‘When you understand that the take-it-or-leave-it prices now being offered [by wholesalers] mean that you’ll pay more to produce crops than you’ll get back in proceeds, you’re left with the choice of either becoming a slave to this impossible system or find a niche to begin other activities.’  This statement is from a French farmer, who took over her parents’ farm and diversified from crops to horseback excursions. She expresses a general trend in French agriculture. Since 1960, the number of farms in France decreased from 2 to 0.66 million in 2010. They employ less than 3 percent of the workforce. A further decline to 0.32 million by 2020 is expected. A fourfold increase in labour productivity in the last 40 years has transformed many farms into megaoperations run with an industrial mindset. Prices paid for crops have fallen 60 percent in this period – and still the gains in efficiency are insufficient to get a decent income, because the wholesalers who supply food processing companies have gotten access to even cheaper alternatives, such as wheat from Ukraine and strawberries from Morocco.

It is a downward spiral of competition and globalisation which, in combination with elimination and a ‘green’ re-orientation of European Union-subsidies, forces farmers to look for alternatives. One avenue is bio-agriculture in which quality, flavour and local tradition is emphasised. Another option is agritourism, which benefits from the infatuation of urban French citizens with the countryside. A third option, widely used also in other parts of Europe, is to let the farmer play a key role in landscape and nature management in its various forms. It appears improbable, however, that these trends will make major inroads in mainstream European agriculture.

Can the farmer be saved? In the summer of 2010, a group of farmers persuaded a fastfood chain to give them permission to sell their fruit and vegetables in the parking place. There was widespread media attention: ‘The raison d’ être of farmers is to feed people and manage the land, not the market…we work with a loss and consumers cannot pay our products…why do I get 17 cents for a kilo of apples and does the consumer pay 1,70 to 3 Euro’? Should the farmer be saved? Consumers benefit from lower prices and global competition forces farmers to be more competitive or leave it to – often poor – farmers elsewhere. From an equity and environmental perspective, that is not necessarily worse than subsidising European, or American, farmers. Inevitably, worldviews and painful trade-offs enter the evaluation.

[* The first two alineas are based on an article by Crumley, How to Save Rural France? in TIME August 2, 2010.]