What's so infuriating in France is that farmers are basically sacred: nothing can be said, let alone done, to curb their behavior.
They benefit from all kinds of advantages: they don't pay taxes on fuel and don't pay for water (water in France is very expensive for everyone else except farmers), have all kinds of special conditions and fiscal deductions, and that's in addition to the direct payments they get from the CAP (around 12 billion Euros / year).
All of this for less than 2% of French GDP and the active destruction of the ecosystem, deforestation and pollution on a huge scale. In the French countryside all one can see are immense fields of corn and wheat, watered all the time (it's esp. infuriating to witness watering in the summer, at noon). The French countryside isn't charming, it's horrible, it looks like a grand experiment from an evil dictator.
Yet politicians from absolutely all parties from the extreme left to the extreme right and including everything in-between, fall over themselves to give more to farmers. Every single national politician attends the "Salon de l'Agriculture" held in Paris in February, etc. etc.
Why is there no one to say, this has gone too far; why can't we hold those people accountable for what they have done and what they are doing, I don't understand.
There are also some good farms practicing agroforestry, an example later in the video linked to above.
The examples are such a small drop in the ocean, but from Sepp Holzer in Austria to Ridgedale in Sweden, momentum for restorative agriculture will grow. Hopefully swiftly, but that's also dependant on government policy.
My uncle has been a farmer for quite a while and his children took on the farm after he "retired" (you never really retire when you're a farmer).
I've worked with them and I've never seen them water the crops. They don't even own the tools to do so and yet they're growing cereals (and a hundred cows) on 300 acres.
They live in the east of France where I've never seen crops being watered.
Not to say that you're wrong but I can't confirm your statement given my experience with farmers.
300 acres is a tiny farm especially for a mix of cereals and cows. It's only going to profitable with massive subsidies and as doing a better job is probably not that important vs. collecting government handouts.
I don't know how most of France operates, but small operations are generally a vast waste of resources.
I live in the Luberon on a hectare of land. But check this out— all real estate sales of land claimed to be agricultural land (such as mine,) must be approved by a farm association. So farmers can even control the buying and selling of my home that they don’t even own. If, for example, I wanted to buy up a bunch of agricultural land and turn it into a nature preserve, that sale could be blocked by a third party despite not having any ownership rights to the land in question.
> If farmers are “sacred”, how do you explain their horrible suicide rate?
There's no contradiction between the two? The suicide rate of farmers is a little above average, probably because, in spite of all the subsidies and advantages, they still have a very hard time making a living.
But farmers are still sacred in the sense that it's impossible to suggest that maybe the current state of affairs is suboptimal, or to have a serious public conversation about that policy.
A suicide rate 20% higher than another suicide rate is 20% more horrible, which is not horribly more horrible unless we've diluted the meaning of horrible which would mean the we don't think the suicide rate is too bad.
Suicide is normally a preventable death, and suicide is a leading cause of death. So if a population has 20% higher than average rate of death by suicide that's a pretty big deal.
Is that measured in suicide attempts, or successful suicides? Because if it's successful suicides it might just be that the number of attempts is the same, but they have more effective methods of killing themselves, like pesticides:
Don't know about France but a definite problem in Ireland is that farming is 7 days a week 365 days a year job for many farmers and for those with a small holding making a living can be difficult. Add to the closing of rural pubs/post offices/shops social isolation is a real problem.
Question from someone who knows nothing about this and is trying to understand: how much of agriculture in France is dominated by big agriculture? Is it possible that small farmers are having a hard time while economics of scale and subsidies work well for big ag?
Not knowing that much either, but I was more under the inpression that farmers working small had a better chance to live decently than the ones working on big contracts.
My perspective is how supermaket chains establish almost direct relations with producers and waive their weigh around to get better and better deals as time goes. Basically a variant of cuting the middle layers to eliminate bargaining power.
> The French countryside isn't charming, it's horrible
I don't know which countryside you've seen, but most of what I've seen is not ugly, with still a great number of forest and other non-ugly parts. Cultivated lands is half of the total surface. Also water is not expensive in France and is not used for agriculture in most parts of the country, where they get enough rain. Of course, I agree with you that seeing those ugly corn fields receiving water at 12h in summer is infuriating.
No, the alternative is changing agriculture, regulating it and helping it be more environmentally friendly, and not alleviating environment taxes on fuel and water. Tax pesticides, too.
If we regulate it and tax pesticides, then in a global market system, wouldn't those areas fail to compete with other countries that don't have those regulations?
France has commonly been one of the five largest agriculture exporters for the last several decades. As recently as 1995 they were the world's #2 agriculture exporter after the US (I believe they're currently #6 or #7 globally, having lost ground the last few years).
As in the case with California exporting vast quantities of its water to Asia in the form of things like Almonds - at a steep resource cost for a very modest financial gain - France could clearly afford to reduce its agriculture exports at minimum cost to its overall economy and reduce the strain on its natural resources.
The part that you don't see in those numbers is that "affording to reduce exports" really means that many people would have to drastically change the life style their families had for centuries. It's not easy for farm owners who've had that land for generations to just turn the switch and start living of something else. In Europe workforce has a lot more of inertia than in US or Canada, people are far less used to relocating and re-skilling in the search for jobs...
No, the alternative is importing food from countries who have a competitive advantage in agriculture, such as the United States — thus improving the economic condition of the 98% of French who aren’t farmers.
Also, your theory holds no water: France still manages to import vast numbers of cheap Chinese consumer goods which are often produced under extraordinary bad environmental conditions. So if the idea that France is saving the environment by farming more, then it would follow that they’d be making more consumer goods for similar reasons. But they aren’t.
Go talk to Venezuela about competitive advantage. They purposefully neglected their native food production in favour of food imports from abroad. Now they cannot source enough USD to import enough food and they are fucked.
Food is a national security issue. You cannot become dependent on other countries.
I think suggesting today's outcome in Venezuela as the result of intention to have imports rather than the obviously bad result of land redistribution is disingenuous. Chavez took land from farmers and gave it to people who had never farmed before. That's not intentionally relying on food imports. That's shooting yourself in the gut while on a drunken bender.
And yet being protectionist isn’t great either and leads to situations exactly like the one discussed here. Obviously the Venezuelan situation is a bit more complex than described and while being able to support ones self is important, pouring money into losing sectors is wasteful. Some pretty big countries aren’t self sufficient for food and most countries aren’t self sufficient for everything. TLDR get on with your neighbours and as many others as possible.
Food's certainly a national security issue, but this has almost zero relevance to the French farming subsidies being discussed here, or similar subsidies in most other countries.
Those subsidies are just enacted to serve entrenched farming interests, usually because rural voters have a disproportionate say in national politics.
If a country was designing a food subsidies policy that was truly concerned about national security they'd do things like maintain a strategic buffer of cheap canned goods, and certainly wouldn't be subsidizing expensive to produce calories like French cheese other animal products which are highly inefficient per produced calorie.
You're mischaracterising the issue. Cheese isn't the issue at hand. Caloric efficiencies are a valid point, but here the greater harm is done by the huge thirsty corn fields that encompass the horizon.
The question as I understand it is whether the surplus production/exports are worth not scaling slightly back on the extensive farming.
Either diversifying production, letting a part of the area to fallow or splitting large "strictly for profit" farms into distinct units would have many benefits ecologically and possibly even help revitalise the rural towns.
Cheese specifically isn't the issue at hand, but French cheese producers are one of many beneficiaries of French agricultural subsidies, but I don't see how anyone could argue that the relatively inefficient production of cheese has strategic value in the sense that you'd need to feed an otherwise starving population cheese.
You'd instead at the very least just have them drink the milk directly, but more efficiently either consume the corn the cows are eating, or grow something in the grass fields the cows are using that people could eat directly.
Then there's the unrelated question of whether these subsidies aren't causing a net harm on the environment in France. I don't know about that, I'm just pointing out that the argument for agricultural subsidies due to national security concerns doesn't hold up if it's being used to defend anything resembling current subsidies.
That's before we even get to discussing how implausible that argument is to begin with. OK, maybe France and other EU countries would need to strategically make sure they don't become reliant on the likes of China, Russia etc. for food imports.
But it makes no sense these days that France would need to be concerned that they couldn't just largely import food from Spain and Italy, who have onerous EU-imposed production quotas due to French agricultural lobbying, even though it's more efficient to produce the food there in many cases.
Yes, but Venezuela isn't part of the largest trading and political union on the planet. France could easily rely on food from any other EU country and they would be fine.
This is one of the rare issues where there is sensible middle ground.
I'm a big fan of agricultural subsidies (you want food to be produced in wild excess of demand for a number of reasons), but you can still regulate agricultural practices to eliminate ones which are unnecessarily environmentally destructive for marginal gains in production.
France has every competitive advantage with regard to soil and climate and technology. And the USA (notably California) is an example for bad toxic wasteful agriculture.
>> Why is there no one to say, this has gone too far; why can't we hold those people accountable for what they have done and what they are doing, I don't understand.
Probably because they're growing food, which most people consider necessary.
Besides, before getting to the farmers and the destruction they have wrought on to the environment, there is plenty of scope to look at the behaviour of, oh, I don't know - the companies that sell the pesticide the farmers use, just off the top of my head? Not to mention other industries that cause much more harm to the environment than agriculture, which is, at the end of the day, something we literally can't live without.
In some nature protected areas in Germany, researchers [1] have reported a 75% decline in flying insects over 27 years. Study is from Oct 2017. This is alarming.
I don't know of any studies to prove it is true, but I suspect that the US Midwest (in particular) has had a similar decline. Anecdotally I can say that there are certainly far fewer insects here than there were in the 60s and 70s when I was growing up, and also that there seem to be far fewer birds.
I wonder if we'll stop dumping this stuff into the environment before it's too late. It would require a whole new way of thinking about the industrial scale agriculture we have developed over the last 50 years, so I'm a little pessimistic.
There's an article related to this titled "Where have all the insects gone?" which discusses the "windshield phenomenon" where far fewer bugs are winding up on the windshields of vehicles.
If you want to lay blame at a single aspect of American government as you have, I think it's more fair to blame a two party system and cultural emphasis on wedge issues (abortion, gun control, gay rights, etc).
I didn't lay blame. You seem to have misread my comment or conflated it with GP. I was just saying that Trump's election doesn't demonstrate a decline in environmentalism among the electorate.
That's blatantly false. US common adherance to science in terms of progress has varied throughtout its history, while general religious belief has almost perpetually declined for two centuries. They do not appear to be very strongly linked in the US; that's due to its secular foundation. The US has been the world's leader in scientific output since the Civil War, there hasn't been a close #2.
Under your theory, the US should be radically more scientifically oriented now than it was a century ago, as religious beliefs have plunged substantially over that time.
Or for another example, the Chinese culture is extremely mystical. And saying extremely, is an understatement. Just their beliefs around luck alone are as mystically out there as any hard-core Christian notions I've ever run across in the US.
And yet those mystical beliefs supposedly do not deter the Chinese from the pursuit of science.
A near majority of people in Western European nations believe in ghosts or the equivalent. In fact, less Americans (42%) believe in ghosts versus people in the UK (52%) [1]. How do you believe in ghosts without believing in some kind of convoluted afterlife theory? How can scientifically oriented people believe such things?
Canadian monthly church attendance rates were as high as recently as 1988, as the US is today. Did that mean Canadians were crippled scientifically until the last 10-15 years? I doubt it.
I'm afraid I believe that culture that values expertise and scientific decision-making is just that - culture, embedded in people's minds and functioning in a very similar way to religion as a default mindset. Most people who are cheerleaders for science believe scientific "facts" without evidence too. They are not looking at the source data and verifying p-values, discounting cherry-picked studies, etc.
Actual critical thinking takes a lot of effort and most people don't continually question their assumptions. I don't think it's possible to bake that into education. Thus we need to inculcate a decent set of assumptions via educational indoctrination. And this, on its surface, is indistinguishable from religious indoctrination, even if it has the best of intentions.
The fragmentation of national narratives certainly has a part to play as well. Increasing divergence in shared narratives reduces political will for the right kind of indoctrination, while the divergent narratives fight culture wars against one another for control of their kids' minds.
No there are not fewer birds. Ornithologists routinely census areas for species and counts. They notice when species decline in an area. They notice when new species arrive in an area. There have been zero reports of birds in general declining.
EDIT: Here's a reference [1]. Note that it specifically calls out species in general decline: the Northern Bobwhite, American Kestrel, and the Loggerhead Shrike.
North American birds are absolutely in decline. From this article [1], the overall population has decreased by about 1.5 billion birds since 1970. For some groups of species, for instance, aerial insectivores [2], things are much worse. For instance, the population of bank and barn swallows, chimney swifts and common nighthawks has decreased by 70% over the past twenty years alone.
The Christmas Bird Survey is done after most birds have migrated and so captures data on the relative abundance of resident birds, which as a group, are doing better than birds in North America overall.
There's hard data from a study over 27 years in Germany on the decline of insects, references below:
> sabertoothed
In some nature protected areas in Germany, researchers [1] have reported a 75% decline in flying insects over 27 years. Study is from Oct 2017. This is alarming.
The main point of the book was that the use of pesticides (specifically, at the time, DDT) had an impact on the entire ecosystem, not just the agricultural pests they were targeting. If I remember correctly, spring was "silent" because you couldn't hear the animal sounds anymore -including birds' song.
Silent Spring is interesting because most people miss the nuance of that book — a nuance that was critical to enacting smart pesticide policy — a smart policy that didn’t not include “total” bans. Here’s a doctor elaborating:
DDT was never banned internationally for use in malaria control. The idea that it was is a falsehood spread by lobbyists. Maybe you meant to post a different link, but the one that you did post is a terrible and misleading article. This article goes into some of what actually happened and the disinformation campaign:
Hiked four days across a national park in the US a couple of years ago and was astounded at the lack of wildlife. Two snakes and a couple dozen small lizards, but almost no birds, no squirrels/chipmunks/whatever, no deer, etc. The lack of birds in particular amazed me, and I noticed the same hiking in Europe.
In Australian backyards, let alone the bush, the birdlife is varied and can be very noisy (magpies, lorikeets, cockatoos). At dawn in many areas of the bush here, the birds are hilariously loud - good luck sleeping in if you're camping!
> Anecdotally I can say that there are certainly far fewer insects here than there were in the 60s and 70s when I was growing up, and also that there seem to be far fewer birds.
Could some of that be due to you paying more attention to insects and birds when you were growing up? Kids tend to spend more time outdoors than adults, especially more unstructured time, and so might be expected to have more time to notice things like insects and birds, and more time to indulge curiosity about them.
Anecdotally, I remember in the 90s my parents having an old and very box shaped Volvo. Driving through light snow one day my mother was struggling to clear the windscreen, we were on our way to pick up a hire car which ended up being a brand new Mercedes. The angle and shape of the windscreen was entirely different and the snow just followed the airflow up and over.
That said, we have front registration plates in the UK which are probably less subject to aero improvements and ISTR the same phenomenon being observed there.
I just read a good article about the passenger pigeon [1]. It was originally published in Audubon, but I read it in a book called "The Best American Science and Nature Writing -
2015".
People forget all those beautiful paintings from the Audoban Society were made by killing the bird, stuffing it, and then painting the stuffed bird.
The example I'd like to share is more from naturalists that would explore tropical islands in the Pacific, but that's not right at hand at the moment, as the examples were in one of those dusty books a friend had one time. But bird populations in decline in tropical islands is a big problem, especially because of the evolutionary niche they have:
Interestingly not mentioned is that many migratory birds that go through Europe pass through a lot of hostile territory. Covered several years ago by none other than Jonathan Franzen:
Maybe not a significant reason for the decline; I don't know, but obviously you can't blame the conditions in France alone for a decline in 70% of migratory songbirds. France could not be the issue at all.
EDIT: it’s fascinating that HN has people that don’t get that disbalancing a fairly balanced system (ecosystem) will lead to severe and, usually, hard to predict results. Birds and insects make up a vital part of our shared ecosystem. By breaking the balance in it further and further we are indangering ourself a further and further. The equation will balance itself, but that balance may or may not include us (humans) in the long run. I’d prefer we make significant concessions now, rather facing such dire consequences later.
We've been seeing a similar issue in Ohio with our apiaries (bee hives). For us it has been three items. I can image it's the same in Europe:
* Varroa mite - a Chinese mite that spread to Europe and then the by cross species breeds. It bites into the side of a bee. Adult bees are usually strong enough withstand the bites. But the mite's feeding leaves holes in the shell that never really heal and makes it easy to contact diseases like Fowl Brood Hive Disease.
When the mite hit the brood (aka larva) they'll grow up in cell with the brood. Regular brood will have the mites cleaned off or the brood and mite larva will be removed as soon as possible. But drones have a longer gestation period and deeper cells. By the time the drone emerges the mite has already gone through it's full life cycle and is ready to restart the process attaching to nurse bees. Ohio would have eradicated it by now but neighboring states don't regulate their hive.
* Fowl Brood Hive Disease - It's bacterium that spreads on contact between bees. Since bees are very social it spreads very easy. Remember when a bees stings something it dies, so why fight when you don't have to? Plus queens prefer to breed with other hives to prevent genetics stagnation.
When a brood has been infected it forms scales on it's shell and begins to for scales similar to Harlequin Ichthyosis in humans. If they die in the cell the nurse bees will remove the decaying brood. In the process the nurse bees also get the spores on them spreading the disease in them. At the point the only good way to stop the disease is to kill the whole hive, clean out the hive, and boil everything. Again Ohio would have eradicated it by now but neighboring states don't regulate their hive.
* Genetically altered crops - We have enough floral diversity in our wetlands, open fields, forests, and private gardens to feed our bees. But we sees build-up of genetically modified pollen that has a pesticide in it. The first couple years of a hive theirs no issue. But around year 3 we can almost count on total hive collapse. Its because the pesticide builds up in the wax they keep rebuilding for the brood, nectar, and honey storage. Eventually to get so strong it poisons the brood or the hive swarms to find a better location.
Pesticides are a big problem, but is more complex than that. The real conservation of migrating species is a tricky problem. You can do your best effort to save birds in France or Germany just to provide hunters in Malta or Lebanon with plenty of birds (Is estimated than 2.6 millions of migrating birds including many european protected species are killed each year just in Lebanon for example). Is the drama with the vanishing european turtle dove and shrikes for example.
Possible contributing cause is a class of insecticides called neonicotinoids. These are not sprayed, but rather coated on seeds, arguably even more alarming.
Seed coating with a neonicotinoid insecticide negatively affects wild bees
https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v521/n7550/full/nature14420.html
I mean, it’s great that there’s not a whole lot of this stuff being used, but if even small amounts are causing problems then it’s not that much of a saving grace.
I am suspicious of the neonics, but I am also suspicious of the many other insecticides that are used indiscriminately, and possible in excess dosages.
I want to get rid of the bad materials and bad methods of use, and keep the good ones/ways.
It is fairly obvious that excess insect kill is harming birds, but is it insecticides or a plague of spiders?
"Despite a government plan to cut pesticide use in half by 2020, sales in France have climbed steadily, reaching more than 75,000 tonnes of active ingredient in 2014, according to European Union figures."
That's an incredibly large amount of pesticides - over two pounds of active ingredient per French citizen per year.
Considering the amount of food, by weight, a human consumes over a year only two pounds of pesticides is an incredibly efficient use as far as my experience. I’m impressed. I probably have to use a half pound per year for my small vegetable garden which might feed me for a month if I had a really good season.
Bird populations across the French countryside have fallen by a third over the last decade and a half, researchers have said.
Dozens of species have seen their numbers decline, in some cases by two-thirds, the scientists said in a pair of studies – one national in scope and the other covering a large agricultural region in central France.
“The situation is catastrophic,” said Benoit Fontaine, a conservation biologist at France’s National Museum of Natural History and co-author of one of the studies.
Does anyone have a link to the actual studies that are referenced? The article mentions Benoît Fontaine as one of the co-authors, but I don't see anything that matches in his recent publications:
Just this weekend I was visiting friends in a small town in the south-west of France. I took a country walk on Sunday morning, and noticed there were very few birds. The familiar, comforting sound of a distant woodpecker, but considering how much forest I walked through and it is fully in Spring-bloom I was very surprised to not see or hear birds in general.
Possibly downvoted because of no references. So first, cats are a menace to wild animals. Second, "We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds and 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually"[0]. Entirely humans' fault of course. Without humans there wouldn't be so many cats.
I'm sure the downvotes are because the people that are firm believers in poisoning the environment with sprays are the same ones that refuse to believe that little Fluffy needs to stay inside because its a relentless animal killing machine.
The incentives for GMO research are perverse, there's so much potential yet like most new tech it's been co-opted for evil.
Most of the money is going into how to sell more pesticide rather than making the plants more resilient. GMO could eliminate pesticides altogether and that would make Monsanto and friends very unhappy.
an interesting side note, endotoxin test have relied on availability of horseshoe crab blood:
The standard assay for detecting presence of endotoxin is
the Limulus Amebocyte Lysate (LAL) assay, utilizing blood
from the Horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus).[44] Very low
levels of LPS can cause coagulation of the limulus lysate
due to a powerful amplification through an enzymatic
cascade. However, due to the dwindling population of
horseshoe crabs, and the fact that there are factors that
interfere with the LAL assay, efforts have been made to
develop alternative assays, with the most promising ones
being ELISA tests using a recombinant version of a protein
in the LAL assay, Factor C.[
GMO is illegal in france. If anything it is the lack of GMO causing the problem. No GMO crops means you must use incesticides in large quantities, with GMO crops you don’t need to use incesticides and therefore insects and the environment are less effected.
A good way fir France to tackle this problem would be to allow GMO crops. Alas, hysteria and superstition are against sensible solutions.
Using GMO crops doesn't mean you don't need pesticides. The crops are engineered to withstand the pesticide, but you still have to use pesticide to protect the plants.
What do you mean by domesticated? It's very vague.
The original comment looks shallow at first, but GMOs often contain pesticides inside the seed/grain because the companies designing them don't know how to control it. That could potentially harm birds in the long run, and definitely harms insects.
That's sad, but until we get insecticides with high specificity I'd rather have fewer birds and fewer insects over more birds and more insects.
Monocultures are definitely in need of becoming at least somewhat diversified because besides the birds, right now we're still at a point where a stupid plant virus or fungus can kill millions because it can wipe out half of the world's wheat or rice production.
We know how to make insecticides that are very effective, almost impossible for the target to develop resistance to, and harmless to most other species.
But to do so, we have to seriously understand the target species, bit there aren't anywhere near enough entomologists for that.
Briefly, what you have to do is extensively study the life cycle of the target. Insects are the biological equivalent of simple robots that follow a bunch of pre-programmed behaviors triggered by their inputs. Hormones are associated with this various behaviors.
Get a few PhD entomologists who make it their career to understand a particular insect, and they can figure out what pre-programmed behavior that insect has, and what triggers them, and most importantly what hormones are involved with which trigger.
You can then make a pesticide based on one of that insect's hormones that will trigger the associated behavior.
For example, suppose you have an insect that in its juvenile form causes a lot of damage to crops. Later, in its adult form, when certain weather changes occur, the females look for a particular plant growing in a still pond, and lay their eggs on the leaves. The males, when that weather change occurs, also seek those plants in still ponds, and fertilize any eggs they find. The adults then die.
If you can find the hormone that triggers the "go lay/fertilize then die" behavior, then you maybe can make a pesticide with that which you can spray on the juveniles. It triggers the "reproduce and die" program, even though the juvenile females cannot yet pay eggs and the males cannot yet fertilize eggs. That doesn't matter. They are essentially biological automatons, and they are running that program now. They find the pond, find the plant, go through the motions, and die.
The cool thing about hormones is that the hormones for one species usually are highly specific to that species. The hormone based pesticide probably will not do anything to other insects. It also probably won't do anything to whatever eats the target insect--things that eat insects and are not unharmed by insect hormones tend to evolve away from eating insects. Another cool thing about using hormones as the basis for pesticides is there is not much the target can do to evolve resistance. An insect that evolves resistance to its own "go and mate" hormone, for instance, is not going to be passing those genes on.
Another thing you can do when you have enough entomologists to actually seriously study insect life cycles is try biological control. For many pest insects there are predator insects that kill the pest. There are also often parasites that can control the pests. If the pest is also a predator, there are often other predators that compete with the pests for food. If you know enough about this complex web of predator/prey/parasite, you can reasonably safely try things like boosting the predators of your pests, or bringing in non-pest competitors for the pest's prey.
But you need to really understand a lot about all the involved species to do that safely, so it suffers the same problem as does hormone based pesticides, but more so.
Are you sure that hormones are species specific? A pregnant human's hormones makes certain frogs lay eggs, insulin from pigs works in humans... at least for vertebrates it seems that the hormonal pathways are fairly similar between species.
They benefit from all kinds of advantages: they don't pay taxes on fuel and don't pay for water (water in France is very expensive for everyone else except farmers), have all kinds of special conditions and fiscal deductions, and that's in addition to the direct payments they get from the CAP (around 12 billion Euros / year).
All of this for less than 2% of French GDP and the active destruction of the ecosystem, deforestation and pollution on a huge scale. In the French countryside all one can see are immense fields of corn and wheat, watered all the time (it's esp. infuriating to witness watering in the summer, at noon). The French countryside isn't charming, it's horrible, it looks like a grand experiment from an evil dictator.
Yet politicians from absolutely all parties from the extreme left to the extreme right and including everything in-between, fall over themselves to give more to farmers. Every single national politician attends the "Salon de l'Agriculture" held in Paris in February, etc. etc.
Why is there no one to say, this has gone too far; why can't we hold those people accountable for what they have done and what they are doing, I don't understand.