Over the next decade, 45% of French farmers will retire, presenting a significant challenge for the next president regarding food self-sufficiency and generational renewal. EURACTIV France reports.
On 30 March, during a congress of the National Federation of Agricultural Holders’ Unions (FNSEA), the organisation invited the main candidates in the French presidential election (those who poll above 2%) to outline their programmes on the issue and answer questions from sector representatives.
Fabien Roussel (French Communist Party, PCF), Marine Le Pen (Rassemblement National, RN), Emmanuel Macron (La République En Marche!, LREM), Eric Zemmour (Reconquête), Valérie Pécresse (The Republicans, LR) and Jean Lassalle accepted the invitation.
Only Jean-Luc Mélenchon (the far-left La France insoumise, LFI) and Yannick Jadot (Europe Écologie Les Verts, EELV) declined.
A new generation of farmers
The figures are striking: 55% of French farmers are now older than 50, and almost half will retire in ten years. While there were 1.6. million French farmers in the early 1980s, today less than 400,000 remain. According to INSEE data, their share of employment fell from 7.1% in 1982 to 1.5% in 2019.
To fill this upcoming shortage, Fabien Roussel, the first to take the floor, announced he wants to reach 500,000 farmers by 2030. This means increasing by 20,000-25,000 farmers per year. “Otherwise, we will not be able to feed our fellow citizens,” he warned.
Macron, interviewed remotely from his campaign headquarters, put forward a slightly more modest objective.
“Taking into account the age pyramid, we must reach 20,000 per year, against 12,000 to 14,000 today.” This ambition is included in his “law on the orientation and future of agriculture” that he presented at the end of February at the International Agricultural Show.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who did not participate in the debate, is the most ambitious, aiming to create at least 300,000 new agricultural jobs should he assume office. These jobs would be based on agro-ecological and food-producing projects, integrating all those “people not coming from the agricultural sector”.
To ensure the next generation gets into farming, all the candidates insist on the importance of training. Even if “the farmers’ schools have never been so full”, as Samuel Vandaele, the president of Jeunes Agriculteurs, an agricultural union dedicated to youth, pointed out.
Concretely, Roussel wants to double the means for agricultural training. Macron wants to “reinforce” it in his future law, while Zemmour and Le Pen insist on apprenticeship.
For Le Pen, farmers should be encouraged to take on young people as apprentices and help those who work on farms alongside their studies. Le Pen announced that the state would help finance these “additional salaries” to relieve employers.
Aid for setting up a farm
Beyond training, facilitating access to land is a key element in all programs. If a young person wishes to take over a farm, Le Pen, Zemmour and Lassalle – who was the last one to speak – inheritance tax should be abolished, with some conditions such as keeping the farm for 10 years.
Similarly, Pécresse suggests a 95% tax exemption on inherited property.
In the case of an acquisition of land outside the family framework, such as purchase or rent, the ‘land piggybacking’ system will be included in Macron’s orientation law and is also one of Pécresse’s commitments.
This system allows young people to spread the costs of setting up a business by paying only for the construction of the building, for example, while postponing the payment for the purchase of the land.
Pécresse would also like to abolish the capital gains tax on selling land to a young farmer, while Zemmour proposes to increase the young farmer’s allowance (dotation Jeune agriculteur, DJA), a start-up aid, and set up sponsorship systems.
While right-wing candidates such as Pécresse, Le Pen, and Lassalle are generally attached to family farming and therefore want to facilitate land transfer through exemptions of taxes, left-wing candidates are more interested in public structures to facilitate access to land.
Mélenchon thus wants to create new rural public land institutions to reduce the price of land and maintain land dedicated to agricultural projects that are environmentally and socially beneficial.
But Anne Hidalgo was perhaps the most insistent on this issue of setting up young farmers. She plans to pass “a law to regulate, share and protect agricultural land, and a ten-year plan to renew generations”.
Not forgetting the elders
Supporting the transfer from one generation to another cannot be done without considering those who are leaving: the elders.
In addition to the general proposals of the candidates on retirement, Pécresse was keen to specify that a retirement pension supplement would be allocated to the transferor who accompanies a young person.
She also announced that no one, starting with farmers, would receive less than the minimum wage in France (SMIC). Similarly, widows who have not contributed will see their reversionary pension increase from 54% to 75%.
On the other side of the political spectrum, Mélenchon intends to raise agricultural pensions to the level of the revalued SMIC (i.e. €1,400 net per month).
“Taking over a farm, because you are the son [of the farmer] or because you have bought or rented it, should no longer be associated with a panic fear”, Lassalle emphasised.
Lassalle, himself the son of a farmer, plans to allocate €3 billion of the budget to developing French rural areas.
Watch the speeches and exchanges here (in French).
[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic/Alice Taylor/Nathalie Weatherald]
Source: euractiv.com
