Claude Gruffat (France) - Erasmus entrepreneurs

Claude Gruffat (France) - MEPs



Claude Gruffat



"Like many people of my age, I don't speak English and I have only worked in France. This is something I missed a lot before discovering here, in the European Parliament, what multiculturality can bring and the new ideas it enables to emerge. I want to show the younger generation what I have missed the most. Please travel, go abroad: you will discover how enriching it is to learn from our European colleagues. Especially since you will have the chance to learn from experienced entrepreneurs who have been where you are today!"


Claude Gruffat: short bio

Since February 2020, Claude Gruffat has been an MEP working in the AGRI (agriculture), ECON (economic and monetary affairs) and IMCO (internal market and consumer protection) committees. Objectively, nothing predestined him to be elected one day. Born on a Savoyard dairy farm, rather reserved and not very inclined to show off, it was quite natural for him to follow a career path in agriculture. He became an agricultural adviser and for 15 years practised this fascinating profession in the Centre-Val De Loire region, advising farmers in their daily lives and young people on their installation. Day after day, he supported all these people in the development of the productivist and chemical agricultural model, inherited from the post-war period. As time went by, he was able to measure the dramatic consequences of this agricultural model that he was helping to perpetuate. This model pushed to the extreme the over-indebtedness, the pollution, the standardisation of our food, the disappearance of biodiversity and the despair of the farmers leading - in the best of cases - to the rural exodus and in the worst of cases to suicides. At the end of the 1970s, he joined an emerging movement that was beneficial to the environment, human health and peasant jobs: organic farming. From then on, he became a militant and an entrepreneur. By structuring a local purchasing group, then by joining the Biocoop cooperative network, of which he ended up being CEO from 2004 to 2019.

He is now working on a sustainable model of agriculture and a sustainable economy that works for the people and for the planet.

Claude is very happy to contribute to the Erasmus for Young Entrepreneurs programs as it gives the opportunity for young people to learn from other cultures in the EU and to open to new ways of doing entrepreneurship.


https://www.facebook.com/c.gruffat/

https://twitter.com/gruffat_claude

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLp-UfHaiHZ7uRHwt5toFmdm1o_axLXNIu

https://www.linkedin.com/in/claude-gruffat-5a080414b

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