Urban Food Chains

the links between diet and power

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Voices from France, 2008

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From its launch in 2008, Parlons Agriculture can be described as a new generation of broadly-based long-term public education campaign. It has yet to herald  a sea change in food policy. But it has cast some light on the power lurking in the dark recesses of corporate lobbying. Given the scale of the commercial interests in play, it would be naïve to imagine that any meaningful change will happen without a fight of some sort. The better you know and understand the issues that will need to be resolved, the more likely you will be in a position to make a difference in years to come.

Here are some of the people who had an input into Michel Barnier’s planning stage of Parlons Agriculture. The original text is to be found in the Parlons Agriculture booklets. This will be available for download (en français) from this website in the near future.

Pascale Hebel, dire-matokingctor of the  consumer department at CREDOC: “Agriculture still has a strong image.” Hebel has been stutake place without happen without dying trends in French food shopping for 13 years. There are signs of a growing gap between the French public and the country’s farmers, as concern grows over issues such as bird flu, pesticides and animal welfare.

Tristan LECOMTE, head of Alter eco. 

“Now, more than ever before, we must think about agriculture when we eat.” Eating conventional foods tends to clog society’s relations with farming. “At Alter éco, we are constantly talking about our producers and current growing conditions.”

François Danel is the head of  Action Against Hunger: 850 million people were still going hungry in 2008. Danel was one of many development experts urging action to revive agriculture in poor countries. “Right now, food price rises make the situation critical: the most vulnerable families in 2008 were subjected to the full force of the emeregency. This crisis shows the need for a world food fund: it will need to cross the policy boundaries of the donor states.”

Pascale Briand is director general of AFSSA (l’Agence Française de Sécurité Sanitaire des Aliments.) “We are evaluating the upstream risks to ensure that political decisions are built on sound science.”

Hafez Ghanem, UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.

The term food safety means different things in the north and the south. In 2008, Hafez said: “We are witnessing a paradox on a planetary scale. In the north, everybody talks about food quality, in the south, people are only interested in quantity. What is more, there is a parallel change in diet. When countries get rich, the citizens eat more meat, vegetables, sugar and dairy desserts. The result is that we face real problems procuring certain crops.

“Food systems will always tend to develop self-regulating responses to the world around them,” says Pierre Feillet, longstanding member of the Académie des Technologies and author of the book French Food, From Making Fire To The 2030s. A seasoned authority on French food, Feillet explains the basis for his thinking. “We find that we are comfortable with all-powerful technology, yet the slightest wobble in a food safety system leaves us scandalised : we want progress, but we are shocked by genetically modified crops. We are constantly looking for reliable food , products, which are easier to cook and transport, yet, for all that, we are unwilling to spend any more money  on food , both now or in the future.”

Olivier Andrault, UFC-Que Choisir : “It is essential to restore a dialogue between consumers and food producters.” Europe offers consumers  an increasingly elaborate choice of foods. Paradoxically, as the choice of products gets bigger, it is also becomes less healthy. “The richer the citizens, the more likely they are to be thin, while poorer people are getting fatter. Obesity is rife in poor parts of the world. Once upon a time, fruit and vegetables were cheap, yet now sugars and fats are unbelievably cheap. Andrault sees this as a crisis in the making : central government should be called in and legislate for healthier food before Europe is brought to its knees by malnutrition.

Michel Lafont, an agronomist working for the regional chamber of industry and agriculture in  Normandy,  pulls no punches : “The most likely outome is most unlikely to be the one that anyone would have chosen.”

 

Europe France

Pictures worth a thousand words

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click picture to download original text (in French)

On April 23, 2008, Michel Barnier greeted  hundreds of French citizens in Paris, who were disturbed  by the farm minister’s use of a contentious image to promote a series of  conferences about food.  “We don’t live on burgers or fast food,” one lady grumbled, staring at a picture of a discarded burger box bearing the words “Qu’est-ce qu’on mange ?” (“what are we eating?”) Collectively, the conferences were promoted under the title “Parlons agriculture” – ‘let’s talk about agriculture’. The graphics are challenging, particularly for rural populations: as well as the burger box image you can see on this page,  elsewhere in the posters and conference literature, there is a battered steel barrel that has not just seen better times, but is clearly toxic.

Starting with the blue booklet on this page, we will unpack the arguments and economics that were shaping agriculture in 2008. Here are the opening words from the minister: “Current events have just reminded us, with terrible consequences, that the world has yet to get rid of the scourge of famine. Egypt, Morocco, Indonesia, Cameroon, Mexico, Bolivia, every continent on the planet is seeing a resurgence of food riots, which harden men’s resolve and leave behind the smouldering wreckage of civilisation. History is being wrapped up in front of us as the world’s raw material prices rise in brutal leaps and bounds, food prices are soaring, traders all over the world are panicking. Rice, a basic food for half the world’s population was at the heart of this. Prices had risen by 54% since January (he was speaking in April) and major exporters were holding back their export tonnages. Today, three billion people live on less than two dollars a day, and the spectre of hardship hangs over them.”

Nearer to home “…hunger has been avoided for a long time, we think that shortages have become a thing  of the past and there is an illusion of food security.” Look again and you will recall “mad cow disease”, alongside avian flu, arising from instances where feeding same-species animal remains have put human health in danger.

“In these times of great doubt, we need to bring together those who produce and those who consume, we need to end the mistrust between two worlds that have stopped talking to each other.”

Nowadays,  [2008] …”wherever we live, a big question hangs over the new century: how do we feed humanity to ensure health and sustainability?  Barnier argues that we can no longer afford to live in ignorance of past mistakes, guzzling saturated fats and rich foods can no longer be indulged. This is the underlying purpose of the conference: we need to   share and exchange resources; weave a dialogue of a sort that has never been seen before; making it possible for agriculture to rejoin the rest of the world.

Breton farmer Morgan urges president Macron to lead European action while it is still an option.

This morning (23-NOV-2025)  I reposted a call to action made by Morgan, a radical peasant  farmer. Speaking to camera, she calls on President Macron to head up a pan-European campaign to stop fruit growers being put out of business by cheap imports from Latin America. France has a strong enough voice to make itself heard on the international scene, Morgan argues. France should stop dreaming of its past glories and wake up to a very real threat, she warns.

Europe France raw

Talk about agriculture..(2)

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Here’s a challenge; how many agriculture ministers would cheerfully stake their political careers on the agressive tone of the visual below? Subtle as a flying brick, this artwork got right up the noses of the farming unions they were targeting. There can be nothing worse than projecting a goody two shoes image of your industry only to see the minister’s team spoil the effect.

French farming unions milked  a government department that they thought they could call their own. For years, the FNSEA posted teams of so-called advisors in the corridors of rue de Varenne, who would be consulted on all manner of policy matters, trivial or otherwise. Fast food ingredients do not automatically  earn thick margins in a competitive sector: even economists need to be realistic occasionally. In the middle of multiple crises with local, regional and national consequences, seemingly overnight we had a food crisis. Sociologist Claude Fischler, research director at CNRS, cautions against considering a collection  of local responses to specific, localised problems will somehow add up to ways of working that will add up to a regional or national strategy that will work straight out of the box. In particular, there is an ever-present push-pull tension between planning for food security, (making sure that there is  food on sale) including, but not exclusively, supermarkets and other distribution models. The rich world which was once home to eaters is now populated by consumers, with all the implications of added-value strategies. Consumers transfer their disposable income to products  increasingly heavily-processed products, thus spending more on food and transferring market power to an ever smaller group of brand owners. As such, they become closed off to the outside world, in an increasingly bitter war of words to justify their positions, if only in their eyes. Food manufacturers focussing on sales targets and profit margins will drift out of markets in the hungry world, widening the gaps between consumers and ever greater numbers of starving populations who are constantly hungry. To say such things are “nobody’s fault” would be disingenuous but is often used to dissipate any blame implied.

A more urgent question is whether or not poor countries should be assisted to stimulate higher productivity among their fellow citizens, with an ever-greater risk of system failure in technology that will stop working sooner or later. Capital-intensive systems have less to offer traditional peasants with lower capital exposure, they are also more likely to survive extended drought or unforeseeable weather conditions (climate change).

Europe France

Let’s talk agriculture!

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The Barnier oil barrel image, reminding everyone that modern agriculture has an environmental cost.

In June 2008, Michel Barnier left rue de Varenne  after two years as France’s farm minister. He was outwardly at peace with the world, after two years spent steadfastly denying that he had any serious differences of opinion with President Nicolas Sarkozy. This was not altogether convincing, since Sarkozy was prone to talk up his chances of successful plans and policies long before they were anywhere near ready to be seen in public. Such stoicism in the face of  a president that spoke first and thought later does not come easily, as the Americans are learning in 2025. Barnier was trained as an administrator, graduating from the École Supérieure de Commerce de Paris (ESCP) in 1972 .

This does not mean that he is a rug to be walked on: far from it. He won a number of internal battles without comment. Some of his victories were reversed by political opponents who went over the minister’s head and persuaded the President to see things their way. People such as Xavier Beulin, head of the FNSEA, had Sarkozy’s ear and seized any opportunity to put ideas into his head (click here). In Beulin’s case, it was personal: the farming unions had operated a system for sitting in on internal ministry meetings and generally making sure that the FNSEA view prevailed elsewhere in the ministry. If this sounds overstated, have a look at this post, describing the modus operandi. Barnier cleared the corridors of unwanted loiterers, by simply re-issuing security passes to ministry staff and setting higher security standards  at rue de , Varenne. He also succeeded in raising the level of public debate around agriculture with a series of state-sponsored debates scheduled for 2008. There were two in Paris and a third in Brussels. There was no mistaking tone of the events, which challenged the FNSEA ‘s founding principles, namely to corner every centime of public funding for  agriculture. A battered steel barrel, dominates one set of conference documents, with the question of the day in big white letters: “What kinds of agriculture(s) do we want for tomorrow?

Barnier sets the scene in the opening paragraph: “There can be no doubt that the outlook for the world has changed. The abundance of nature that we have unthinkingly squandered has now given way to a weak and fragile planet, in which resources are threatened. Today, we have the results of years of work from the scientific community. We can no longer ignore them.The age of widespread scarcity has begun.” Readers will be glad to learn that unless things turn nasty, I shall make these two conference documents available for as long as possible. I have no plans to offer a translation unless a significant number  of people request one. There is no way I would put the documents through an AI system, the words are too carefully balanced to survive a bot’s blunt ignorance and I haven’t got the necessary time to make a useable translation.

There can be no discussion of how to set things back on track without an understanding of population dynamics. Barnier sketches it out like this: “The prodigious population explosion that marked the 20th century is set to continue until 2050, at least. It will impact the poor world, in the places where hunger is already  rife and  in urban areas, where eating habits at all levels of society have been messed up.” Up until now, Barnier argues, humanity has usually been able to patch things up with technical solutions. In 2008,  there was a glimmer of recognition that the scale of the problem was greater than anyone imagined.

“Faced with rocketing food costs (in 2008), confronted by food riots, hampered by shortages of basic resources: the strategies which we used to think would solve the problem will do no such thing.

“We are faced with an equation, the like of which we have never seen before (still in 2008) (the French use “inédit” so much that it ceases to carry much weight) . “To deal with the problem, on the basis of current evidence we have to break with development models that will increase the consumption of finite resources. This is what makes the situation so urgent, since all the checks and balances that keep the planet in working order are threatened.”

 

MORE FOLLOWS LATER

France raw

When is a peasant not a peasant?

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France’s national farmers’ federation, the FNSEA, is more like an advertising agency than a trade union. When marching in national demonstrations, they make a point of referring to themselves as ‘paysans’ (peasants), . Dare to call one of them a ‘peasant’ away from the television cameras and you’ll get a bunch of fives and a reminder that there is more to farming than spreading muck. While I was learning my way around government offices in Paris, I found myself being quizzed by a couple of burly agricultural types. I had just arrived at the agriculture ministry in rue de Varenne with an appointment to talk to the minister about the Common Agriculture Policy. These two weren’t as smartly dressed as the ministry staff, but were very interested in my business, only withdrawing when they spotted the minister’s chef de cabinet coming back. “Ouf, les syndicalistes, c’est pénible,” he groaned. “Lequel syndicat…?”  “FNSEA.” The conversation moved to less thorny topics and I took a sheaf of papers from my briefcase. “…let’s show those to my advisers, shall we…?” the minister pleaded. There was a brief exchange of words at the office door, just enough to identify the pair I had met in the foyer minutes earlier. “…subvention? …fonds publiques…?” This was clearly a fishing trip. “C’est un thème d’interet tout public…” I started. “…donc le public va payer…” came the answer. Stripped of any wider context or or even interest, the topic pretty much curled up and died on the spot.

crunchy numbers UK

Morrisons disposals: the end of a hot air balloon race?

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This spring, Bradford-based supermarket chain Morrisons dumped all its added value satellite profit centres, in a bid to reduce costs and consolidate its position in the English groceries market. 

The closures ensure that there can never be any question of a revival of the pipe dreams Morrison family shareholders entertained years ago. Morrisons was one of a number of retailers across Europe that monitored the twists and turns in the relations between Edouard Leclerc and the former Leclerc retail member Jean-Pierre Leroch.

Harassed and  constantly attacked bitterly by his former retail partner, Leroch established Intermarché, a retail group that owned the manufacturing capacity for 20% of its retail sales. This was successful in part due to the group’s strong roots in Britanny. The Intermarché business model was admired by many and bits of it were adopted by Swiss retailer Migros, as well as the Swiss Co-op and the Basque Eroski group.

The Morrison disposals are extensions of retail departments, such as the meat or fish counters, where higher levels of product knowledge are only retained at a price. The prospect of skilled staff moving to competitors is a bigger issue to operational management than it would ever be for strategic number crunchers. This has all the signs of a desperate attempt to throw heavy kit off a hot air balloon before it crash lands.

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