France: Confédération Paysanne Puts Forth 22 Demands to Address the Climate Crises

The consequences of global warming are hitting farms and those who make them thrive hard. They have considerable economic, physical and psychological repercussions. The difficulties of coping with fires, drought and heatwaves, of dealing with the loss of our animals, as well as the damage caused to our crops and production equipment, are all the more serious because they add to an already extremely tense economic situation for many farms and sectors.

This crisis is also unfolding in a context of deep concern about the future of our farms. The embers of the agricultural anger that has been expressed in recent months have not been extinguished, and it would be more than legitimate for them to flare up again when the new school year begins, because no structural political response has been provided to build a positive future for peasant farmers.

Peasant farmers know that every crisis – health, economic or climate – causes the most vulnerable among us to disappear. History is stubborn and repeats itself: with every crisis, the concentration of farms accelerates, their expansion continues and the number of peasant farmers decreases. By challenging, during the Paris International Agricultural Show, the need to maintain a reasonable size for farms, the government chose to pursue this concentration in the name of competitiveness and productivism.

This approach was reflected in the agricultural emergency law recently passed in France, which provides no concrete response to the majority of peasant farmers. What impact will this law have on our incomes? The few tools for protection and better distribution of value outlined in Articles 19 and 21 have been stripped of their effectiveness. Worse still, by facilitating the development of production equipment, increasing the size of livestock buildings and the use of pesticides without sustainability or sharing objectives, this law accelerates a productivist model based on competition between peasant farmers and, ultimately, on their disappearance.

Yet the resilience of our sectors, our food sovereignty and our ability to make agriculture a major lever for adapting to and fighting climate change depend above all on maintaining a large number of peasant farmers in our territories. The strength of our agriculture lies in its diversity, complementarity and solidarity, as we demonstrated during health crises or the most intense periods of fires. Solidarity is only possible in living territories where there are still many peasant farmers.

No political leader, whether governing today or aspiring to govern tomorrow, can deny the realities brought to light by climate disruption. The urgent task now is to support the essential agroecological transition that peasant farmers are calling for.

This transition is the only credible path towards a liveable world. We consider that any policy that does not place the public interest at the heart of its action, that does not take the maintenance of shared habitability as its compass, that does not integrate production models into a vision for society and that fuels conflicts over the use of the commons such as water, is not merely irresponsible: it is criminal.

We, peasant farmers, call on political decision-makers to act consistently and at the scale required by the challenges we face. If this does not happen, a significant number of our farms will disappear, and political decision-makers will have to bear that responsibility for the rest of their lives.

In the very short term, it is crucial to implement all the necessary emergency measures so that no farm is permanently weakened or threatened by drought, heatwaves, hail or fires. More broadly, decision-makers’ action must focus on anticipation rather than solely on crisis management, in order to move away from an exhausted system based on our dependence on petrochemicals and benefiting only a minority.

Preserving, preventing, protecting and reforming public policies as well as support mechanisms must become the guiding principles of your action.

Our determination to defend peasant farmers and to ensure that no farm disappears remains intact and unwavering. This is why the Confédération paysanne has already identified 22 essential measures that must be implemented as soon as possible to address the climate crises.

Saving farms in the very short term: easing cash-flow pressures to get through the summer

1. Unlock a flat-rate aid payment per farm and per active worker, amounting to €5,000, to be paid rapidly to farms that have suffered at least 30% losses in harvests or turnover, with priority given to farms without multi-risk climate insurance (more than 80% of French farms). In this regard, the Confédération paysanne calls for crisis aid currently devoted to nitrogen fertilisers to be redirected towards farms actually affected by climate hazards.

2. For farms affected by fires, the majority of peasant farmers will only be able to rely on emergency aid released by the State, Departments or Regions, given that damage caused by fires to farms is not covered by standard compensation schemes. It is essential that this aid be accessible to as many people as possible and not be conditional on taking out an insurance policy.

3. Suspension of bank payments and loan instalments, as well as the State covering farmers’ agricultural social security contributions (MSA). 

4. Exemption for farmers from repaying the value-added tax (VAT) on the sale of their produce. 

Urgently reform the system for covering losses caused by climate hazards in agriculture

5. Allow farmers without multi-risk climate insurance to receive the National Solidarity Indemnity (ISN) when they lose 30% or more of their crops or livestock, instead of only when losses reach 50%. 

6. Align the compensation rate for uninsured farmers with that of insured farmers (objective: 100% coverage of losses for everyone). It is unacceptable that uninsured peasant farmers (more than 80% of farms) should see their losses compensated by the ISN at only 28% for certain types of production, while insurance premiums are covered at 70% through subsidies from the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). 

7. Make losses in market gardening and beekeeping effectively eligible for the ISN, for which the French departmental authorities (DDTs) say they cannot process compensation requests due to the lack of an appropriate method for calculating losses. 

8. Quickly draw lessons from the failure of the first three years of implementation of the crop insurance reform and rapidly put forward a reform to establish a professional, mutualised and solidarity-based fund, accessible to all farms and involving all links in the agri-food chain. Peasant farmers must not be the only ones bearing the risks 

This post is also available in Español.