Published last autumn, a report by the Senate Economic Affairs Committee draws up a harsh indictment of agricultural policies, thinking of an upward shift, a palliative intended to counterbalance Ferme France’s lack of competitiveness, but which it resists the food insecurity of more and more French people and the issues of sovereignty and generational change. Dive into five lifelines.
Neither the cherry tomato nor the organic ones have made it possible to counter the Moroccan and Spanish tomatoes, with unbeatable production costs, sometimes with the accomplice support of French and European public policies. Will salvation pass through the heirloom tomato, the last tidbit to date? Or from the scarcity of water resources… in Morocco.
France has concentrated its efforts on whole chicken as a sign of quality, whose consumption is stagnating, to the detriment of standard chicken and fillets, whose consumption and imports are booming. Our country is paying dearly for its family model and the diversification of production, according to a senatorial report
According to a senatorial report, wheat-producing France owes its granary to its (but limited) yields, its CAP bonuses (declining) and its silos (aging), while the state chains the scythe of environmental overpayments and underinvestment in research, in a context of growing competition with wheat from the Black Sea. Downstream there are lumps in the flour and cracks in the rusk.
According to a report by the Senate, the strategy consisting in eluding a lack of competitiveness by going towards the high range considered more profitable turns out to be totally counterproductive, making a bed for imported apples and mortgaging the renewal of orchards and producers.
The competitiveness of the dairy sector operates on the backs of overworked and underpaid farmers, to the detriment of investments and, more seriously, the drying up of the installed population, the herd of cows and, ultimately, the whole dairy ecosystem: this the conclusion, with a nice ladle, of the Senate Economic Affairs Committee, which fears “a vast social plan”.
