HASWhen the farmers’ movement was in full swing, a refrain kept recurring in the political and media discourse: crushed by the environmental standards dictated by the European Union, farmers would be the first victims of an ecology “punitive” imposed by a disconnected elite. The government’s announcements, by confirming the sacrifice of ecological measures essential to the preservation of agricultural ecosystems, went in the direction of these discourses, further widening the gap between agriculture and the protection of living things.
So, how can we reconcile agriculture and ecology? A thorny question, and difficult to approach in the media space, where projections linked to the figure of the farmer often obstruct reflections on the future of our food system.
Any public debate is anchored in shared beliefs, which structure the social group and allow it to give meaning to reality. The farmer, as shown by the wave of support generated by the movement, supported by nearly 90% of French people, occupies a privileged place in our national unconscious. If this empathy can, of course, be understood by the extreme difficulty of working conditions in the agricultural world and by its primordial importance, few necessary and arduous professions enjoy such popularity in France.
Heroes of popular literature
Unsurprisingly, many political figures, aware of this popularity, have seized on the subject to draw the most convenient and anti-ecological conclusions, often based on this simple presupposition: farmers would be the best experts and, consequently, the best protectors of “nature”.
An idea that hides a more complex reality. First, it would assume a certain homogeneity of agricultural practices, thus masking the substantial differences between intensive agriculture and sustainable models, and their impacts on living things. Then, it reinforces the systematic association between agriculture and ecology, even though the dominant productivist model is one of the main causes of climate change. But where does this association come from, and why such rhetorical and political effectiveness?
To understand this, we need to go back to the 19th century.e century and the socio-economic upheavals which changed the perception of the peasantry in Western Europe. The agricultural revolution made possible not only the growth of industry, but also the increase in population, improved nutrition and large-scale urbanization. It is against this background of profound historical transformations that the figure of the farmer evolves in literature and the media.
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