The right hand doesn't know what the left is doing” is an expression often used to make fun of the confusions of others , especially when they give rise to grotesque situations like the one the agricultural sector is experiencing in France.
To help conventional French farmers do without glyphosate , the Government has in fact allocated 215 million euros in subsidies in favor of companies that will give up using this herbicide as early as 2023, aware of the fact that the replacement of the chemical substance with mechanical it is possible only with the availability of adequate equipment and which in any case will give rise to an increase in company costs of around 250 euros/hectare .
With this maneuver, Paris therefore aims to make its conventional agriculture more sustainable, knowing full well that if all local companies switched from conventional to organic, there would be a collapse in production similar to that recently recorded in Sri Lanka, a country where the conversion had place, plunging large sections of the population into poverty . A population which therefore forced President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee abroad, pursued by the furious people armed with pitchforks. To understand the risks involved in going from conventional to organic, it is enough to know that in the decade 2009-2018 the average production per hectare of organic wheat was just over 29 quintalsagainst the over 71 and a half of conventional wheat. So it takes almost two and a half hectares of organic to produce the same amount of grain as just one conventional hectare.
The “Farm to Fork” program
Given this figure, but not the only one, it would have been logical to expect that Paris, in addition to sponsoring conventional agriculture, would also review its adherence to the European objectives of the "Farm to Fork" program which aims to increase the areas cultivated organically up to to 25 percent by 2030. But no. As the expression quoted at the beginning of this article clearly states, in French “La main droite ne sait pas ce que fait la gauche”, it has in fact happened that parallel to the support advanced towards the conventional, 60 million euros of aid to the Bio sector as an advance of a larger package that should settle at around 200 million.
French organic in crisis
On the one hand it is therefore pushing towards sustainable conventional agriculture and on the other towards organic farming. It is a pity, however, that the cultivable areas are those and therefore if one practice grows it is inevitable that the other will decline. A situation that organic farming is experiencing in France on the economic front. After decades of growth, pumped above all by a shameful criminalization of agricultural chemicals, this business marked time in 2021 and then engaged the reverse in 2022, the year in which sales of organic products decreased by three and nine percent in value and of seven and eight percent by volume.
Going organic might be fashionably green, but it won’t feed the world
On the other hand, the decline in supply in large and medium-sized supermarkets was eight and a half percent , nearly 12 percent in the month of December alone. Worse was the specialty stores, with 222 of these having closed their doors. A reality that the sector obviously did not like and for this reason was repeatedly denied, in particular by BioCoop, the first French distributor specializing in organic products which, from the pages of the Crédit Agricole magazine, did not fail to proclaim itself optimistic for 2023 despite its own numbers an entirely different story.
In fact, its turnover decreased by five and six per cent last year, a period in which the brand opened 40 new stores and then closed 36 due to the demand crisis. The latter penalized above all the milk and organic pork sectors, so much so that according to the testimonies of farmers for each pig raised on the basis of organic specifications and then sold they recorded losses of between 40 and 50 euros due to retail prices of free-falling meat. The same for organic milk which according to the newspaper LesÉchos in March 2023 saw the price per liter very close to that of normal milk as demand did not absorb supply. It is therefore no coincidence that AgenceBio, the public interest group in charge of the development of organic agriculture, announced a drop of four and 17 percent in the number of organic farms, indicating however only inflation and the economic crisis as primarily responsible for the difficult moment. Undoubtedly, these factors have played their part, but they are certainly not the only causes of the problem.
The perception of organic products in France according to Le Monde
In fact, according to the newspaper Le Monde, the organic market is slowing down also due to the many labels that guarantee the absence of "pesticide" residues even in conventional products deriving from integrated, modern and sustainable agricultural practices. According to Le Monde, today in French popular perception there is no longer much difference between conventional sustainable and organicand therefore the economic aspect weighs heavily on purchasing decisions, an area in which organic farming is a complete loser since, apart from obvious scams and counterfeiting, organic fields do not harvest enough, not even to break even. So the words of Dr. Franco Berrino make you smile when from the pages of the Corriere della Sera he tries to convince consumers that you can eat real organic food cheaply, so as to then enjoy a long and healthy old age. Apart from the fact that ours, we do not want it for the good-natured irony, due to its extreme thinness it is very reminiscent of Ötzi, the mummy of Similaun - and we should already reflect on this - the doubt that low-priced organic is true bio is more
