In fall 2019, the French Interior Ministry announced the creation of a gendarmerie unit called Demeter, designed to "combat agribashing and trespassing on farms." The ministry justified the creation of this unit by citing a sharp rise in attacks on the agricultural world, committed in particular by environmentalist and anti-speciesist activists. In several areas of France, agribashing monitoring bodies were set up at the same time, bringing together the services of the prefect, the gendarmerie, local intelligence services, the public prosecutor's office and farming unions.

What has been the outcome of these measures? Far from the rhetoric that legitimized the opening of the hunt for agribashing in 2019, this phenomenon remains virtually invisible five years on. At the same time, it is at the heart of parliamentary proposals to toughen the penal response to the actions of environmental activists.

To estimate the scale and frequency of these "ideological attacks" on the farming world, the ARIA association requested from 10 prefectures in western France – chosen because of the high concentration of livestock farms in the area – the disclosure of documents relating to the activity of the agribashing monitoring bodies placed under their responsibility, under the law on access to administrative documentation. The organization, which specializes in environmental and climate surveys, requested the minutes of meetings of these bodies and all internal notes concerning them, drawn up between February 2020 and January 2024. By return mail or through the Commission for Access to Administrative Documents, ARIA obtained the requested information for six prefectures, which it shared with Le Monde.

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