ve destroyed our lives and our families, you leave victims and sick people all over the place. You stole our little Emmy from us, 11 years old and already in heaven. So many children already gone to the other side, and not a single commitment from our President to stop these poisonings. Quite the opposite — the watchword is: let’s not be too restrictive. Trying to shut us up, that you know how to do. But you haven’t understood: now we’re united, and tomorrow it’s you who’ll be living on borrowed time, and certainly not our families anymore. Step by step we’ll survive, as we already do, but you, Syngenta, you will go under.”
Théo, 19, who has suffered from severe pesticide-related malformations since birth, speaks in the hoarse voice of those who have had a tracheotomy. The crowd falls silent, focused on every word, spoken with a force no one will forget: “The institutions don’t listen to us. They broke my voice — they won’t be able to break all our voices.” Tears run down many faces. Added to this emotion are the rage and the joy of being together a few kilometres from the guilty factory, shut down thanks to the mobilisation.
Fleur, from Cancer Colère, goes further: “We’ve exhausted every avenue of appeal. They ask us to accept illness without a murmur, and they never talk about the environmental causes. But our anger is healthy, it’s legitimate. Our bodies are sick. We have no choice anymore. We’re here because we have a serious desire to live.” She points out that for many of the people on the roundabout, this is their first demonstration. Her comrade Caroline names those who could not come because their illness is too severe or because they died before 3 October.
Next to her, Matilin explodes: “And they want to make us — us, the sick — believe that it’s the farmers who are responsible for our illness. They need to stop treating us like idiots. We have to smash this supposed opposition between a civil society of victims and guilty farmers. All of that is a narrative pushed by an agricultural bourgeoisie that has a lot less to do with us than with the agro-industrial complex and with a guilty government. Today we’re blocking them, but we’ll have to come back and disarm them — they have to be put out of action.”
Loan, from Les Soulèvements de la terre, denounces chemical colonialism in the French Caribbean, South America, India and Africa. She talks about the use of pesticides as an imperialist and colonial weapon, historically in Vietnam, and today in Palestine and Lebanon. She lists all the actions taking place in parallel against Syngenta in some ten countries, including Argentina, Kenya, Switzerland, Pakistan, Hawaii and Indonesia, as well as the statements of support from comrades at Agrimouv in Lebanon and the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil. And Nahia concludes by reminding us that we will get nothing from these criminal industries without a continuing series of direct actions.
A factory brought to a halt
This is the first time in France that farmers and pesticide victims have joined together in such large numbers to converge on a major site of the pesticide industry with the aim of blocking its production. And that blockade is something the announcement of the mobilisation, and the fear it has stirred up among our adversaries, has already managed to achieve — even if only all too temporarily. We know, in fact, that for several days the Syngenta site, which usually manufactures its poisons 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, has been shut. Internal sources have confirmed to us that production has stopped and that tension had been mounting for management for weeks. Tanks and stockpiles at the plant have been emptied, its outdoor staircases dismantled, and the employees have been put on paid leave. We know that its activity will not resume before the middle of next week.
The march
The march that sets off towards Syngenta is teeming with life. At the head of the procession, a large banner, “Syngenta spreads death and reaps anger”, then tractors covered in multicoloured messages: “Farmers’ self-defence”, “The peasantry against agrochemistry” and “We want to make a living from farming, not die from it”. They are followed by hundreds of sick people and carers in a bloc led by Cancer Colère. They hold up standards bearing their names, or those of loved ones struck by cancer, to denounce the systemic causes and the responsibility of the industry’s manufacturers.
A decolonial bloc embodies the internationalist dimension of the mobilisation and the struggle for the liberation of Palestine. Adama Agriculture Solutions, a subsidiary of Syngenta Group, does indeed work with arms companies close to the Israeli army and takes part in the ongoing genocide by supplying pesticides used in the conflict in Palestine and Lebanon. International delegations of farmers from Via Campesina are present. Residents of Normandy, but also of many other regions of the country, whose water catchment points, land and health are being poisoned by Syngenta, swell the march. Six protest brass bands, Planète Boum Boum, and comrades from the Normandy free party scene and from the ZAD de Notre-Dame-des-Landes have pooled their talents and their sound systems to liven up the procession.
On the other side of the Seine, guarded by the river police’s Zodiacs, kayaks approach the factory with a floating banner reading “Syngenta drowns the poison”. The company persists in ignoring the results of tests proving that the water is polluted by its discharges. Along the route, local residents come out and voice their support: their groundwater is contaminated, loved ones are sick, and cancer cases are exploding in the neighbourhood.
The cemetery of public health
The march, more than 10,000 strong, stretches out until, three kilometres from its starting point, down below, the Syngenta site and its yellow towers come into view for the participants. It is now only a few hundred metres away, behind the railway line, and guarded by lines of gendarmes positioned in the fields. The head of the march then stops opposite the site, on a large roadside field in front of which the tractors line up. The prefecture has designated this field as the start of its “red zone”, which it does not want anyone to enter. Yet hundreds of people go down into it, with a banner reading “Your chemicals, our chemo”. They then tie the standards bearing their first names, or those of their loved ones struck by illness, to tall stakes and plant them one after another in the field.
This is the moment the riot police (gendarmes mobiles) choose to drench the field with tear gas and GM2L stun grenades, on the pretext that some twenty people had come a little too close. They were our very own “gendarmes”: protesters equipped with flashy cardboard shields in the red-and-black colours of the gendarme — the insect, that is, the firebug. Caught in the gas, part of the march unfortunately turns back before reaching the site. But despite the tears and the difficulty breathing, many of the sick people present hold firm together with those around them and courageously stay to set up this cemetery of public health and agrochemistry.
The air has barely become breathable again when a ritual begins. A comrade takes the microphone and reads out, one by one, the names of the sick or deceased people who make up the “cemetery of public health”, their age and their illness. The crowd responds by alternately chanting the words “Cancer” and “Colère” (“Anger”). The emotion is so strong that she has to hand over to another comrade, who continues the reading as the march keeps arriving. He announces: “We refuse to let the bosses of Nufarm and Syngenta come back as if nothing had happened. We want them never again to be able to look away from the devastation they are responsible for. We are going to shame them — them and the politicians who protect them, all of cancer’s allies — for as long as it takes.”
The farmers’ party facing Syngenta
Meanwhile, on the other side of the road, in the adjoining field that the crowd is gradually filling, infrastructure suddenly emerges from farm trailers and trucks. Within a few dozen minutes a camp is set up with two stages, bars, toilets, water tankers… A collective announcement is then made over the microphone: “Agrochemistry is a mafia and the French state is its zealous servant. For weeks, the public authorities have piled on the pressure so that this demonstration could not take place in good conditions. They wanted to send us far away, to march on the other side of the Seine. They also did everything they could to deprive us of a site to host us. The local councils and farmers in the area who were ready, in solidarity, to lend us plots of land to host the party and let protesters camp received heavy threats from the gendarmerie, and bans.
So, collectively, we decided that we were going to stay and hold the farmers’ party, facing Syngenta, facing our executioners! Because setting up where we’re not wanted is exactly the right place to express our anger and our determination! Because we have a furious desire to live! Because in the face of illness and death, our joys, our parties, our dancing are vital. They make us stronger than those who prosper from death, from the destruction of the farming world and from illness. What this free party says is that pesticide production sites must be blocked and besieged.” On the flatbed trailer in the middle of the field, Yoa then launches into the first notes of “Mes copines” and instantly sets the crowd alight, which erupts into a big, packed dance floor.
After this first concert, Vincent, national secretary of SUD Chimie, climbs alone onto the free party stage and courageously addresses the thousands of people still there. In November we made a surprise invasion of the factory where he works rotating three-shift work and brought it to a halt. Since then, ties have grown stronger with a number of his fellow workers in the agrochemical sector, who wrote a call to join the 3 October march entitled “Our lives are worth so much more than their profits”. He describes how they are on the front line of poisoning in their workplaces and how “the chemical industry is disgusting”. He talks about the fights against their bosses, about their difficulties, and about their determination to imagine converting the activity of their sites. And many of us are thinking that what is at stake with his presence is of crucial political importance.
As the sun sets in a great marbling of pink, the prefect — heavily attacked on social media for having deliberately gassed the setting-up of the cemetery facing Syngenta — is infuriated that the party is carrying on opposite the site. He decides to pull out all the stops to put an end to it: threats to seize the tractors and sound systems under the new “riposte” law against free parties, a dispersal order announced by helicopter, the arrival of a water cannon and a whole load of vans around the field. A comrade who happens to overhear the gendarmerie colonel’s briefing hears him hammer home to his men: “Really don’t hesitate to use tear gas and GM2Ls.” Just before they launch the charge, we decide to set the party back in motion and stay together.
A long, dancing night-time convoy, lit by the tractors’ headlights, heads back towards Gaillon, followed by a long line of gendarme vans. That doesn’t stop it from having a blast for two hours to Bass Tong’s electro-acoustic pipe techno and a tekno sound wall. Back at the starting point in front of Auchan, everyone is invited to the camp, 40 km away, where a stage is set up again under a big top at midnight for an insane hip-hop concert with Dr Kyle and a random party until the end of the night.
And now
This day of mass mobilisation, called publicly, was a new step in a campaign of action aimed at occupying, blocking and disarming the country’s pesticide production sites. It followed the surprise intrusion in November by five hundred farmers and sick people into the BASF site in Saint-Aubin-lès-Elbeuf, 40 km away, to bring it to a halt, and the action at a Phyteurop site near Angers with tractors. It was also the first moment of popular fightback in France following the summer passage of the agricultural emergency law, and at a time when the omnibus law plans to make it easier to keep many pesticides on the market at European level. This campaign continues, and the 3 October coordination calls on people across the country to keep blocking, occupying and disarming the pesticide sites in their region, whether announced publicly or by surprise. The map of these sites is available on the Les Soulèvements de la terre website.
This 3 October also marked a coordinated wave of international protest against Syngenta, whose activities have devastating consequences in many countries: exports of pesticides banned for use in the European Union, dependence on chemically coated seeds, GMOs… Syngenta stands out for its toxic devastation. Following the Gaillon call, simultaneous actions took place in Pakistan, Switzerland, Costa Rica, England, Argentina, the United States, Sweden, Austria and Brazil, among others. In its response to this global movement, Syngenta had the nerve to claim it supports “farmers” and also “biodiversity”, which its activities are wiping out day after day. The newspeak of multinationals, which long ago made lying the rule of their communications, might be laughable if it were not the language of such a genuinely destructive power. It has gone on far too long.
A fundraiser to support 3 October and the continuing mobilisations against pesticides: all the infrastructure that makes these demonstrations and the camps that host them possible, transporting the tractors and printing leaflets and posters all add up to major costs. We are a movement that values its autonomy and that, in any case, will never receive any subsidy for this kind of mobilisation. So we manage to organise them thanks to your financial support. A fundraiser has been set up for the 3 October march, the continuation of the campaign of action against the pesticide industries, and the appeal to the Court of Cassation in the chlordecone scandal. Thank you for your contribution so that we can carry on these struggles with you!
