Megabasins: understand everything about the mobilization of “antibassins” gathered this Saturday in La Rochelle

Manifestation contre les méga bassines dans le Puy De Dôme en mai 2024. MAXPPP – Nicolas Liponne

the essential The organizers of the event – including the Bassines Non Merci (BNM) collective – announced a gathering, both “in town and by the sea”, in an atmosphere of “party and celebration”. carnival" this Saturday in La Rochelle. The mobilization against the "basins", these decried irrigation reserves, continues. We summarize the situation for you.

After an aborted demonstration on Friday in a burning field near Poitiers, opponents of the "bassines", irrigation reserves, set sail on Saturday for the commercial port of La Rochelle, which ;#39;they intend to block "symbolically" to denounce agro-industry practices.

Several dozen demonstrators, including farmers, entered the agro-industrial terminal of the port of Pallice early Saturday morning, "emerging from the bridge of l'Île-de-Ré" for "to thwart the system prohibiting demonstrations" according to the organizers.

Why the protesters are angry

With a few old tractors, they blocked a quiet street, with music and a refreshment bar, in front of the buildings of a major grain trader, the Soufflet group, a "sensitive& ;quot; according to the prefecture of Charente-Maritime.

On this Saturday of school holidays, no activity was visible on the site, according to AFP journalists.

"The mega-basins, it's a system for a privileged few who will be entitled to water to irrigate, that is to say to produce more, products which are then exported abroad, to countries in Africa where ;we are destabilizing their agriculture", denounced Frédéric Boutin, organic farmer.

"The aim of the demonstration is to join us but we have to be honest, we weren'were not convinced of' #39;get that far", said a member of the environmental movement Earth Uprising into the microphone.

Why port ?

Other demonstrators, who were to join processions that left the city center in mid-morning, were blocked at the main entrance to the commercial port, two gendarmerie armored vehicles being deployed behind the gates closing the gate. ;#39;access.

"It's completely oversized, judged Agnès Denis, who came from Dijon to demonstrate with her partner. We need to accept people's words because if we systematically prevent it, we end up in a fight and that's not what ;we're coming to pick up".

On the program for this second day of mobilization, the encirclement of the port aims for Saturday at denounce the major players in the grain industry, whom the organizers associate with the construction of contested water reserves and a &amp ;quot;grabbing" of water by agro-industry.