France’s pork crisis: symptomatic of an unsustainable agricultural model

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Road blocks, protests in front of prefectures, strong-arm visits to supermarkets: this summer French farmers have vented their anger at the excessively low prices paid for their products.

For 30 years, the agricultural sector has been caught in a web of cyclical crises, and yet the industrial model in place since the Second World War has not been called into question.

The latest crisis has driven Brittany’s pig farmers to mobilise to call for a ’decent’ price for their produce.

“At less than €1.40 (US$1.57) a kilo, a pig farmer earns nothing. Just the share that goes to feeding the animal amounts to €1,” explains Yves-Hervé Mingam, head of the young farmers’ union Jeunes Agriculteurs in Côtes d’Armor, Brittany, in the west of France.

Brittany supplies 60 per cent of French pork produce, and the activities linked to it – rearing, slaughter, processing – employ 30,000 people in the region.

Yet two of the main buyers – Cooperl, France’s leading group in the pork industry, and the private group Bigard, one of the leaders on the European meat market – have decided to boycott the Plérin auction near Saint-Brieuc, which sets the reference price twice a week for France as a whole. As a result, demand is falling and prices are stagnating under the €1.40 mark.

The pork crisis, as with the crisis faced by meat farmers in general, is also owed to the EU sanctions against Russia. In an interview with Equal Times, Christiane Lambert, vice president of the powerful national federation of farmers’ trade unions FNSEA (Fédération Nationale des Syndicats d’Exploitants Agricoles), points out that there is a glut of 750,000 tonnes of pork.

France, moreover, is becoming the outlet for surplus production from Germany and Spain – two countries each producing twice as much pork as France, and at a lower cost “given the more advantageous social and fiscal practices,” explains Lambert.

France is not the only EU country affected.

This summer, British dairy farmers stepped up their actions against low produce prices. Called to action by the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) and Farmers for Action (FFA), they organised “trolley dashes” to empty supermarket shelves of milk and donate it to charitable organisations.

Discontent is also mounting in Spain. On 10 August, a convoy of over 500 tractors in Galicia called on the government to ensure higher milk prices.

 

’Ecological’ farming: the solution?

On a world market where volatility goes hand in hand with deregulation – the end of the milk quotas in Europe, for example – the three main global production areas, the United States, Europe and Oceania, are waging a brutal price war.

The latest index published at the beginning of August by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) speaks for itself: overall, food prices are at their lowest in six years.

Yet this has apparently done little to help the state of malnutrition around the world. According to the World Food Programme (WFP): “There are 795 million hungry people in the world. That means one in nine people do not get enough food.”

In France, as admitted by the Agriculture Minister, Stéphane Le Foll, himself, 22,000 to 25,000 farms – that means 10 per cent of French animal farmers and 40,000 direct jobs – are threatened by the meat farming crisis.

According to the National Institute of Statistics (INSEE), over the last 20 years, the number of meat farmers has almost halved, falling to 515,000.

The INSEE also notes that “small and medium sized structures are the most affected, whilst the number of large farms is higher than in 1988”.

From his farm in Cesson-Sévigné, near Rennes, in the west of France, 49-year-old Michel Priour is philosophical about the situation. “The crises come back every five to six years and nothing is done to stop them. People from the FNSEA are liberals who don’t want the state to meddle in their affairs, but they are the first to knock on its door as soon as things go wrong.”

This plain-speaking, quick-witted man has chosen to progressively switch over to organic milk and meat production. He rears around 50 Normandy cows on pastures. Output is lower than with cows derived from genetic research but the milk is better quality.

Studies show cows that graze on grass produce healthier milk than those fed corn or soy, which is the norm on large farms.

“I’ve banned pesticides here. I don’t buy feed and I do everything I can to avoid using antibiotics to treat my cows,” explains Priour. “The problem is that conventional farmers throw themselves into investments to pay out less in social contributions and they use corn or soy to feed their cattle. A milking robot is €150,000 (US$169.000), plus €8000 to €10,000 (US$9000 to 11,000) in maintenance costs a year.”

According to Greenpeace, “ecological farming can produce up to 80 per cent more food per hectare in developing countries” and it is the only type of farming capable of feeding the global population between now and 2050, with the introduction, wherever necessary, of small, very productive, local farms.

Lambert smiles at this assertion. “In France, organic pork’s share of overall consumption is 2.7 per cent. Because it is very expensive.”

Over the last four years, the organisations grouped behind the FNSEA have been working on a “real plan” for sustainable agriculture and are preparing for the Paris Climate Conference with a catalogue of “concrete” proposals.

“Farmers are directly concerned by climate-related matters, because they are both impacted by them and involved in them,” explains Lambert. What she sees on the horizon in the next 20 years are “more professional, larger farms, making wide use of technology, which implies serious societal debates”.

“The real issue is that if seven billion people consume like the Americans or the Europeans, we’ve had it!” responds Priour. “People need to be taught to change their eating habits. There is no need to eat meat twice a day.”

 

This article has been translated from French.