Protecting the Farmers of France

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/11/world/europe/protecting-the-farmers-of-france.html

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VIEUX MANOIR, France — The wheat harvest is winding down here in northern Normandy, the last region in France to bring in its crops. Farmers here say this promises to be a bumper year, but that doesn’t mean they are happy.

Over the past month, farmers across France have taken to the roads to protest their anger at a drop in meat and milk prices, sporadically throwing up barricades of tractors and burning tires on main highways and near popular tourist sites. Here in the Seine-Maritime region, more than 500 farmers blocked bridges across the Seine in late July.

“Livestock farmers are having a very difficult time,” said Sébastien Windsor, president of the local Chamber of Agriculture. “This has led to discouragement and yes, anger.”

Mr. Windsor, who grows grain and raises pigs on a 500-acre farm, points to falling prices that are unsustainable for farmers. In a region known for its dairy cows, milk prices have dropped 25 percent since 2014 to 300 euros per 1,000 liters — roughly $330 per 265 gallons — about €40 less than production costs. Meat prices have fallen about 20 percent since 2013, partly because of Russia’s embargo imposed last year in response to European Union sanctions against Moscow’s aggression in Ukraine.

But geopolitics are not what has driven French farmers to protest. Reflecting growing discontent with the European Union itself, their anger has focused on produce coming into France from neighboring countries from the bloc that, in their view, has undercut French food prices. This explains the farm protest’s latest targets — food trucks coming from Germany and Spain, and even wholesale markets inside France.

According to local news reports, farmers near Avignon raided a local market on July 31, triumphantly producing evidence of “unfair competition” in the form of Dutch beef, foie gras from Bulgaria, Italian watermelons and Spanish plums, delivered in shopping carts to the doorstep of local officials.

So much for the “common market.” As a German farm union leader warned, such national boycotts would put “in question the foundations of Europe.”

Yet Mr. Windsor argues that what is needed is not “less Europe,” but “more Europe” — in the form of a greater harmonization of norms and regulations that would level the farmers’ playing field across Europe.

“Europe should be more effective in helping the member states overcome these kinds of price distortions,” he said. “The question is how to get out of a system that is killing our production. Do we want to end up with no local produce because France is suffering from a competitive disadvantage?”

France has always fought hard to protect the small farms that guarantee the quality of its produce and the scenic beauty of its countryside. The concern now is that this system is at risk, battered by competition from countries that favor larger, industrial-scale agriculture, with cheaper labor and less rigorous environmental regulations.

To save their model, some farmers, including Mr. Windsor, are even willing to review France’s social charges, which protect cherished benefits to employees at considerable expense to employers.

In the meantime, the farmers are trumpeting a “buy French” campaign, calling for better labeling to help consumers stay loyal to their farmers and putting greater pressure on schools and other public institutions to serve French food. “It is not about nationalism,” Mr. Windsor said. “It is about supporting a system that protects our countryside, and better-quality produce.”

He cites the cases of Chinese rabbits and Brazilian chickens found in school kitchens. “There is nothing strange about that since that they are much cheaper,” he said. “The question is whether the norms that are imposed on us are imposed on what is offered to the French consumer.”

Sitting on his loading dock, supervising the trucks bringing in their loads of wheat, Mr. Windsor said the government’s emergency aid package of €600 million — including loans and tax relief — was just a stopgap measure.

“That will give some oxygen to those that are hurting most,” he said, “but that doesn’t address the problem.”