In France, 2024 kicked off with a major farmers’ movement that had been brewing for several months. From symbolic actions such as flipping over signposts to blockades of motorways, shops and distribution centres for supermarkets, they quickly obtained the announcement of a number of measures in their favour from the new French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal. But these are far from enough to tackle the problems facing farmers. The mobilisation continues and is spreading to other countries.
The spark for this movement is the delay in the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) subsidies and the increase in taxes on pesticides and water consumption. But above all there is the issue of the very low remuneration of farmers, which is worsening as a result of a number of factors.
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, the price of non-road diesel (RNG, the fuel used in agriculture) has soared, and the 2024 budget (passed by article 49.3 of the constitution, allowing measures by procuration …) provides for an increase in the tax on it. Demand is falling because inflation has reduced household spending on food, particularly organic produce and meat. Epizootic haemorrhagic disease (EHD) broke out in France in September, and livestock farmers are having to bear the cost of the vaccine. Following the bad weather, many farmers had to make repairs that were not adequately covered by insurance. And then there are the repeated droughts… The list goes on.
On top of all that, there’s the frustration of having to deal with paperwork, numerous controls, sometimes contradictory regulations, competition with countries that don’t have the same standards, debt to finance farm equipment, and the climate crisis that makes the future uncertain, especially when you don’t have the means to make the changes needed to adapt your farm.
All of this makes the heavy impact of their work on farmers’ health even worse. On average, they live longer than the rest of the population, but live less long in good health. A link has been shown between exposure to pesticides and cognitive disorders or chronic bronchitis. Rates of prostate cancer and Parkinson’s disease are higher in farming environments. Physical work causes musculoskeletal disorders. Added to this is the isolation caused by the difficulty of finding a spouse willing to share these harsh conditions, and the heavy toll on mental health. Many farmers commit suicide.
The dead end of the capitalist market
At one end of the chain, farmers are struggling to survive. At the other, households are suffering from rising food prices. In between are the manufacturers and distributors who know how to take advantage of the crisis. According to a report by the French Senate in July 2022, “Some distributors apply price increases on their shelves even though they have not signed a purchase price increase agreement with the supplier. These practices are said to be facilitated by the fact that consumers expect to see high inflation on the shelves anyway.”
Of course, price negotiations between producers and manufacturers or distributors do not have the same effect on large and small farmers. Large farms (large cereal growers, intensive livestock farms, etc.) benefit from economies of scale that farmers do not. Through competition, agribusiness drives prices down below the remunerative rate for small farmers, who survive in spite of this thanks to public subsidies. Market prices are based on the socially necessary working time for the products, but at world level. This does not represent the production costs of a small producer. They are therefore obliged to sell below their cost price. The public aid, which barely allows farmers to live, is in fact the difference between what the distributor pays and the value of the products — a real gift to the distributors.
With the Egalim laws (for “balanced commercial relations in the agricultural sector and healthy, sustainable food”), the French state imposed certain rules on negotiations, with the aim of protecting producers’ incomes. These laws are not only useless, they are not applied. And according to the Senate report cited above, they also have the side-effect of being inflationary. In the context of capitalist free trade, every attempt at a solution simply shifts the problem elsewhere…
But as the farmers organization Confédération Paysanne explains, “[this law] does not guarantee that the costs of agricultural production will be covered, including a fair and decent remuneration for farmers… we must finally act at the root of the problem, i.e. prohibit the purchase of agricultural products below their cost price, instead of waiting for a hypothetical trickle-down effect through opaque food chains. Hoping that industry and supermarkets will agree among themselves to protect farmers’ incomes is either a sham or a sign of complete ignorance of reality.”
Buying agricultural products below cost is the key to the problem of remuneration. But how can this be “forbidden”? In a capitalist economy, forcing several branches of industry to deviate from price formation could only be temporary. What’s more, they would pass on the increase in consumer prices, which would depress demand and be the pretext for a further fall in the prices paid to producers. To impose remunerative prices in the long term, we would have to take control of the agro-industry and distributors, i.e. nationalise them.
Capitalism is an unstable system that obeys its own laws based on the anarchy of production. For example, the milk, potato and beet quotas, which the CAP has just abolished, gave a certain stability to the price paid to producers. But it was a form of bureaucratic planning that balanced surpluses by selling them at knock-down prices. What we need is a way out of the anarchy of the market, with democratic planning based on real needs and in which farmers take part.
Agribusiness is trying to keep a firm grip on the movement
At the head of the movement is the FNSEA, the national federation of farmers’ unions. While the strength of the movement lies in the small farmers protesting against low incomes and hardship, the FNSEA above all represents the interests of agribusiness. Its positions are productivist and anti-environmental, particularly in favour of intensive farming, pesticides and large-scale ponds. It has a strong influence on the government and was behind the attempt to dissolve the environmental group Soulèvements de la Terre (The Earth Uprisings Collective). Its president, Arnaud Rousseau, is chairman of the board of the agro-industrial group Avril, France’s fourth-largest agri-food company, with a turnover of €9 billion in 2022.
Although the FNSEA has a majority of farmers, we need to distinguish between the FNSEA’s management, which is made up of agro-industrialists, and its 212,000 members, many of whom are small farmers. Some of them joined the FNSEA to become part of the farmers’ network and benefit from the union’s services, rather than out of conviction in its productivist and anti-environmental programme or in support of its lobbying activities. At departmental level, the FDSEAs have a degree of autonomy — the blockade of Paris was the initiative of the local FDSEA, while the national FNSEA was calling for calm. Do they feel that the movement could overwhelm them? Within the current movement, voices are being raised against the FNSEA, criticising in particular its closeness to the government. Some, while sharing the anger of their colleagues, have refrained from joining the movement out of rejection of the FNSEA’s policies — but this could change if the voice of small farmers starts to become dominant.
The FNSEA leadership is using the righteous anger of farmers being crushed by inflation, competition and taxes to push through its ideology, which is both liberal and protectionist, productivist and anti-environmental. And while they concentrate on repealing standards and go no further than demanding compliance with the Egalim laws, they ignore the role of manufacturers, distributors and banks in the dramatic situation of farmers.
For ecological and remunerative agriculture
Karl Marx, the precursor of ecology, explained how capitalism exploits both nature and human beings. Farmers are at the heart of this dual exploitation. Now the Right and the representatives of agri-business would like farmers to form an alliance with Capital against Nature. But it is clearly an alliance with Nature against Capital that humanity needs if it is to survive.
The message that the FNSEA and the Right want us to get across is that there is a total incompatibility between ecological standards and improving the condition of farmers. In fact, in every aspect of the current ecological crisis, the watchword of capitalism is: make the workers and the poorest pay the cost, and continue to destroy the planet if you can afford to. This logic also applies to agriculture. Standards are a threat to small farmers, while the big cereal growers dry up the soil with their mega-cultivators and intensive livestock farming continues to pollute, with all the horrors that entails for the animals. This reckless exploitation of the Earth threatens the future of agriculture, and indeed our very survival as a species.
But farmers have no interest in using up the land on which they live. While many small farmers are joining the fight against the use of glyphosates and neonicotinoids, many are also campaigning for ecological causes. They are also the ones experimenting with alternative production methods such as permaculture. We should be resolutely encouraging all farmers to move in this direction, with support for the transition to ecological farming that meets our needs.
If we are to survive, this type of agriculture must develop and take over. A number of ecologist organisations have signed a petition calling for unity between the ecologist movement and the farmers’ movement, pointing out that the two have converged in many recent struggles.
Major distributors targeted
On 5 December, FNSEA president Arnaud Rousseau announced that he had succeeded in stopping the increase of taxes on pesticides and water. Far from going home, from 18 January onwards, farmers continued to broaden their demands and organise blockades. Motorway blockades made the headlines, but distribution was also targeted.
Across France, distribution centres and shops belonging to supermarket chains Auchan, Carrefour, Leclerc, Aldi, etc. were blocked, as was a Lactalis factory. At Carrefour Maubeuge, farmers seized a pallet of butter pads and handed them out free of charge to passers-by. These actions provide an opportunity for discussion between producers and consumers on the issue of prices. In 2 years, food prices have risen by 21%, and 16% of French people say they don’t have enough to eat.
By targeting distribution, there is a way of creating concrete solidarity between the farmers and the working class. The trade union CGT is calling for the demands of workers in general, agricultural workers and farmers to converge. It is also calling for more strikes to win wage increases. A strike call in the distribution and agri-food industry sectors, in solidarity with farmers and on the issue of wages and their own demands, would be a formidable means of creating a relation of force by threatening their profits.
Insufficient announcements
On 26 January, Gabriel Attal announced the cancellation of the GNR tax increase, 10 measures to ‘simplify’ standards, and promised to enforce the Egalim law. But this is far from enough. The Confédération Paysanne is continuing to call for mobilisation, demanding “structural measures” with guaranteed minimum remuneration prices and market regulation. In its view, “the Prime Minister is responding to the FNSEA’s short-term, productivist demands, which will weaken standards and accelerate competition between farmers. But the main concern on the ground is to make a decent living from our work. The administrative burden must be lightened without calling into question the standards that protect our health, our social rights and our planet.”
For all those who took part in the recent struggles in France, it is surprising to see how quickly some of their demands were met. It is even more surprising to note the absence of repression against the movement. The fact that the mobilisation is led by a powerful lobby has something to do with it, but there is also the fact that the government is using double standards to maintain the division between different sections of the working class.
At the very moment when the environmental activists of Sainte-Soline (against a “megabasin,” or a huge water reserve) were on trial, minister of Interior Gérald Darmanin declared: “We don’t respond to suffering by sending in the armed police” and spoke of “legitimate reactions.” Quite hypocritical when you think of the police violence used against equally legitimate angry movements in 2023. He argues that farmers don’t attack public buildings. In fact, there has been some destruction, including an explosion that blew out the windows of the Dreal (Direction régionale de l’environnement, de l’aménagement et du logement) in Carcassonne — two “CAV” (Comité d’Action Viticole) tags were found on site. When you push hundreds of thousands of people to their limits, how can you not expect this kind of action? And motorway blockades and street actions are not described as “hostage-taking”, as is inevitably the case during railway strikes. For Darmanin, it’s not just a question of showing his complaisance for a movement led by the FNSEA, but also of deepening the division between farmers and other workers by pointing out that the latter are dangerous vandals.
Another factor in the government’s attitude towards farmers is that over 80% of French people support the movement — but not for the same reasons. For the right, farmers represent opposition to standards and regulation, and an idealised vision of entrepreneurship and economic independence — but this independence is far from reality, since farmers are subject to the banks to which they are indebted and to the distributors who impose prices.
For the far right, this is an opportunity to stir up protectionism; but while they are prepared to denounce foreign competition, they are silent about the competition from agribusiness… And all they have to say on the issue of hunger is that people of foreign origin should not have access to the foodbanks or to social assistance. Impoverishing the section of the working class that the far right Rassemblement National (RN) doesn’t like will never improve the situation of the other sections.
For the working class, farmers are workers with an enormous workload for extremely low incomes, who far from being independent are exploited by different branches of capitalism. It is crucial to build solidarity between all workers, and for the left to show the way out of capitalism to prevent the far right from taking the wheel and leading us straight into the wall.
A socialist transitional programme for agriculture
This crisis highlights the impasse in agriculture under capitalism. In “business as usual” mode, agriculture is subject to the fluctuations and speculations of the globalised market, which regularly creates situations of acute food crisis, especially when large producers like Ukraine suddenly see their production collapse.
Against the backdrop of climate change and new regulations aimed at making agriculture a little greener (even if we’re still a long way from what’s really needed), the situation is becoming totally unmanageable. Farmers are facing a number of simultaneous challenges:
- Additional costs linked to the new rules, and to the increase in prices and taxes on certain products.
- Additional costs linked to the deterioration in operating conditions caused by climate change, epidemics, etc.
- A market made unstable by the same causes, plus geopolitical instability.
- A crushing financial burden that often prevents them from quickly changing their production methods.
In short, they find themselves between the hammer of climate change and the anvil of the need to combat it, in addition to all the other calamities inflicted by capitalism.
These contradictions are still being suppressed by the movement’s leadership (in the hands of agribusiness), but they will soon be brought out into the open and raise the question of a genuine green transition programme for agriculture. Among the farming federations that have been mobilised, the Confédération Paysanne is undoubtedly the organisation with the most assertive class vision, clearly calling for an end to free trade, “social food security” and measures to guarantee a decent income for every farmer. This is the kind of foundation on which to build a farmers’ movement capable of attacking head-on the deadly system that is impoverishing the soil, the fauna, the flora and the entire population for the benefit of a few handfuls of shareholders.
But it will not be enough to “get out of free trade” to solve all farmers’ problems; we need to take control of the sectors that are stifling them upstream and downstream. The socialist programme for agriculture will necessarily involve:
- A call for strikes in the agri-food industry and supermarkets — Unity between workers and farmers against capitalism!
- Nationalisation of the agro-industry and the distribution sector under workers’ control to allow democratic production and distribution of food products. Once freed from capitalist logic, planning will make it possible, through quotas and administered prices, to guarantee both remunerative prices for producers and affordable prices for consumers.
- Development of cooperatives for the joint purchase of agricultural equipment with technical support
- Cancellation of peasant debt, nationalisation of banks under workers’ control to provide peasants with economic support for the agro-ecological transition and the challenges posed by climate change.