Toshinobu Kitabayashi, head of Worldwide Agricultural Policy Information Center
Between the beginning of this year and February, a series of fierce protests spread among livestock farmers of western France against a squeeze in margins by large supermarkets which made it difficult for them to even make up for production costs. The French government and the European Union have been busy trying to settle the issue, with President Francois Hollande promising to review the deregulatory measures implemented under the act on modernization of agriculture and fisheries enacted in 2010 by the administration of former President Nicholas Sarkozy, and the European Union presenting emergency support measures. However, I would like to discuss why such protests concentrated in France’s intensive livestock farming regions, while farmers in mountainous regions remained silent despite the fact that livestock is virtually their only produce.
As a matter of fact, large-scale intensive livestock farming in western France is an ultimate form of productivity-oriented modern agricultural model intently pursued in postwar France. However, this dominant farming model, which requires enormous amount of land – for crops – and money, is something impossible to adopt for most farmers, and something that could lead their business to go bankrupt if they dared to adopt it. In the late 1970s when the nation faced a farm crisis, some farmers, especially those in mountainous regions who are disadvantaged in terms of climate conditions and geographical features, began seeking diverse farming as an alternative to the dominant farming model. Come to think of it, this is the reason why farmers in mountainous regions have managed to escape from the recent livestock farming crisis which hit farmers in flatlands.
The logic and strategy of diverse farming is in itself diverse, but when you get down to it, it can be summarized into three factors: a. Saving all expenses; b. Utilizing all the available resources in and outside the farm to the greatest extent possible; c. Supplementing income shortage by using time left over from farming to do other activities (“Resistances Paysannes,” a book published in 1982 by Francois Pernet, then researcher at French National Institute of Agricultural Research).
Especially important among them are the supplementary activities, such as processing agricultural produce in farms, direct sales of farm produce at farms and markets and accepting tourists at restaurants and inns. Roughly speaking, it is said that producers can gain two times more income through direct sales, three to four times more income through processing at farms, and five to six times more value can be added by using farm produce and processed products in restaurants and inns.
According to France’s 2010 Agricultural Census, 11.5 percent of farms in mountainous regions are engaged in processing (goat rearing, fruits, grapes, multiple cropping etc.), 24.1 percent in direct sales (bee keeping, multiple cropping, goats, vegetables etc.), 29.7 percent in production of agricultural items with an authorized quality mark which can be sold at higher prices and 3.4 percent in operation of restaurants and inns. All the figures are higher than farms in flatlands.
Moreover, while farms in France’s flatlands decreased at an annual rate of 3.3 percent between 1988 and 2010, the drop in mountainous regions was 2.9 percent. In terms of the amount of arable land, Japan is as disadvantageous as the mountainous regions in France. Taking this into account, the agricultural model which Japan should aim for is not large-scale, productivity-oriented farming. I believe that France’s mountain farming is what Japanese style farming should follow.