French farmers harvest billions of euros every year in government support through the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Yet those lavish subsidies and trade barriers have failed to achieve one of their primary objectives: saving the French family farm.
According to a study just released by the French Statistical Institute (INSEE), and reported in today’s Financial Times, an average of 100 French farms have gone out of business EVERY DAY for the past 50 years. The number of farm workers in France has dropped by two-thirds in the past 25 years. France’s farm exports have been declining by 3.4 percent per year since 1999, and farm household income has actually fallen during the past decade, while the incomes of non-farm households in France have been going up.
The decline of the French farm has occurred despite, or perhaps because of, the generous support of the CAP. France’s farmers receive the equivalent of $11.6 billion a year in handouts, more than one fifth of total European Union spending on agriculture. Those subsidies have arguably kept French farms from becoming more competitive and thus contributed to their long-term decline.
When the EU’s farm commissioner, Mariann Fischer Boel, warned that French farmers should seek second incomes outside the farm sector to survive, the French farm minister denounced her comments as “an insult to the social model to which European citizens are profoundly and legitimately attached.”
Is an agricultural “social model” that costs billions of euros a year and only adds to the decline of the French farm worth holding on to?
