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I've been hearing about some good things happening in France too (and many further afield).

Bec Hellouin is a productive, healthy farm in Bretagne which follows permaculture principles. They've been taking part in studies to see how viable organic market gardening can be. Asking if 1/4 acre is enough to provide a job for 1 person (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8alcGWNyX8&t=7m35s). Read more about them here https://www.fermedubec.com/english/ and the studies are linked to from this page https://www.fermedubec.com/la-recherche/les-rapports-scienti... (in english down the bottom).

There are also some good farms practicing agroforestry, an example later in the video linked to above.

The examples are such a small drop in the ocean, but from Sepp Holzer in Austria to Ridgedale in Sweden, momentum for restorative agriculture will grow. Hopefully swiftly, but that's also dependant on government policy.

My uncle has been a farmer for quite a while and his children took on the farm after he "retired" (you never really retire when you're a farmer). I've worked with them and I've never seen them water the crops. They don't even own the tools to do so and yet they're growing cereals (and a hundred cows) on 300 acres. They live in the east of France where I've never seen crops being watered. Not to say that you're wrong but I can't confirm your statement given my experience with farmers.

300 acres is a tiny farm especially for a mix of cereals and cows. It's only going to profitable with massive subsidies and as doing a better job is probably not that important vs. collecting government handouts.

I don't know how most of France operates, but small operations are generally a vast waste of resources.

My bad I got my math wrong, it's 330 hectares which equals roughly 815 acres.

I live in the Luberon on a hectare of land. But check this out— all real estate sales of land claimed to be agricultural land (such as mine,) must be approved by a farm association. So farmers can even control the buying and selling of my home that they don’t even own. If, for example, I wanted to buy up a bunch of agricultural land and turn it into a nature preserve, that sale could be blocked by a third party despite not having any ownership rights to the land in question.

It’s a bit insane.

If farmers are “sacred”, how do you explain their horrible suicide rate?

There are a lot of problems with the french agro-food industry; but I wouldn't blame farmers alone.

"horrible" is going a bit too far? It is 20% higher than average. http://www.lepoint.fr/sante/en-france-les-agriculteurs-se-su...

Considering we are talking about people killing themselves, I don’t think so.

Yes any suicide rate would be horrible.

A suicide rate 20% higher than another suicide rate is 20% more horrible, which is not horribly more horrible unless we've diluted the meaning of horrible which would mean the we don't think the suicide rate is too bad.

Suicide is normally a preventable death, and suicide is a leading cause of death. So if a population has 20% higher than average rate of death by suicide that's a pretty big deal.

> If farmers are “sacred”, how do you explain their horrible suicide rate?

There's no contradiction between the two? The suicide rate of farmers is a little above average, probably because, in spite of all the subsidies and advantages, they still have a very hard time making a living.

But farmers are still sacred in the sense that it's impossible to suggest that maybe the current state of affairs is suboptimal, or to have a serious public conversation about that policy.

Question from someone who knows nothing about this and is trying to understand: how much of agriculture in France is dominated by big agriculture? Is it possible that small farmers are having a hard time while economics of scale and subsidies work well for big ag?

Not knowing that much either, but I was more under the inpression that farmers working small had a better chance to live decently than the ones working on big contracts.

My perspective is how supermaket chains establish almost direct relations with producers and waive their weigh around to get better and better deals as time goes. Basically a variant of cuting the middle layers to eliminate bargaining power.

Yup. And that is how farmers find themselves with huge debts, because they are strongly advised by companies to buy big machines.

Is that measured in suicide attempts, or successful suicides? Because if it's successful suicides it might just be that the number of attempts is the same, but they have more effective methods of killing themselves, like pesticides:

https://80000hours.org/2018/03/leah-utyasheva-pesticide-suic...

(I know Sri Lanka isn't France, and we cannot assume anything about French pesticide laws. I'm just offering another possibility)

That’s a good question, and an interesting point.

(though I think they mostly hang themselves)

Don't know about France but a definite problem in Ireland is that farming is 7 days a week 365 days a year job for many farmers and for those with a small holding making a living can be difficult. Add to the closing of rural pubs/post offices/shops social isolation is a real problem.

> The French countryside isn't charming, it's horrible

I don't know which countryside you've seen, but most of what I've seen is not ugly, with still a great number of forest and other non-ugly parts. Cultivated lands is half of the total surface. Also water is not expensive in France and is not used for agriculture in most parts of the country, where they get enough rain. Of course, I agree with you that seeing those ugly corn fields receiving water at 12h in summer is infuriating.

The part of the GDP is 4.5%, not 2%.

The alternative seems to be importing a lot of food that has been grown in countries that might care even less about the environment.

France has commonly been one of the five largest agriculture exporters for the last several decades. As recently as 1995 they were the world's #2 agriculture exporter after the US (I believe they're currently #6 or #7 globally, having lost ground the last few years).

As in the case with California exporting vast quantities of its water to Asia in the form of things like Almonds - at a steep resource cost for a very modest financial gain - France could clearly afford to reduce its agriculture exports at minimum cost to its overall economy and reduce the strain on its natural resources.

The part that you don't see in those numbers is that "affording to reduce exports" really means that many people would have to drastically change the life style their families had for centuries. It's not easy for farm owners who've had that land for generations to just turn the switch and start living of something else. In Europe workforce has a lot more of inertia than in US or Canada, people are far less used to relocating and re-skilling in the search for jobs...

No, the alternative is importing food from countries who have a competitive advantage in agriculture, such as the United States — thus improving the economic condition of the 98% of French who aren’t farmers.

Also, your theory holds no water: France still manages to import vast numbers of cheap Chinese consumer goods which are often produced under extraordinary bad environmental conditions. So if the idea that France is saving the environment by farming more, then it would follow that they’d be making more consumer goods for similar reasons. But they aren’t.

Go talk to Venezuela about competitive advantage. They purposefully neglected their native food production in favour of food imports from abroad. Now they cannot source enough USD to import enough food and they are fucked.

Food is a national security issue. You cannot become dependent on other countries.

And yet being protectionist isn’t great either and leads to situations exactly like the one discussed here. Obviously the Venezuelan situation is a bit more complex than described and while being able to support ones self is important, pouring money into losing sectors is wasteful. Some pretty big countries aren’t self sufficient for food and most countries aren’t self sufficient for everything. TLDR get on with your neighbours and as many others as possible.

Food's certainly a national security issue, but this has almost zero relevance to the French farming subsidies being discussed here, or similar subsidies in most other countries.

Those subsidies are just enacted to serve entrenched farming interests, usually because rural voters have a disproportionate say in national politics.

If a country was designing a food subsidies policy that was truly concerned about national security they'd do things like maintain a strategic buffer of cheap canned goods, and certainly wouldn't be subsidizing expensive to produce calories like French cheese other animal products which are highly inefficient per produced calorie.

You're mischaracterising the issue. Cheese isn't the issue at hand. Caloric efficiencies are a valid point, but here the greater harm is done by the huge thirsty corn fields that encompass the horizon.

The question as I understand it is whether the surplus production/exports are worth not scaling slightly back on the extensive farming.

Either diversifying production, letting a part of the area to fallow or splitting large "strictly for profit" farms into distinct units would have many benefits ecologically and possibly even help revitalise the rural towns.

Cheese specifically isn't the issue at hand, but French cheese producers are one of many beneficiaries of French agricultural subsidies, but I don't see how anyone could argue that the relatively inefficient production of cheese has strategic value in the sense that you'd need to feed an otherwise starving population cheese.

You'd instead at the very least just have them drink the milk directly, but more efficiently either consume the corn the cows are eating, or grow something in the grass fields the cows are using that people could eat directly.

Then there's the unrelated question of whether these subsidies aren't causing a net harm on the environment in France. I don't know about that, I'm just pointing out that the argument for agricultural subsidies due to national security concerns doesn't hold up if it's being used to defend anything resembling current subsidies.

That's before we even get to discussing how implausible that argument is to begin with. OK, maybe France and other EU countries would need to strategically make sure they don't become reliant on the likes of China, Russia etc. for food imports.

But it makes no sense these days that France would need to be concerned that they couldn't just largely import food from Spain and Italy, who have onerous EU-imposed production quotas due to French agricultural lobbying, even though it's more efficient to produce the food there in many cases.

I think suggesting today's outcome in Venezuela as the result of intention to have imports rather than the obviously bad result of land redistribution is disingenuous. Chavez took land from farmers and gave it to people who had never farmed before. That's not intentionally relying on food imports. That's shooting yourself in the gut while on a drunken bender.

Yes, but Venezuela isn't part of the largest trading and political union on the planet. France could easily rely on food from any other EU country and they would be fine.

This is one of the rare issues where there is sensible middle ground.

I'm a big fan of agricultural subsidies (you want food to be produced in wild excess of demand for a number of reasons), but you can still regulate agricultural practices to eliminate ones which are unnecessarily environmentally destructive for marginal gains in production.

France has every competitive advantage with regard to soil and climate and technology. And the USA (notably California) is an example for bad toxic wasteful agriculture.

Besides: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/09/netherlands-is-world-n...

No, the alternative is changing agriculture, regulating it and helping it be more environmentally friendly, and not alleviating environment taxes on fuel and water. Tax pesticides, too.

Well, these are both alternatives. But I like your one more, let's work on that.

>regulating it

Why no one has thought of that before? Problem solved!

If we regulate it and tax pesticides, then in a global market system, wouldn't those areas fail to compete with other countries that don't have those regulations?

Could say the exact same about consumers.

>> Why is there no one to say, this has gone too far; why can't we hold those people accountable for what they have done and what they are doing, I don't understand.

Probably because they're growing food, which most people consider necessary.

Besides, before getting to the farmers and the destruction they have wrought on to the environment, there is plenty of scope to look at the behaviour of, oh, I don't know - the companies that sell the pesticide the farmers use, just off the top of my head? Not to mention other industries that cause much more harm to the environment than agriculture, which is, at the end of the day, something we literally can't live without.

So you are essentially blaming peaticide companies for the pesticide use by farmers?

That’s like blaming a murder on the bullet factory.