A beautiful spirit of solidarity. This Monday morning, the jackpot online Leetchi called “Help a family at the edge of the street” reached 210.000€, for a target of € 450,000. More than 6,500 donors have contributed. “I was really surprised to see so many people giving,” says Emily Pécourneau, the 15 year old girl to the origin of this call to solidarity. Launched there a month now, the jackpot is intended, as its name suggests, to save them from bankruptcy, the family of Emilie, in debt for several years.
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“initially, she said, I had launched without telling my parents. The family situation became untenable. At home, my parents did more than talk about problems, bills, debts. They were desperate”. So in the spirit of the youth germ of an idea. “On my laptop, I’ve seen rollovers that worked very well, with large sums of money. I told myself that it had a chance of working”. In a first time, it is in the utmost discretion. “In high school I started to talk to some friends there has only been two weeks,” she says.
The pot just to start, to harvest 1700 euros a month. It takes off really when, last Monday, La Dépêche du midi , in fact, an article. Since, for parents, Joel and Murielle Pécourneau, and their three children hope to take out the head of the water is income.
“people give because our history the key”
“We have already reached 46% of the total sum!” welcomed the girl. The goal, 450.000 euros before April, the equivalent of their debt, now seems attainable for the family of farmers, established 30 years ago in Madaillan, a village of 600 inhabitants, 10 km from Agen, in the Lot-et-Garonne. “People give because our history the key, analysis Emilia. I get a lot of messages of encouragement, of support. In high school, everyone is in solidarity with me. I find it really beautiful.”
A desperate situation
“We have a liability very heavy,” says his father. His operation is already highly in debt when the services of the State require it to submit to the standards of his poultry farm at a cost of 100,000 euros. A sum too high for this operation of 35 hectares, which produces in parallel cereals and vegetables. The outbreak of avian influenza in 2017-2018 is the drop that makes the vase overflow. “For two years, we lost almost half of our turnover, between 5000 and 7000 euros of loss per year,” said the farmer.
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And this is not finished. After the epidemic, new standards are imposed. “We were asked to decontamination areas, new changing facilities. These are additional costs that have aggravated the situation, once more”.
While the Pécourneau tighten the belt (they live in five with only 800 euros per month), the holding is placed into receivership in 2016. She has twelve years in which to repay all his debts. But the time is not sufficient ; Joel Pécourneau had to ask for a deferral of payment for 2019.
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“The debts we are unable to live with what is key to the operation, he explains, we live thanks to the RSA, allocations”. Public subsidies? “They represent 7% of our total budget, they are much less compared to what we would need”. For Joel Pécourneau, the problem goes well beyond its simple operating. “For me, it is not livable to impose the same standards in the same time to small and large farms. We do not make the same margins with a farm of 35 hectares, like mine, or with a plot of 600 hectares. We are many to be in great financial difficulty, including farmers”.
To him, “with this prize, you are defending of course our own case, but you can’t not have a thought to agriculture in general. If we reached the goal of the prize, we will be entitled to a second chance, we will rebuild and it will be good for us. But in any case, I am glad that we were able to highlight the difficulties of small farmers”.
