From France24, January 24:
The protests sweeping across France have cast a renewed focus on the plight of farmers, a shrinking and ageing category at the mercy of volatile prices and grappling with a bleak economic outlook. FRANCE 24 talks to an economist and a unionist about the key figures behind France’s farming crisis.
French farmers expanded their roadblocks on Wednesday in protest at plunging food prices, soaring costs and crippling regulations they say are killing their livelihoods.
The protests, part of a rising tide of anger among agricultural producers across the European Union, pose a major challenge to President Emmanuel Macron’s government, coming just months ahead of European elections.
The turmoil has reopened a sensitive debate in France, the EU’s leading agricultural producer, which has seen the number of farmers shrink from 2.5 million in the 1950s to fewer than half a million today.
An ageing population
France’s farming population has not only shrunk dramatically; it is also older than ever before. According to the latest available census, farmers averaged 51.4 years of age in 2020, up from 50.2 in 2010.
Of the 496,000 farmers counted in 2020, almost 200,000 – two fifths of the total – will be eligible for retirement by 2026. Meanwhile, aspiring younger farmers are being priced out of the industry, unable to invest in land and property.
“Young people who want to go into farming have to invest hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of euros in a profession that is known to be tough, with long working hours, on-call duty, few holidays and a fluctuating income,” says economist Alessandra Kirsch, head of studies at the French think tank Agriculture Stratégies.
“The loan repayments they have to make in the first few years are too high compared to the meagre profits generated by farms,” she explains.
Improving the sector’s attractiveness is crucial to its survival, adds Yohann Barbe, a cattle farmer from eastern France who sits on the board of the FNSEA, France’s main farming union.
“We need to offer people the prospect of better working conditions,” he says. “We’re lucky enough to work in contact with nature, but we have to be able to make ends meet too.”
100,000 fewer farms in one decade
The corollary of a shrinking workforce is an almost symmetrical decline in the total number of farms, down by almost 21% between 2010 and 2020 – a loss of around 100,000 businesses in the space of a decade....
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So where will the food come from? Not your urban garden. That route is will be closed off.
From The Telegraph, January 22:
Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than those grown conventionally
The study found individual garden infrastructure responsible for increased levels of CO2
Growing your own food in an allotment may not be as good for the environment as expected, a study suggests.
The carbon footprint of homegrown foods is five times greater than produce from conventional agricultural practices, such as rural farms, data show.
A study from the University of Michigan looked at how much CO2 was produced when growing food in different types of urban farms and found that, on average, a serving of food made from traditional farms creates 0.07kg of CO2.
The impact on the environment is almost five times higher at 0.34kg per portion for individual gardens, such as vegetable patches or allotments.
The majority of the emissions do not come from the growing of the food themselves, the scientists say, but from the infrastructure needed to allow the food to be grown.
Researchers grouped urban agriculture sites into three categories: individual or family gardens, including allotments; collective gardens, such as community gardens; and larger, commercial-orientated urban farms.
Jake Hawes, a PhD candidate at Michigan and first author of the study, said: “The most significant contributor to carbon emissions on the urban agriculture sites we studied was the infrastructure used to grow the food – from raised beds to garden sheds to pathways, these constructions had a lot of carbon invested in their construction....
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