OPINION: Brittany's killer seaweed reveals the dirty secret of French farming

Local France

02-07-2025

Fourteen years ago I spent a day on a pretty beach in Brittany. I was not swimming or sun-bathing. I was, it turns out, risking my life.
I described the Plage de Saint-Maurice at the time as 'the symbol of an ecological calamity which has been 40 years in the making'.
'On a sunny August day,' I wrote in 2011. 'There was not a soul walking on the sand, not a single sunbather, not a single child with a bucket or spade.'
Just below the surface crust of the beach lay a seam of evil-smelling black mud, formed by rotting seaweed. Ecological campaigners were complaining that the weed – natural to the French coast but supersized by nitrogen-drenched effluent from Breton farms – was a threat to human life.
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Yves-Marie Le Lay, one of the campaigners, met me on the beach wearing a gas mask. He said: 'No one is removing all of this filth. Why? It is as if they are waiting for a child to die.'
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Five years later, in September 2016, someone did die near the Plage de Saint-Maurice in Saint-Brieuc Bay. It was not a child but a 50-year-old jogger and father of three, Jean-René Auffray.
The cause of his death has been disputed for nine years. A few days ago,
a court in Nantes
ruled that he was killed by seaweed. More specifically, the court decided that he had died from inhaling hydrogen sulphide, a toxic gas emitted by rotting heaps of ulva, or sea lettuce.
The judges of the Nantes administrative court said that Monsieur Auffray was 40 percent to blame for his own death because he ignored warnings about running near the closed beach. They decided that the French state was 60 percent responsible because it had failed to enforce French and European environmental controls on intensive agriculture.
This was a very important ruling, the first of its kind in France. It draws embarrassing attention to one of the great, institutional hypocrisies of French public life.
France, we are told is a beautiful country of small, traditional family farms and quality food. Yes it is - in some places. Elsewhere, especially in Brittany and the chemical-soaked prairies of the Île-de-France and northern France, it is an intensive producer of cereals, sugar-beet and pork by methods which spoil the countryside and devastate the environment.
French rivers are among the most polluted in Europe.
The impact in Brittany is multiplied by the enclosed habitat of the peninsula. Nitrogen from fertiliser and animal waste pours into streams and rivers from the scores of intensive pig, cattle and maize farms created in the Breton heartland since the 1970s. They have propagated an explosion of giant sea lettuces in the estuaries of the northern coast.
Attempts by campaigners like Mr Le Lay and intermittent efforts by successive governments to reduce the problem have been defeated by the powerful Breton agri-industrial lobby and the cowardice of Breton politicians.
The farmers blamed global warming or phosphate pollution. The bodies of poisoned wild animals have been dumped on the doorsteps of anti-weed campaigners.
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Finally, in 2021, a report by the powerful, public spending watchdog, the Cour des Comptes, concluded that the proliferation of toxic seaweed was 90 percent caused by intensive agriculture. Nothing much was done.
Now the ruling by the Nantes court presents the government with a serious problem. The state has been ordered to pay the jogger's family over €300,000 in damages. Other compensation claims will follow.
The timing is awkward. A joint committee of the Senate and the National Assembly this week approved a version of the 'Loi Duplomb', an attempt by a Centre-right senator, farmer and farm-lobby spokesman, Laurent Duplomb, to roll back some of the modest, environmental protections imposed on agriculture in recent years.
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Duplomb did not get things all his own way but the committee - to be followed almost certainly by the Assembly and the government - lifted a ban on an especially nasty pesticide.
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Acétamipride is needed to protect the crops of large-scale beetroot farmers; unfortunately, it also kills the bees of small honey-producers. So much for France as the guardian of small, quality farming,
So what will the government do - what CAN the government do - to stop the invasion of the giant, poisonous sea lettuces?
Yves-Marie Le Lay, whom I met on the Plage de Saint-Maurice in 2011, is still, I'm delighted to find, campaigning, aged 75.
'There has to be a complete rethink of Brittany's model of intensive agriculture,' he said. 'So long as that is not changed, the problem will never go away.'
Breton pork farmers are among the most pig-headed and belligerent of all French farmers. Who, in the present, anti-ecological mood of Far Right, Right and Centre in French politics, is brave enough to tell them that they have to keep fewer pigs or stop dumping their slurry into streams?
The calamity of the north Breton beaches is now a half-century old and counting. Nothing will change soon.