Politics comes to the aid of the county, accused of being "an ecologically bad product"

This lesson is worth a cheese, no doubt. A controversy surrounding the environmental impact of Comté, the best-selling PDO cheese in France, has sparked the ire of dairy farmers and inflamed the political class on Monday, May 12.

The controversy was sparked at the end of April by an environmental and anti-speciesist activist during a segment on France Inter . On the station's microphone, Pierre Rigaux quoted a study explaining that Comté cheese seems to have "become a bad product from an ecological point of view" . After highlighting the pollution of waterways by the droppings of cattle used to make this emblematic product of the Jura massif, he called for people to do without this hard cheese, which is "rather bad for their health" , recalling that "cheese kills and makes animals suffer just as much as meat".

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Comté producers were quick to respond. "These attacks are hurtful and unfair given the high standards we impose on ourselves in the region," Alain Mathieu, president of the Interprofessional Committee for Comté Management, told AFP. Referring to the strict specifications that govern production, he went on to argue that "the environment and the preservation of our resources" were among the priorities of the industry, which represents 14,000 direct and indirect jobs.

Pierre Rigaux's statements caused such a stir that the prefect of the Jura department, Pierre-Edouard Colliex, reacted this Saturday on his X account, using the hashtag #TouchePasAuComté: "Comté is Jura, with flavor, calcium, protein... and zero guilt. […] Banning it? It's like banning sunsets over the Jura. Let's be serious!"

Several National Rally MPs also spoke out to "protect" the iconic Jura cheese, including local Julien Odoul , who is also a regional member of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté. On the right, Laurent Wauquiez, presidential candidate for the Republicans party , saw the denunciation of comté cheese as a "project […] for a France without identity and without flavour."

Faced with the outcry, the national secretary of the Ecologists, Marine Tondelier , relayed a party press release on X on Monday to "re-establish some truths about Comté": "The Ecologists have never asked to stop eating it, and even less to ban it," she maintained. The Ecologists of Franche-Comté also reiterated their support for the sector, "built on cooperative values ​​and an exemplary organization," while adding that it was "not possible to deny the environmental impact of livestock farming and cheese factories, even under AOP."

The Besançon regional environmental prosecutor's office opened investigations after cloudy water, white foam, sewage odors, and dead fish were reported between 2019 and 2020 near dairies with significant wastewater treatment failures. Two cheese factories were initially fined heavily in 2022.

Having become undersized, the treatment plants of the dairies in question discharged "untreated water into the environment, with a catastrophic effect on the environment" , on very permeable soil, the Besançon public prosecutor Etienne Manteaux had analyzed at the time.

"Using individual negligence to discredit the entire industry is unacceptable," Alain Mathieu defends himself. In a vast "cheese plan" launched in 2022, the prefectural authority had ordered 14 of the 96 cheese factories in Doubs to bring their processing facilities into compliance or repair defective pipes.

Almost all of them were now compliant by 2024, according to the DDETSPP, the state department responsible for economic change. But for the environmental association SOS Loue et rivières comtoises, the issue is above all the quantity of milk produced: "in 30 years, the county has more than doubled its production, going from 30,000 tonnes in 1991 to 72,000 in 2024," says the environmental association, for which the specifications "do not go far enough at all."

"The number of cows has certainly not increased, but they produce more milk than before, meaning they eat more and produce more excrement... which contributes to the increase in nitrates in our rivers," the association summarizes.