french farmers

You have to love French farmers. Woe betide you if you don’t.

I suspect French farmers run France, rather like the hydro-electricity commission or Gunns ran Tasmania during different decades.

The male of the species is un agriculteur, the female une agricultrice.

The simple fact is that France has a lot of them, whereas only 26 farmers can be found on the land in Australia. The average Aussie ‘farmer’ is a mega-conglomerate lording it over an area the size of a European country. You need a mighty powerful telescope to see from one farmhouse to the next.

France is an endless patchwork of small farms and even smaller village holdings that produce the extraordinary variety of high quality gastronomic delicacies France is famous for. If you’re not un agriculteur in France, you’re being a fool to yourself and a burden to others.

The popular argument, d’accord, runs the other way. It purports that the French farmer is a burden to everyone (except himself) via the enormous subsidies his political clout enables him to wring from the European economy.

He launches his farm vehicles into traffic at will and marches on Paris armed with plenty of fertiliser if he’s a smidge less than completely gruntled.

The other popular theory—it’s been going around for decades—is that the French economy is cactus and well go belly-up at any moment. It never happens, never will.

Being a well-known economist, I’m prepared to offer my utterly simplistic view of all this agri-business. All hail the scowling, irascible French farmer, I say.

Because farms are small and don’t rely on one crop or herd, they’re bomb-proof when commodity prices nose-dive. Because French farms produce fresh food for local people, local economies thrive even if the nation’s economy is on the blink, or the brink.

And all this local produce generates the 70 million gourmands who populate this verdant place, shut it down so they can lunch in peace, and get on with business only when they’re good and ready to.

Vive la France!