France passes law to protect farmers against ‘townie’ complaints

On Tuesday (12 March), the French Senate approved a law protecting farmers against growing complaints from new rural residents about the nuisance caused by farm activities, such as the crowing of cockerels in the morning or the smell of manure.

“When you choose the countryside, you accept it and you take responsibility for it,” French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal told a press conference on 1 February, promising to speed up the approval of the law, proposed in 2023 by MP Nicole Le Peih (Renaissance/Renew) and already approved by the National Assembly last December.

The new rules aim to protect farmers against complaints that have been piling up for several years.

With the arrival of urban dwellers, or ‘townies’, in the countryside, especially since the Covid crisis, farmers have been receiving increasing complaints from ‘new’ residents annoyed by the side effects of normal agricultural activities, such as manure odours and noise caused by animals.

According to the FNSEA (Fédération Nationale des Syndicats d’Exploitants Agricoles – National Federation of Farmers’ Unions), nearly 500 farmers are facing legal action from neighbours and 18,000 cases have been filed in courts in the last 10 years.

Maurice’s legal controversy

For the moment, the law is relatively vague. While the Civil Code stipulates that “no one may cause an abnormal neighbourhood disturbance or one that exceeds normal neighbourhood annoyances,” decisions are often made on a case-by-case basis.

The most emblematic case was of a cockerel named Maurice in 2019, whose morning crowing disturbed neighbours on a farm near La Rochelle. The court ruled in favour of the animals’s owner.

Following this case, an initial law was passed on 21 January 2021, enshrining the ‘sensory heritage’ of the countryside in French law. The Environment Code now states that the sounds and smells of natural environments are, “part of the nation’s common heritage.”

However in another case the farmer had to pay. Last December, a dairy farmer was ordered to pay €106,000 in damages to six neighbours who complained about the smell and noise of the cows.

According to FNSEA and many rural mayors, the increasing number of lawsuits and problems of cohabitation with new residents, mean that the law needs to be updated.

However, some sociologists denounced these high-profile media stories, instead they wanted to highlight the challenges caused by the installation of industrial farming infrastructures all over Europe, especially in the Netherlands and Poland.

This new law, which is due to be submitted to the national Parliament for the last time in a joint committee (a small number of senators and deputies), stipulates that a new resident cannot sue a farmer for nuisances caused by their activity if they existed before they moved in.

The Senate text goes even further in protecting against new nuisance complaints linked to the development of the farm. The ecologist group voted against it, while the socialists abstained.

[Edited by Angelo Di Mambro and Rajnish Singh]

Read more with Euractiv

EU Parliament approves farmer-backed amendments on trade benefits for Ukraine

The European Parliament adopted changes to the regulation for prolonging trade liberalisation measures with Kyiv, backing EU farmers' demands and overthrowing the prior vote in the trade committee that rejected the amendments.