Victoire Violanes, new co-president of Modef: "Overseas, farmers pay twice as much as in mainland France"

Elected as the new co-president of the Movement for the Defense of Family Farmers (Modef) alongside Frédéric Mazer at the agricultural union's congress in May 2025, Victoire Violanes is the first overseas farmer to hold these responsibilities.

While the first months of her term are filled with current events that revive the need for human-scale agriculture, the unionist particularly intends to give voice to non-metropolitan producers , who, according to her, lose out twice. Interview.

How long have you been a farmer?

Victory Violanes

Co-president of Modef

I have been self-employed since 1996 after having co-produced with my partner. I produce on land formerly belonging to sugar factories. When these factories closed, in order not to lose the sugarcane crop, it was decided to maintain production on at least 50% of the plots. I rent this land; it is my working tool.

When did you decide to organize collectively?

When I started, there were several of us growing melons for the same company. That's when we decided to create a producers' organization, and I became its secretary.

But my real union fight began in 2018, when I met the president of the Guadeloupe Chamber of Agriculture. He later asked me to be part of his list for the 2019 elections , and I accepted. It was important to me, because we, the small farmers, must succeed in making ourselves heard.

We won these elections with a platform defending small farms, with the guarantee that we would be there alongside large industrial structures when our fate was decided. I no longer wanted everything to be decided for us but without us.

You are the first woman from overseas to hold the position of co-president of Modef. Will you be promoting a different kind of unionism than your predecessors?

I will speak for the overseas territories . We pay twice as much as farmers in mainland France, due to our distance from consumers, our isolation, and our small size. Here, the average farm is one and a half hectares in size (compared to 63 in mainland France, editor's note).

I will be keen to specifically highlight the difficulties we face here, which are often ignored or forgotten in mainland France. I am thinking in particular of the marketing difficulties we may encounter here due to our isolation; we need support to enable us to export our products outside the island.

Today, we rely heavily on the arrival of ships that bring and take away agricultural products. We would like to move away from this dependence on ships to sell our goods.

However, I remain very vigilant about the problems that farmers may encounter nationally . I am following the development of lumpy skin disease very closely. The systematic culling that was decided by the government does not suit us, we are fighting to ensure that the vaccination campaign is deployed quickly.

Your role as co-president begins as the fight against the Duplomb Law is underway. Will it have specific effects overseas?

This law will be bad everywhere . It's just that, in our country, since the chlordecone crisis , we have truly realized that pesticides, even if we sometimes have to use them, can be extremely harmful.

We are wary of plant protection products and view this Duplomb law very negatively. We were assured that chlordecone could treat plants without posing any risk to humans; we now know that this is false and that the soil is contaminated for a long time. We will not accept the reintroduction of substances that can be toxic to humans.

What priority measures do you want to implement as co-president of Modef?

Being a female co-president makes me particularly want to make women's voices heard. In too many farms, women are still the service people who play the roles of technicians, salespeople, nurses, secretaries, accountants and household managers, but without recognition and without access to responsibilities .