Despite French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal’s intention to incorporate the concept of ‘food sovereignty’ into French law, there remains a strong split over what the concept means, and its compatibility with the government’s trade policy.
In response to widespread farmers’ protests, Attal announced on 1 February that ‘agricultural sovereignty’ would be at the heart of France’s next major agricultural law – an idea called for by FNSEA, the country’s main farmers’ union.
However, it is difficult to define what this much-touted term means. Some see it as the power to set market standards in a globalised, free-trade world order; others see it as synonymous with self-sufficiency.
The term is the tagline for the Salon de l’agriculture et de l’alimentation, the biggest mainstream farming fair, which opens on Saturday (24 February).
However, on the same day, the farmers’ union La Confédération Paysanne is organising a counter-event, the Salon à la ferme – also under the tagline of food sovereignty, yet proposing a very different understanding.
In its counter-event, the union is set to denounce the appropriation and misuse of the concept, which it claims to be rooted in the peasant movement that opposed globalisation.
“Today, the French government and the FNSEA have a vision of food sovereignty that is the antithesis of this definition,” said the union in a press release.
From Via Campesina to Emmanuel Macron
The concept of food sovereignty was first used in the early 1990s by the Via Campesina anti-globalisation movement, at a time when agricultural products were entering the world market. It is defined as “the right of each country to maintain and develop its own capacity to produce its own staple food”.
The same definition is followed in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other Rural People (UNDROP), adopted in 2018.
It was in 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, that the phrase saw a resurgence in the political world.
Dealing with emerging shortages and external dependence, President Emmanuel Macron declared that “delegating our food” was “madness”, and called for “a sovereign Europe, a France and a Europe that firmly hold their destiny in their own hands”.
The concept was pushed in Brussels by France in recent years, particularly throughout the French Presidency of the EU Council in 2022. In the same year, France’s Ministry of Agriculture became the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Sovereignty. At the end of 2022, Italy did the same.
Paradigm shift
But somewhere between Via Campesina and the French government, the definition has shifted: in a recent interview, Agriculture Minister Marc Fesneau defined the term as “more French production, which will lead to more French products”.
From the freedom of countries to choose their food system, sovereignty has become a production capacity, whose indicator is the balance of trade.
“The problem of food and agricultural sovereignty lies in the fact that we import 1/3 of our food,” Arnaud Rousseau, head of the FNSEA, recently said on X.
In September 2022, a French Senate report that largely guided the government’s choices blamed the ‘loss of food sovereignty’ on the country’s falling competitiveness.
According to bipartisan senators, the fact that the country has gone from being the world’s second-largest food exporter to sixth-largest in just a few decades means its ‘food sovereignty’ is undermined.
Relying on imports to assess sovereignty can be misleading, as Harold Levrel, professor of ecological economics at AgroParisTech, explained in a recent op-ed.
While France imports three-quarters of the durum wheat, over a third of its temperate fruit (that which can be grown in France), and a quarter of its potatoes and pork, it also exports these products at the same time. “The real problem is that we export what we produce, including what we need,” he explained.
France’s draft agricultural policy law defines food sovereignty as “its capacity to ensure its food supply within the framework of the European Union’s internal market and its international commitments”.
France must therefore “control the necessary or strategic dependence on imports and exports”, it states.
However, the Confédération Paysanne pushed back on the understanding: “This gives the false impression that food sovereignty and free trade agreements are compatible,” it said.
European sovereignty?
Another controversial issue is the scale. For the Paris government, ‘sovereignty’ should be French and European. But this, too, brings a certain paradox.
“This is in total contradiction with the principle of sovereignty, which is the right of each country to maintain and develop its own production capacity,” Grégoire de Fournas, an MP of the far-right Rassemblement National, said during a parliamentary debate on the concept of EU food sovereignty.
Moreover, for environmental campaigners, sovereignty must take into account the sustainability of agricultural systems, water resources, soil quality and farmers’ access to land.
“No one can go off on their own with their own definition,” stressed Benoît Biteau MEP (Greens/EFA) on Arte on Thursday. In his view, the only definition that counts is the original Via Campesina definition: “Produce here to feed here, produce there to produce there”.
[Edited by Angelo Di Mambro/Nathalie Weatherald]
