Question 13575 — breeding

Summary

Mr. Damien Girard alerts the Minister of Agriculture, Agri-Food and Food Sovereignty of the risk of closure of the last local slaughterhouse in Morbihan. The number of slaughterhouses in France has declined sharply in recent decades, from around 400 in 2003 to nearly 220 today. Nearly 30% of these slaughterhouses are public and provide an essential slaughtering service, particularly for farmers and farmers engaged in short circuits. These structures face increasing profitability difficulties. Although the closures concern both public and private slaughterhouses, volumes tend to be concentrated in a limited number of large private slaughterhouses. There is thus an economic and geographical concentration of this essential link in the sector for the benefit of large industrial groups. Many slaughterhouses nearby suffer from competition from much larger slaughterhouses, processing much higher volumes. For two years, the rate of closure of these local slaughterhouses has accelerated, with at least one closure per month. The disappearance of a local slaughterhouse has direct consequences for breeders. Certain services become inaccessible, such as the emergency slaughter of injured animals, and transport distances lengthen considerably. Breeders must travel tens of additional kilometers for slaughter and then to recover the carcasses, which significantly increases their workload and their costs, in a context where working conditions are already grueling and cash flow is weakened. Due to a lack of a nearby slaughterhouse, some farms are forced to cease their activity. However, local slaughterhouses constitute an essential link in the food chain. They make it possible to limit workloads, to promote peasant breeding, to support short circuits and direct sales, guaranteeing better remuneration for breeders. They also allow farmers to keep an eye on the slaughter conditions of their animals. Their disappearance leads to a loss of value for local livestock and a shift towards long distribution circuits which do not benefit the territories. In 2023, the Ministry of Agriculture initiated diagnostic work to build a “slaughterhouse strategy”, intended to respond to the crisis in the sector. This approach, however, did not result in any concrete action and appears to have been abandoned. In Morbihan, the Vannes slaughterhouse, the last multi-species slaughterhouse of the department, could close soon. Breeders risk finding themselves unable to have their animals slaughtered and, consequently, to continue their activity. This means that all livestock farming in the territory is under threat. Faced with this situation, breeders have organized themselves to create a cooperative society of collective interest, the SCIC abattoir des breeders du Morbihan (SCIC ADEM), with the aim of maintaining a sustainable local slaughterhouse. The prefect of Morbihan was opposed to the creation of a new slaughterhouse, for fear of competing with the existing private slaughterhouse in Vannes. It was then agreed that this slaughterhouse could be taken over by SCIC ADEM, a project financially supported by the Gulf of Morbihan - Vannes agglomeration community. Studies relating to buildings, land and the equipment was carried out in 2024. However, in September 2025, the owners of the Vannes slaughterhouse indicated that they did not wish to sell the slaughterhouse at the proposed price and announced its closure, despite the dialogue efforts undertaken by the prefecture, the community and the SCIC. He therefore asks her what actions she intends to implement to save the last slaughterhouse in Morbihan and, more broadly, to support and sustain local slaughterhouses throughout the country.

Machine translation from French. The official text remains authoritative.

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