English-speaking readers might be forgiven for thinking that there is only one paysan standing as candidate in the French presidential elections – the Roquefort cheese producing MacDonalds-basher, José Bové. But there is another, higher in the opinion polls and much more likely to get at least into the second round: François Bayrou. Born in the foothills of the Pyrenees, both his father and mother worked the family farm (Calixte and Emma, names that seem as old as French farming). When François Bayrou was 23, studying at Bordeaux university, his father was killed in a farming accident and overnight the young man became a farmer, later a teacher as well. Politics was the last thing on his mind.

Last Saturday at an agricultural fair in the Gers he made a major and delicate speech about the future of French farming. As you will see if you look at the video, his audience was not studded with rappers, left-bank intellectuals or any other Paris-Match favoured pipole, but some 500 farmers, a sea of white-haired, thick-set ruddy-faced men. Indeed, the second-most-noticeable-thing about Bayrou is his avoidance of big razzmatazz meetings, so beloved of his two principal rivals. He prefers to talk like an ordinary human-being at ordinary human-being-sized events. The most-noticeable thing about him is his spectacular rise in the opinion polls.

A farmer addressing farmers deep in farming France: a recipe, you’d think, for more of the “change the CAP over my dead body” stuff dealt out so often by Jacques Chirac. But no. Bayrou is the first French politician I have heard admit that the [French-inspired] CAP policy, based on production, is wrong for all sorts of reasons. One of these, says Bayrou, is that French farmers hold not only the “tissue agricole francais” in their hands, but “le tissue agricole de la plantète”. World agriculture, Bayrou says quite plainly, is endangered by the (French) agricultural policy. European subsidies on production have ruined African agriculture: “We have assassinated the African farmer,” he said “And this policy will be changed, so that we cannot be held responsible. We cannot let the African countries die of hunger.” For years the theory, pushed by Tony Blair, The Economist and their ilk, that the Common Agricultural Policy is actively harming African farmers, has been pooh-poohed by Chirac and those who want to maintain the pampered status quo of their dwindling agricultural voters. Bayrou’s stand is as brave as it is clear-headed.

Another consequence of the European agricultural policy, says M. Bayrou, is that whereas 20 years ago French farmers were independent, now they are totally dependent on subsidies (around me that is certainly true). At the same time the image of farmers has gone from being defenders of nature to nature’s principal polluters. Bayrou’s quiet but insistent message to the farmers was clear: be independent of Brussels with its stifling bureaucracy, live by and with the market. He suggests “new” markets such as growing cereals for biofuels. At the moment cereal-produced alternatives to fossil-fuels are almost unknown in France, whereas in the UK Tesco has been selling a bioethanol mix at its pumps for over a year. In France such an initiative could only come from the government: an announcement of future intent was made last June, but quietly forgotten, like so much else, during the long summer lunch-break.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 at 8:59 am and is filed under Political, François Bayrou, Ecology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.