OPINION: Tractor protests expose the hypocrisy of French farming policies

Local France

4 days ago

We seem to be going through a period of 'peak France'. Farmers with €200,000 tractors besieged the National Assembly this week; taxis blocked roads all over France.
A pro-farmer law, scrapping some environmental rules, was rejected by the Assembly on Monday. So the farmers were furious? No, they were delighted and took their tractors home.
Taxi unions won concessions from the government at the weekend. So the taxi-drivers were delighted? No, they were furious. The blockades continue.
The law lifting some green constraints on farming was about to be blocked in the Assembly by an avalanche of amendments by the Left and the Greens. By rejecting their own law in advance, with help from the Far Right, the government ensured that the final word would go to the right-leaning and farmer-friendly Senate.
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On Saturday, the taxi unions persuaded the government to reconsider proposed new rules on when, and how much, taxis can be paid by the state to take people to and from medical appointments. Not enough, said the taxi-drivers. They wanted guarantees that they would lose no money and that new restrictions would be placed on on-line chauffeur services like Uber.
Both disputes raise larger issues. The taxi row is a reminder of how easily the French state manages to pile up deficits and how hard it is to reduce them.
The health service spent €3 billion on taxi fares for patients last year – a 45 percent increase in five years. The money has become vital to taxi companies in rural areas but also to city taxi-drivers who have lost income to Uber and others. Officially, no one can explain the sudden boom in 'ambulance taxis' but it coincides suspiciously with the rise in on-line competition for 'normal' taxi fares.
The farming dispute is even more elemental. Stripped of its arcane procedural manoeuvres, the proposed new law is a reminder of the hypocrisy at the core of agricultural policy in France for the last half century or more.
France, we are told, is a country of family farms, pretty villages and high-quality food. Yes, it is, in some places. It is also a country of mass-production of wheat and sugar-beet in chemical-soaked prairies as vast as any in Nebraska or Alberta.
This week, Bruno Retailleau, the new leader of the Centre-right, boasted that French agricultural produce was the 'finest in the world'. This is an old and deliberate confusion. Some French cheeses and wine, and some fruit and vegetables, may be as fine as any in the world. But the real economic strength of French agriculture – and the real political power in the farming industry – lies with vast agri-industrial companies and huge farms which mass-produce cereals, pork and industrial cheeses.
For decades, France claimed to be a country of small farms and high-quality food while it pursued policies that encouraged large farms and indiscriminate production. As recently as 1980, France had one million farms. It now has 390,000. More than 100,000 farms have been lost, or rather merged, in the last 15 years alone.
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Some of this is inevitable. But successive French governments, with only one or two honourable exceptions, including part of the Macron era, have brayed about 'family farms' while fork-loading European subsidies into the bank accounts of large farms and agri-industries.
In recent years, EU and French policies have shifted, modestly or aggressively, depending on your viewpoint, towards protection of the environment. Some forms of pesticides have been banned. Restrictions have been placed on factory-sized farm buildings and the pollution of streams and rivers with slurry and nitrogen fertilisers.
Some farmers welcome such policies. The left and green-leaning Confederation Paysanne sees environmental constraints as a way of protecting family farms, not destroying them.
The biggest farming union, the FNSEA, has long been dominated by large cereal farmers and agri-industrial companies. It pays lip service to small farms while pursuing policies which encourage large ones
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The increasingly powerful, Far Right-leaning farmers' union Coordination Rurale, has many small-farm members but detests all state and EU constraints (while cashing in the European subsidies). Coordination Rurale has also become, in effect, a low intensity terrorist movement, encouraging attacks on the offices of left-wing and green deputies and state environmental protection agencies.
The law blocked this week is one of the concessions made to farmers after the big tractor blockages led by the FNSEA and Coordination Rurale last year. It will, amongst other things, lift limits on the size of farm buildings, allow private, agricultural reservoirs and lift the ban on some pesticides.
They includes an insecticide called acétamipride, which has been banned in France since 2018 but is still allowed on most other EU countries. Sugar-beet and hazelnut growers say it is essential to protect their crops. Honey-produces say that it devastates their bees. Environmentalists say other, less aggressive, forms of protection are available.
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The balance of arguments is complex and technical. Should the livelihoods of some farmers be sacrificed to protect others? What about the reports suggesting that 80 percent of Europe's insects have vanished in the last 30 years?
French farmers say that it is unfair to expect them to work without pesticides available to their competitors in other EU countries. Environmental campaigners retort that the most direct and frequent victims of excessive pesticide use include farming families themselves.
In the Macron era, France has taken timid steps towards making French agriculture more environmentally friendly. Now it seems that some of those steps are to be reversed.
Once the Senate restores, or even intensifies, the proposed law on removing environmental constraints on farming, it will be a shift back towards hypocrisy as usual. France will continue to boast about the superior quality of its food and its 'traditional' pattern of farming. It will pursue policies which encourage the opposite.