Despite dwindling numbers of farmers, the power of agriculture in France is still strong – as the annual Salon d’Agriculture in Paris, which opens today, shows. Yesterday was press day, and the Salon was the lead item on all media, they talked of little else. It’s an annual ritual that I suspect will become much less important if either Nicolas Sarkozy or Ségolène Royal is elected president. For two weeks, millions will flock by car, bus and train to France’s largest city to spend a couple of hours imagining they’re in the countryside. Needless to say, the pomp and fuss made of fancy bulls and pedigree pigs bears little relation to the real situation in rural France, which is disastrous. A survey in 2004 showed that half the people moving into rural France are below the official poverty line – which means they earn less than either 50 or 60% of the median wage-earner (the first figure is the French measure, the second the European). They cannot afford to live in towns, and in the country there is no work. The famous farmers so cosseted in this weekend’s press employ no one: in 30 years, farming has ceased to be a labour-intensive occupation and now, certainly round me, it is a purely family affair. European subsidies have enabled farmers to mechanise every part of the food-producing process, at the same time dig themselves deeply into debt since the subsidies are not 100%, whereas, in my view, those subsidies should be for paying wages beyond the family. Then of course the farm-equipment manufacturers would squeal – but since most have already moved their manufacturing outside France….. But no one wants to hear that: Sarkozy’s publicity director puts him on a poster against a backdrop of an idyllic French village – la France éternelle. 16 years ago, the same idea worked well for Mitterrand, and we all know France has not changed one iota since.
Jacques Chirac, who spent four hours at the Salon yesterday, is constantly referred to as the farmers’ friend, mainly because way back in 1976 when he was Minister of Agriculture he defended their rights tooth and claw against Britain and Brussels. It’s a trick he has repeated often since, each time to great applause: yesterday he did it again, lambasting that perfidious Brit, Peter Mendelson who only has to twitch his pen for all France to boo. But in between times the farmer’s friend has done strictly nothing to prevent rural decline – as if his annual visit to the Salon patting heads was enough to keep the peasants happy. But farmers are fed up that in this election campaign the candidates (and M. Chirac) waste their time banging on about the environment. Thus far they haven’t addressed real farming issues: money. That will change this week of course, as each candidate visits the Salon. The air will be thick with extravagant promises about defending the Common Agricultural Policy to their dying breath – more methane to add to that produced by the cows. The only candidates to talk honestly about subsidies, Bayrou and Bové, both practicing farmers, have pointed out that they distort trade and hurt, kill farmers in the developing world. And then Bové wonders why rural mayors are not endorsing him!

Farmers want to produce food to feed the masses, a virile, status-rich occupation, not receive a monthly cheque from a computer in Brussels for titivating a few hedgerows –for farmers are as much seduced by rural nostalgia as townies, and look back through rose-tinted spectacles at the time when all winter we ate nothing but the potatoes, Swedes or chestnuts (if we were lucky) grown in good French soil, and meat was a once a month luxury.

Two or three evenings a week I visit lonely farms to give the children extra English lessons. Nobody could claim that their parents are poor, but they far from well-off after working long and anti-social hours. They know their world is changing, if not disappearing, and their children had better adapt. The simple time-honoured expedient of inheriting the family farm will be much less attractive in ten years’ time.

Two figures: there are 1 million farmers active in France - and nearly 2 million retired. That merits reflection. Traditionally most rural mayors (those chaps so sought after for their endorsement by the “small” candidates) are retired farmers, they have kept local power leaning their way. But that too is changing, in my neighbouring village the mayor and ten of his councillors live and work far way, in large towns. They return to the village where they grew up most weekends, but inevitably their mindset is now urban. Similarly the vast majority of the millions who visit the Salon d’Agriculture will get in the car afterwards and drive to the nearest supermarket to buy (at best) a nice piece of shrink-wrapped (special offer) meat, vegetables ‘produced in the European Union’ and fruit from a long way away. At best. Even in France a growing number opt for the prepared meal, the frozen veg, the ready-to-eat pudding. The one piece of French produce they will buy is cheese – although increasingly in supermarkets that is industrial, as unpasteurised milk becomes proscribed by Brussels. That is the reality of agriculture – what it produces has to be cheap and safe and as far removed from the realities of farming as possible. A few years ago I was helping one of Bové’s neighbours on the Larzac plateau milk her sheep. As she worked, the sheep she was milking shat into the bucket of milk. Calmly she hoiked out the turd and carried on milking.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 4th, 2007 at 9:23 am and is filed under The real issues. 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.