French agriculture is by far the most important in Europe. A radical policy of modernization was implemented from the 1950s, later associated with Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The strategy has been successful, but its consequences include a series of social problems such as regional desertification, the aging of farming communities and the disappearance of debt-ridden small farms, together with a deterioration of the rural environment. Recent reforms of the CAP and the gradual opening of agricultural markets to international competition signal the ultimate failure of the ‘modern family farm’ model which was at the root of the policy consensus since the 1950s.
French agriculture is diverse. There is little common ground between large wheat producers such as Champagne, where extensive cultivation of fields extends way over the horizon, creating one of the most deserted landscapes to be found in Europe; specialized vineyards in Burgundy; and areas in the Alp foothills or around the Massif Central, where ageing communities die out, still practising mixed production in small farms. A common feature, however, is that all of the above are beset with problems and conflicts born of a rapid and brutal modernization process which has changed the face of French agriculture beyond recognition. These often assume an importance in French political life which may seem disproportionate to the actual social weight of agriculture. But the lateness of the modernization process, the continued pace of rural exodus, and nostalgia for a fast-disappearing "traditional" society, form part of the cultural background of a majority of the adult population; hence the frequent support given to farmers in their protest actions.
The cultural relevance of agriculture is still considerable. French children still learn the adage pronounced by Sully, a minister of King Henry IV, according to whom 'Labourage etpâturage sont les deux mamelles de la France' ('Ploughing and grazing are breasts feeding France'). France was indeed the corn-belt of Europe in the seventeenth century. However, it fell behind in the early twentieth century, withdrawing into a protectionist stance and lacking in investments. Then the French countryside took on the forms which have been used by writers such as Giono, in Regain, or Pagnol, in his L'Eau des collines novel or in recollections such as La Gloire de mon père. Both, in different ways, set their writing in an early twentieth-century Provence left behind by a fast-changing urban France.
Prospects for French agriculture changed in the 1950s. Modernization policies were pursued by successive governments, supported by the main farmers' union, the FNSEA. This consensual approach aimed to preserve the family farm unit by providing the means to modernize. Policies were organized around market stabilization strategies, cheap finances (through the Crédit Agricole), processing and marketing tools (especially through co-operatives which developed considerably since the 1960s), the restructuring of land property (for instance, remembrement (reassembling) seeks to create larger fields through land exchanges in order to facilitate mechanization), and hefty subsidies for drainage, hedge cutting, etc. The CAP reinforced this approach, guaranteeing and subsidizing internal prices and protecting European production against imports througha common tariff barrier. The system was soon eating most of the EU budget, creating huge stocks and benefiting mostly the larger farm businesses but also providing a fragile lifeline to the smaller family units. These policies were successful on a purely quantitative level. Undercapitalized and antiquated in the 1940s, French agriculture changed into a highly productive and technically up-to-date industry which, in the early 1990s, provided more than a quarter of EU production-this proportion rises to more than a third for wine, not surprisingly. France has also become the world's second agricultural exporter, behind the USA. However, this technical success has its darker side. Ultimately, the original aims of the postwar modernization programme have not been achieved-the medium-sized family farm is disappearing and the environmental, social and cultural costs of ensuring food security are considerable. In environmental terms, requirements of modern, mechanized agriculture, compounded with subsidized drainage, hedge-cutting and soil "improvement", have caused a complete change of landscape and a general deterioration of biological diversity in many regions. The concepts of terroir or pays (a subregional geographical areas forming an ecological, historical, cultural and agricultural unit) have lost their relevance, despite a recent fashionable comeback. At a social level, the consequences of modernization policies have been severe. The number of farms and the size of the workforce are still falling. The population active in agriculture was reduced from 3.9 to 2.1 million people between 1962 and 1975, and continued to fall thereafter to only 1.2 million in 1993. It can be expected to fall further, since more than half of French farmers were aged 50 or more in the early 1990s, and the average farm surface area is only 28 hectares (against 65 hectares in Great Britain). Therefore, rural exodus still affects more remote regions, with local services slowly disappearing and whole areas becoming deserted.
These trends have accelerated further with changes in the CAP since the early 1980s. Despite numerous protests, from specialized fruit growers to cattle owners (particularly affected in 1996 by bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or "Mad Cow Disease"), the highly protective system is being dismantled. The resistance of farmers has a long history-for instance the Révolte des Vignerons (Winemakers' Revolt) in the south of France in 1907, quelled by the army, is still in farmers' memories, and their descendants violently clashed with police forces again in 1975-6 against the EC market regulations. Protests against imports of Spanish fruit or British lamb have been part of life for decades, as smaller farmers, often heavily in debt, find themselves unable to survive-their feeling of betrayal towards agricultural policy's failure to maintain the family farm model of the 1950s explains brutal flare-ups which are sometimes difficult to understand from abroad.
