“Pressure from the French authorities is one of the tragedies of farming life”

conic Roussillon winegrower Hervé Bizeul of Clos des Fées has no faith in the French government’s promise to simplify administrative requirements in response to the country’s farming crisis. His clear-sighted conclusion is that pressure from the authorities can only continue to be a burden, when they should be helping the wine industry.

A decade or so, you listed all the administrative requirements for winegrowers on your blog. Since then, the list has only got longer – unless the government’s promise to simplify them materialises?

Hervé Bizeul: Tilting at windmills is a fictional vision that fails to drive me anymore. The reality today is that the real global power is in the hands of the authorities, and not just in France. Their praiseworthy objective of putting order into society has now been put on a backburner and their main aim is to justify their existence, to create standards and regulations that will increase their power and justify greater resources and personnel. They’ve become a hydra and I don’t think we can backtrack. The number of farmers continues to fall, whilst the number of civil servants increases, despite the fact that we now live in a paperless society where the end users do all the work. Even worse – it is now impossible to come across human beings, [we have to live with] phone bots and inhuman computer portals.

If I understand right, you mean the two worlds are in opposition when they should be helping each other?

We should be helping each other. There’s always a good idea to start with – protecting employees to avoid accidents or marketing a sound wine to avoid fraud, for example. Let’s start by admitting that when there are inspections we can’t always do everything right. It’s impossible to know everything and yet the authorities automatically hide behind the premise that “ignorance is no excuse”. It’s outrageous! It’s extremely unfair – no information filters through, there is no portal which summarises all of my responsibilities, no schedule for filing my returns… But I’m supposed to know everything, be aware of everything and apply everything. Otherwise, I get told off or punished. This leads to the unbearable situation where every morning I get up and think, “What am I going to forget to do today?” You go to bed at night thinking, “What did I do wrong?” The mental stress is just unbearable, and it’s why I’ve given up applying for most export grants, for example.

Do you have any faith at all in the government’s promise to simplify administrative procedures in response to the uprising of farmers?

People talk about simplification, and then in the next breath they tell me to put a QR code on my bottles… That’s the worst thing – they do the opposite of what they say they do, and treat us like fools. The French authorities use two yardsticks: the responsibility of the registrant, which increases with dematerialisation, and fear of the long arm of the law. If there’s a war tomorrow and I have to flee, I want to be with winegrowers or crop and livestock farmers – it will be my only chance of survival, these people are super-human. I challenge any top-ranking civil servant to take charge of a farm or a winery today! But if one of them has the courage to do so, which I strongly doubt, they need to be filmed! Finally, they will experience the reality of a world where two farmers commit suicide every day. Pressure from the French authorities is one of the tragedies of farming life.