France faces the formidable challenge of the agroecological transition, while generational renewal in agriculture is not assured. At the same time, support systems continue to exclude those who wish to settle down after the age of 40.
France belatedly discovered that generational renewal in agriculture is a strategic issue. We are talking about food sovereignty, agroecological transition, maintaining farms in the territories.
We are urgently discussing a new law intended to respond to the anger of the agricultural world. But the essential continues to be avoided: to keep this essential branch of our economy alive, we need strong people ready to devote twenty years of their lives to it, whatever their date of birth or their professional trajectory.
The “young farmers” category: the invisible wall of 40 years
However, current installation policies are based on an arbitrary boundary: 40 years. Below, the status of “young farmer” opens access to a whole range of aid: capital grants, income supplements, social exemptions, tax reductions, investment subsidies, dedicated support.
Beyond that, almost all of these schemes close, even when the project is technically sound, economically viable and agronomically useful to the territories.
In the forms, this boundary takes the form of conditions presented as purely administrative. In reality, it is a social sorting. Anyone who wishes to take over a farm at the age of 45 is not entitled to the basic young farmer grant to supplement their starting capital.
It is excluded from the additional income support paid for five years by the common agricultural policy (CAP). It benefits neither from the increased rates nor from the classification priorities granted to “young farmers” in the investment plans.
He does not benefit from exemptions from contributions or tax reductions reserved for installations before the age of 40. Some of the support systems are closed to it or less favorable. The transferor(s) of the repossessed farm must pay much heavier capital gains taxes.
Financial damage and hindrance to agricultural establishment
Adding up all these differences is not meticulous accounting. It is measuring a structural handicap. As a concrete example, the takeover of an average French dairy farm – seventy cows and a hundred hectares, one family to settle – by a farmer under 40 years old or by someone over 40 years old represents a gap in direct public support which is commonly between 35,000 and 75,000 euros over the first five years.
These are subsidies, income supplements, exemptions and bonuses that simply never reach the account of those who are “over the age”.
Added to this are indirect but equally decisive discriminations. Access to bank credit is mechanically more difficult for a project leader as the public aid system does not secure it.
The banker knows perfectly well how to read a bundle of subsidies and a cash flow trajectory: a “young person receiving assistance” and a “non-young person” do not present, on paper, the same risk profile, even though they sometimes carry out almost identical projects.
A handicap of image and file on land too
On land, the same mechanisms play out again: the candidate who checks the “young farmer” box is favored in the arbitrations of various commissions, whether land development and rural establishment companies (Safer), communities or parapublic institutions. Someone who is 45 or 50 years old arrives with a handicap in terms of image and record, even if their project is more solid.
On farms whose management is increasingly done “on a string” and in particular in the highly strategic category of mixed farming, these differences translate into very concrete choices: invest or not in bringing them up to standard, hire or not an employee, train, take the time to restore agronomic value to the soil, or even convert to organic.
Change paradigm
As long as we continue to reserve resources for a single age category, we silently condemn some of the possible recoveries, including in territories where we claim to defend livestock farming and rural life.
This policy is in direct contradiction with the proclaimed objectives, but also with our fundamental principles.
The principle of equality before the law, guaranteed by the Constitution, is undermined when a criterion of civil status – age – becomes the main determinant of access or not to the means to settle, rather than the quality of the project and the services it provides to the community.
Freedom of enterprise, also guaranteed by the Constitution, loses its substance when the State massively directs public financial flows towards a single category of profiles, leaving others to advance with a structural financial handicap.
“The risk of letting production tools die”
The agroecological transition will not happen without a large movement of reconversions: teachers, public officials, employees in industry or services, who, at 42, 48 or 55 years old, want to take over a farm, maintain livestock, restore value to meadows, relocate dairy or market gardening production.
These people do not fit into the boxes, although they are often ready to invest their savings, to take risks, to commit to a territory for twenty years. To keep them away from aid is to objectively sabotage one of the only reserves of living forces that we have to successfully renew generations.
Failing to create the installation conditions for these profiles, the risk is clear: letting demanding production tools die – in particular our mixed crop-livestock farms – and replacing them with highly capitalized systems based on poorly paid, sometimes foreign, labor in structures where the decision takes a little further away from the field.
Is this really what French society wants when it talks about food sovereignty, dignity of work and social justice?
Recognize agriculture as a strategic asset of the nation
The problem is not marginal nor purely French. The next common agricultural policy and national strategic plans must stop making age a discriminating criterion and, at a minimum, establish a compensation mechanism for those over 40 in agricultural reconversion, at national and European level.
It is not a question of eliminating aid for the youngest, but of correcting a flagrant inequality of access to the means to settle down. The State must also clearly tell the regions and communities which intervene in land and installation that they must no longer, under pressure from unions, indulge in age discrimination, but on the contrary welcome and support project leaders in professional retraining who really invest in agricultural tools.
Recognizing agriculture – and in particular livestock farming – as a strategic asset of the nation requires us to follow the logic to its logical conclusion: widely opening access to this asset to all those who are ready to assume responsibility for it over twenty years.
As long as public policies continue to draw a dividing line on the sole basis of civil status, we will miss the target: ensuring the renewal of generations, respecting our own constitutional principles and succeeding in the agroecological transition on which our food sovereignty depends.
About opinions
This text is signed by a guest author. He expresses his opinion and not that of the editorial staff. Our Live section aims to allow the expression of pluralism on religious, social and current affairs subjects, and to encourage dialogue, according to the criteria set by our editorial charter.
Share your opinion in comments or by writing to us at: readers.lacroix@groupebayard.com
