Lhe agricultural volcano erupts again. In the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Romania and France, the demands are the same: more income, more consideration and fewer standards. An economic and identity crisis that is not new and will last for a long time. The agricultural world weighs little in terms of numbers, 2% of the population, but four times more if we include the rural environment as a whole and much more in the imagination of the French, as well as the Germans, the Dutch and of all countries whose peoples have long since left the fields for the cities.
This attachment is not only sensitive but also economic, political and ecological. Hence the contradictory demands that emerge with each new outbreak of anger. To resolve this insoluble equation, it is the States that come to bridge the gap. All major developed countries help their agriculture. The OECD’s annual report examined the agricultural policies of 54 global countries. Total support for this sector reached a record level of 851 billion euros between 2020 and 2022, two and a half times more than in the early 2000s.
And it is not France nor Europe which wins the prize in aid, but China, with 36% of this total, followed by India, the United States and the European Union. With a basic principle, the more fragile and unproductive agriculture is, the more it is supported. The three countries that help the most as a proportion of their total production are Switzerland (72%), Japan and South Korea.
In the average
France is in the European average. As former advisor to the Court of Auditors François Ecalle points out on his Fipeco website, the country spent nearly 26 billion euros in 2022 to help its farmers, or almost a quarter of its production. Around half are aid and subsidies, particularly European, and the rest comes largely from reductions in charges and the financing of social protection.
The reality is that this essential sector, for food and land use planning, has become a regulated profession. The subsidies it receives are in exchange for constraints of all kinds, arising from the political agenda and which are expressed through a profusion of standards. The disadvantage is a distortion of market rules, which are to the detriment of prices for the consumer and can direct production according to aid and not customer demand.
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