For a week now, the farming world has been expressing its anger openly and in deed: that of a profession that has become virtually impractical, crumbling under the brutality of the ecological upheavals that are on the horizon and under asphyxiating economic, regulatory, administrative and technological constraints.
At a time when blockades are continuing just about everywhere, we would like to offer a few updates on the situation from the Soulèvement de la Terre movement (the Earth’s Uprisings).
We are a movement of urban and rural dwellers, ecologists and peasants, both settled and new. We reject the polarisation that some people try to create between these worlds. We have made the defence of land and water our point of entry and anchorage. These are the working tools of farmers and the environments that nurture them. We have been campaigning for years against the major development projects that are ravaging them, and the industrial complexes that are poisoning and monopolising them. Let’s be clear, the current movement, in all its heterogeneity, has this time been initiated and largely driven by forces other than our own. Some of its stated objectives are different, while others we absolutely agree with. Be that as it may, when the first blockades began, we joined some of the blockades and actions from various local committees. We went to meet mobilised farmers. We talked to our comrades from different farmers’ organisations to understand their analysis of the situation. We found ourselves in the dignified anger of those who refuse to resign themselves to their extinction.
We can only rejoice that the majority of farmers are blockading the country today. The fact that they are represented by the FNSEA and agribusiness bosses in negotiations with the government is appalling, at a time when the executives of the majority union are being roundly whistled at at some blockades and the union can no longer hold back its members. Many of the people at the blockades are not union members and do not feel represented by the FNSEA.
«Two-thirds of farm businesses have no economic reason to exist. We agree on reducing the number of farmers» – Michel Debatisse, General Secretary of the FNSEA, 1968
Founded after the war, this hegemonic union has accompanied the development of the agro-industrial system for decades, in co-management with the State. It is this system that puts the noose around the neck of farmers, exploiting them to feed its profits and ultimately pushing them into debt to expand in order to remain competitive or disappear. In 1968, Michel Debatisse, then Secretary General of the FNSEA before becoming its President, declared [1]: «Two-thirds of agricultural ehttps://basta.media/enquete-Salaires-dirigeants-cooperatives-triskalia-coop-de-France-inegalites-agriculteurs-adherents#:~:text=11%20500%20euros%20%3A%20c’est,dans%20le%20Finist%C3%A8re%2C%20en%20Bretagne; https://www.latribune.fr/economie/france/mediapart-revele-les-salaires-des-dirigeants-de-la-fnsea-payes-par-les-cotisations-des-agriculteurs-840217.htmlnterprises have no economic raison d’être. We agree that the number of farmers should be reduced». The mission has been more than successful: the number of farmers and farm workers has fallen from 6.3 million in 1946 to 750,000 at the latest census in 2020. While the number of tractors in the countryside increased by around 1000%, the number of farms fell by 70% and the number of people working in agriculture by 82%: in other words, more than 4 out of 5 people working in agriculture left the profession in just four decades, between 1954 and 1997. And the slow haemorrhage continues today…
While the average size of a farm in France in 2020 will be 69 hectares, that of Arnaud Rousseau, the current head of the FNSEA, a former broker and trader straight out of a business school, is 700 hectares, and he is at the head of around fifteen companies, holding companies and farms, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the industrial and financial group Avril (Isio4, Lesieur, Matines, Puget, etc.), Managing Director of Biogaz, and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the food and agriculture group Biogas. He is Chairman of the Board of Directors of the industrial and financial group Avril (Isio, Lesieur, Matines, Puget, etc.), Managing Director of Biogaz du Multien, a methanisation company, Director of Saipol, the French leader in the transformation of seeds into oil, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Sofiprotéol, etc.
FNSEA executives and the heads of the biggest agricultural cooperatives – who are amply represented by the «Fédé» and its satellites – are gorging themselves [1]: the average monthly income of the ten best paid people in 2020 at the Eureden cooperative is €11,500.
The average incomes of farmers trumpeted on TV and the myth of the organic unity of the farming world conceal a staggering disparity in incomes and violent socio-economic inequalities that are no longer acceptable: the margins of small producers continue to erode while the profits of the agro-industrial complex soar.
Worldwide, the percentage of the selling price that goes to farmers has fallen from 40% in 1910 to 7% in 1997, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Between 2001 and 2022, distributors and agri-food companies in the dairy sector saw their gross margins soar by 188% and 64% respectively, while producers’ margins stagnated or even went negative.
One of the reasons why farmers are blocking motorways, opening bottles of milk at Carrefour (Epinal-Jeuxey) or blocking Lactalis factories (Domfront, Saint-Florent-le-Vieil, etc.), ploughing up a car park (Clermont-l’Hérault), blocking the port of La Rochelle, emptying lorries from abroad, spraying a prefecture with liquid manure (Agen), turning a Macdo’s upside down (Agens), to osrtir is that the intermediary upstream industrialists (suppliers, agro-equipment salesmen, (suppliers, agro-equipment vendors, industrial seed companies, input and food vendors) and downstream (collection-distribution cooperatives such as Lactalis, supermarket and food manufacturers such as Leclerc) who structure the agro-industrial complex are robbing them of the products of their labour.
It is this plundering of added value organised by the sectors that explains why, today, without the subsidies that play a perverse role as crutches in the system (as well as benefiting mainly the biggest farmers) 50% of farmers would have a negative current result before tax: in dairy cattle, the margin excluding subsidies, which was €396/ha on average between 1993 and 1997, became negative at the end of the 2010s (-€16/ha on average), while the number of farmers taken into account by the Farm Accountancy Data Network in this sector fell over this period from 134,000 to 74,000 [2] …
International free trade agreements (denounced by both the Confédération Paysanne and the Coordination Rurale) put peasant farmers around the world in competition with each other and have accelerated this economic depredation. We are well aware that, today, when we talk about «liberalisation», «gains in competitiveness» and «modernisation» of structures, we are talking about the disappearance of farms and the decline of mixed farming (which now accounts for only 11% of farms), All that will be left is a green desert of industrial monocultures run by farmers at the head of increasingly indebted structures who have less and less control over their work tools and bank accounts, which end up belonging only to their creditors.
The facts are clear: the fewer farmers there are, the less they can earn, unless they keep expanding their farmland, devouring their neighbours in the process. In these conditions, to ‘become an entrepreneur’, as the FNSEA promises, is in reality to find oneself in the same situation as an Uber driver who has gone into debt up to his neck to buy his vehicle, even though he depends on a single client to carry out his activity… Add to this the brutality of climate change (extreme weather events, droughts, fires, floods, etc.) and the ecological disruption that is bringing in its wake the multiplication of emerging diseases and other epizootics, and the job becomes almost impossible, unbearable, so great is the instability.
If we are rising up, it is largely against the ravages of this agro-industrial complex, with the vivid memory of our families’ farms that we have seen disappear and the acute awareness of the abyss of difficulties that we are encountering in our own setting up. It is these industries and the mega-companies that accompany them, swallowing up the land and farms around them, speeding up the corporate demise of agricultural production, and thus quietly killing off the farming world. It is these industries that we have been targeting in our actions since the beginning of our movement – and not the peasant class.
While we claim that the social and economic liquidation of the peasantry and the destruction of living environments are closely correlated – with farms disappearing at the same rate as the birds of the field and the agro-industrial complex tightening its grip as global warming accelerates – we are not fooled by the deleterious effects of a certain industrial, managerial and technocratic ecology. In this respect, the management of agriculture through environmental and health standards is absolutely ambiguous. Whilst failing to protect the health of people and the environment, it has, behind its fine intentions, above all provided a new vector for the industrialisation of farms. The colossal investments required to comply with standards over the years have accelerated the concentration of farm structures everywhere, their bureaucratisation under permanent controls and the loss of the meaning of the profession.
We refuse to separate the ecological question from the social question, or to make it a matter of responsible consumer-citizens, of changing individual practices or of «personal transitions»: it’s impossible to demand that a farmer trapped in a hyper-integrated production chain make a U-turn and get out of industrial production, just as it’s shameful to demand that millions of people who are structurally dependent on food aid start «eating organic and locally». Nor do we want to reduce the necessary greening of the work of the land to a question of «regulations» or a «set of standards»: salvation will not come from strengthening the hold of bureaucracies over farming practices. No structural change will come about until we break free from the stranglehold of economic and technocratic constraints on our lives: and we can only break free through struggle.
While we have no lessons to teach farmers and no false promises to make to them, the experience of our struggles alongside peasants – whether against large-scale, pointless, imposed projects, against mega-pools, or to reclaim the fruits of the land grab – has given us a few certainties that guide our strategic bets.
Ecology will either be peasant and popular or it won’t be. The peasantry will disappear at the same time as people’s food security and our last margins of autonomy in the face of industrial complexes if a vast social movement does not rise up to take back the land in the face of land grabbing and destruction. If we don’t break down the barriers (free trade agreements, price deregulation, the monopolistic hold of the agri-food industry and hypermarkets on household consumption) that seal the grip of the market on our lives and agriculture. Unless the techno-solutionist headlong rush (the genetic biotechnology – robotisation – digitalisation triptych) is stopped. Unless the key mega-projects for restructuring the agro-industrial model are neutralised. If we don’t find the right levers to socialise food so as to secure producers’ incomes and guarantee the universal right to food.
We also believe in the fruitfulness and power of impromptu alliances. At a time when the FNSEA is seeking to regain control of the movement – in particular by chasing away from some of the blockade points it controls anything that does not resemble a «unionised» farmer – we believe that the turning point can come from the meeting between the mobilised farmers and the other fringes of the social and ecological movement that have risen up in recent years against the government’s predatory economic policies. «Corporatism» has always been a breeding ground for impotent farmers. Just as separation from agricultural livelihoods has often sealed the workers’ defeat.
Perhaps it’s time to break down a few walls. By continuing to strengthen certain blocking points. By going out to meet the movement for those who have not yet set foot in it. And in the coming months, we’ll be continuing the common struggles between local residents and land workers.
Les Soulèvements de la Terre (Earth Uprisings) – 30 January 2024
NOTES:
[1] https://basta.media/enquete-Salaires-dirigeants-cooperatives-triskalia-coop-de-France-inegalites-agriculteurs-adherents#:~:text=11%20500%20euros%20%3A%20c’est,dans%20le%20Finist%C3%A8re%2C%20en%20Bretagne; https://www.latribune.fr/economie/france/mediapart-revele-les-salaires-des-dirigeants-de-la-fnsea-payes-par-les-cotisations-des-agriculteurs-840217.html
[2] See : Atelier paysan, Observations sur les technologies agricoles, «Une production agricole ne valorisant quasiment plus le travail».
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