Movement of defense of the family owners

Movement of Defense of the Family Owners or MODEF is a French Agricultural trade union.

Creation of Modef

April 7th, 1959, forty country militants of the departments of the south and center of France resulting from the section from the farmers and sharecroppers and vine growing of FNSEA met in Toulouse to create a structure of coordination which uvement became the Mo of D éfense of the E xploitants F amiliaux . They were socialist, like Nègre, Communists, like Soulié, anarchist-Communists, like Raymond Mineau; or simply militants of the social progress. They met to break definitively with the FNSEA, single agricultural trade union at the time, by creating a dissenting trade union movement. The fights of the sharecroppers To combine it of 1900 or wine growers of the South of 1907 constituted their principal references. In France which counted 2 more million peasants, their objective was to defend the small farmers vis-a-vis the land big landowners in favor of an agriculture productivist and concentration of the exploitations, orientations then proposed within the framework of the creation of the Common Agricultural policy.

Evolution of Modef

Following this scission, Modef will know an important rise, until competing with during the years the 70-80 FNSEA with the professional elections in many departments (southern west, center or south east of France in particular). The disappearance of hundreds of thousands of small-scale farmings under the road roller of the CAP, combined with the increasingly marked prevalence of the liberal ideas in agriculture as from the Eighties will take part in an electoral retreat of Modef in the colleges of the managers, even with its marginalisation in the departments of field crop of the north of France. There remains enraciné in the departments of small cultivation of cereals, breeding, vine growing or culture of fruit and vegetables, like in the DOM TOM (Martinique, Guadeloupe)

Its trade-union position

Rejecting the entrepreneurial logic of the recent law of agricultural orientation, Modef denounces the persons in charge of the difficulties of agriculture: giants mondialized of agroalimentary and the large distribution which bleed the producers, exploit their employees and bernent the consumers. Asserting a minimum price guaranteed for all the productions, he wants to give the assistances to their place: the support for small and average farmers, with the quality of the productions, the compensation of the natural handicaps and the remuneration of the role of agriculture in town and country planning and the environment.

Basing from now on its action on " a remunerative agriculture, citizen and durable" , Modef militates against competition of the peasants of the whole world carried by the liberal internationalization, against the delocalizations of productions and the social dumping, against the acceleration of the concentration and agro industrialization, for the defense of the co-operative tools, sovereignty and food safety. Vis-a-vis the deregulations, it puts at the center of its action the need for a public intervention on the agricultural markets and food, in particular by a framing of the imports and speculative practices of large distribution and chains of restoration, who crush the country income and the consumers and call into question quality and food independence. Acting for the co-operation between nations, Modef intervenes for the exit of the agriculture of the World Trade organization and her transfer to FAO. He asks the maintenance and the reorientation of the Common Agricultural policy towards these objectives, with a priority with the community preference and the safeguard clause, like with negotiated calendars of importation.

Modef acts for a real participative democracy in agriculture, that it is in the rooms of agriculture, but also in l" together agricultural organizations. He asks the abrogation of the decree fixing at 15% of the votes the consular elections the threshold of representativeness of the agricultural trade-union organizations, as well as the association of all the organizations without exclusive to the decisions of CDOA and SAFER.

Modef wants to reconquer a trade-union space at the sides of the victims of the speculation on the agricultural markets, while calling in particular with the plain action of the peasants and their organizations, which it is about the Peasant confederation, created in the Eighties, with which he shares the refusal of the liberalism, but which it is also about the trade unionism " majoritaire" (FNSEA/JA), taken in contradiction between its liberal orientations and the devastators effects of the liberalization of the agricultural markets on the French farming community and campaigns. Modef thus took a central share in the unit fights which led in January 2005 to the reintroduction in the French legislation of the multiplying Coefficient, instrument intended to frame the abusive margins of the intermediaries of the distribution. Having joined Via Campesina in 2001, Modef takes part in the initiatives altermondialists. The national congress of Fournols, April 5th and 6th 2006, confirmed these orientations, for a combative trade unionism and rassemblor with the service of the peasants, carrying values progressists.

The movement is chaired by Xavier Compain, stockbreeder in the Coasts of Armor.

Bonds

Official site of the MODEF
Site of the family owner, the monthly magazine of the MODEF
Site of federations MODEF of area PACA

Random links: