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A local trout farmer is suing the company, owned by French multinational Danone, after a stream that fed his 17th-century fish ponds abruptly dried up.

The owner of the fish farm affirmed that the water tables are being dried up by Danone and its subsidiary, the bottled water company Société des Eaux de Volvic, whose boreholes are near his property.

Edouard de Féligonde, the owner of Saint-Genest l'Enfant fish farm, said, “Since the Danone group took control of the Société des Eaux de Volvic in 1993, withdrawals have quadrupled." 

"And that's how we have, not a drought as many would like us to believe, but a drying up of the sources of the property," he added.

Edouard de Féligonde filed a lawsuit against the Danone Group and the government agencies responsible for providing pumping licenses.

Despite all the criticism, the Société des Eaux de Volvic maintains that their activities have no impact on the supply of drinking water, arguing that they only withdrew 2.3 billion liters of water in 2020, which was less than the 2.8 billion liters the state had permitted.

However, the firm's assurances fail to ease the people's mounting rage, particularly in light of recent limitations on drinking water use brought on by falling groundwater levels.

“At the end of 2021, we decreed a first structural and definitive reduction of 10% its withdrawals authorization, and planned a second reduction of 10% for 2025," Guilhem Brun, head of the Direction Départementale desTerritoire of the Puy-de-Dôme, said.

"There is a structural decline of the resource. From our point of view, the reason is more to be found in other factors, in particular climate change. But it is not the Société des Eaux de Volvic that triggered the decline," he added.

The notion that the decline in water level is caused by global warming is disputed by Francois-Dominique de Larouzière, a geologist with the environmental defense group PREVA. 

Hydrobiologist Christian Amblard, also a member of PREVA, rang a bell, stressing that "it is the beginning of desertification of the area."

"We are not opposed in principle to the commercialization of water, but the priorities must not be reversed," he concluded.

With brands like Volvic, Evian, Vittel, and Perrier, France is both the world's largest supplier of bottled water and the origin of many of its most recognizable names.

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