France | Budget 2025: the job cuts planned at the ONF are “inadmissible”, say unions

The elimination of 95 positions at the National Forestry Office (ONF), included in the 2025 draft budget, is considered “inadmissible” by the Office’s unions, whose missions are increasing in a suffering French forest.

While farmers see their taxes reduced, the tightening of the screws at the Ministry of Agriculture, Food Sovereignty and Forestry concerns almost exclusively the ONF, manager of French public forests whose workforce has already declined in recent years, going from 12,500 to 8,000 between 2000 and 2022.

“It’s no! », Warns the EFA-CGC, the only union representing both private and public law employees within the establishment. “This return to the old methods of stifling the ONF is unacceptable”, for the union, even though according to it “the management of the ONF like the new minister are committed to the defense” of the workforce.

Thursday evening, the ministry in fact indicated that “the priority of Minister” Annie Genevard would be “to support a stabilization” of the workforce.

“We will no longer be able to carry out our missions”

Faced with the attribution of additional missions, in particular to fight against the increased risk of fire in forests, and the scale of the needs for renewal and maintenance of massifs weakened by climate change, the ONF had obtained the cancellation job cuts planned in the State-ONF contract in 2023 and 2024.

The elimination of 95 FTEs was also planned for 2025, but the Office’s unions expected to see it canceled. “Cutting more positions is untenable, we will no longer be able to carry out our missions,” Patrice Martin, secretary general of Snupfen-Solidaires, the majority of public sector employees, told AFP.

“We are preparing an amendment to increase the staff of the office, which we will submit to the deputies. We are asking for 478 more FTEs, or one per service, because all services are on the fritz today,” he added.

For Armelle Noé, representative of executives on the Board of Directors of the ONF and member of the EFA-CGC, these job cuts have “no justification” while the ONF has improved its financial situation for two years, thanks in particular to the surge in wood prices.

In its latest report, published in September, the Court of Auditors considers that the ONF’s workforce, long in decline, “now appears insufficient to respond to the growing missions assigned to it.”