Regular storming of Paris every five years or so by farmers enraged by their government's bending to American demands that certain French agricultural subsidies be eliminated is not so much about "a few million tons of oilseeds" as it is about preserving a culture and way of life.
In the United States, where traces of the rural ideal can still be found in remaindered coffee table art books, there are 30 percent fewer farmers, as an average of the total population, than in France. While roughly 25 percent of all Americans and Frenchmen live in rural areas, almost all the rural French are in agricultural work as compared to only 2 percent of the rural Americans.
A semi-rural lifestyle is within commuting distance of most middle class Americans fleeing the ravaged cities, and their nostalgia for the countryside provides a marketing bonanza to country lifestyle magazines circulating to millions of Americans and read by three times as many. This yearning for the land is the cultural cue for real estate developers to pressure county planning boards to rezone rural acreage for large-lot developments that gobble up farm land and strain limited ground water resources.
Inefficient pocket development inevitably drives taxes up as communities are logistically stymied by the far-flung need for services such as schools, sewers, police, fire, ambulance and garbage. Where resistance to rezoning rural land is high, rural "block busting" in the form of seemingly innocuous golf courses ultimately creates a landscaped environment more compatible with luxury housing than contour farming.
The anti-agrarian agenda in the U.S. over the past decade was set in corporate and bank board rooms, where credit-squeezed farmers were left to the mercies of agri-business and real estate speculators. The average size of a French farm is still under 100 acres, more than six times smaller than an American farmhold. While the size of French farms has more than doubled since 1970, French farmers still cluster in charmingly preserved villages in order to conserve valuable land.
There are few suburban zones surrounding French towns, which puts an urban Frenchman much closer to his rural roots than the American suburbanite who must look wistfully each month at a Vermont wall calendar.
American trade policy is a direct assault on France's rural way of life, which is willingly supported by French taxpayers with huge annual subsidies to farmers. While the visible American farm subsidy is comparatively small, our indirect subsidy is hidden in various programs that make food available to needy segments of our society.
The Franco-American subsidy issue now swirling around oil seed and soybean production is really a political issue involving our government's need to show better public numbers on the trade deficit. American posturing also serves the big agri-business interests which, rather than cut back or shift production, seek higher prices for exports in order to maintain corporate profits.
Our policies would remold French agriculture and rural life in the American image. That means forcing them to consolidate small farms into big ones and reducing the numbers of farm laborers. With fewer hands needed to work more land, villages and towns would begin to empty as people moved closer to industrial centers in search of work.
Vacant houses and untilled farm land would become targets of real estate speculation and development. Already in Provence one can see vineyards abandoned to weeds as the European Community trade agreements undercut French vintners by opening France to cheap Italian and Spanish red wines.
The suburbanization of France is the price that the French are being asked to pay so that a rather small segment of American agriculture can wedge its way into world markets.
The violent protests of French farmers can be dismissed as economically self-serving. But the apparent support of the urban French for their rural brethren indicates the tightness of the cultural weave that binds together French life, while our symbolic connection to Americana is preserved by nostalgic mythologists on the pages of Yankee Magazine and on Hallmark holiday cards.
When was the last time you saw a team of Clydesdales on a snow-covered street, trotting in tempo to the jangle of mellow Christmas bells, gliding to a stop in front of a clapboard colonial oozing warmth on golden shafts of light through multi-paned windows?
If your answer is "on a TV commercial," you can understand why most Americans can't relate to the plight of U.S. soybean "farmers," who have shed their jeans for three-piece suits and cluster in office buildings in Chicago, Minneapolis and Des Moines.
And what the heck is a soybean anyway, other than an alternative cheap food ingredient to equally wholesome but more flavorful oils and proteins? Is it for this that we want to bulldoze French villages?
https://www.my-french-house.com/property-french-farm-house.shtml