The 20th
anniversary
edition
March 14 & 15, 2025
at UNESCO • Paris

Noémie, you are an organic black pig farmer in the Gers, and you write about agriculture and its environmental, societal, and political issues. You co-authored Plutôt nourrir, which immerses readers in your daily life as a farmer while questioning our agricultural model. What were your goals with this book, and how do you turn your personal experience into a political narrative?

Noémie Calais: I wouldn’t have written this book if my friend Clément Osé hadn’t come to me with an editorial proposal and time to focus on the main writing of the book; at the time, I was deep into setting up my farm and was really short on time! Over the months, working closely with Clément made me realize the importance of documenting what I was living through in my daily life as a farmer: the relationship with life, death, the joys, and the many difficulties of the profession, and gradually... the political power dynamics that are extremely strong in the agricultural world. Peasant agriculture, despite being so rich in positive social and environmental externalities, receives very little support from public authorities, or is even completely discredited. In the face of certain injustices, I took up the pen. Our book Plutôt Nourrir follows this path: it starts with an individual approach, my own experience of setting up the farm, and gradually moves toward a political and collective reflection.

The anger of the agricultural world is a recurrent topic in French current affairs. Since January, French farmers have mobilized, particularly against the signing of the Mercosur agreements. You yourself denounce the precariousness of the sector and the lack of effective measures to support the transition of the agricultural world: what do you expect from the political world today?

I am appalled by the physical or political attacks suffered by organizations supporting agroecology and biodiversity: Agence Bio, the OFB, INRAE, ANSES... The government seems to have taken the farmers' anger from last year as a blank check to accelerate the intensification and industrialization of our agricultural systems, and to severely roll back environmental protections, particularly on pesticides. Regarding the intensification of livestock farming, who has heard about the decrees from last summer changing the classification of installations subject to environmental regulations? In complete silence, the thresholds were raised, for example from 40,000 to...85,000 chickens per building. This is how we end up intensifying our agricultural models and increasing the risks that come with them (zoonoses, diseases, dependence on fossil fuels and the import of grains or oilseeds, etc.), instead of addressing the root causes of the crisis: free trade, price destruction of agricultural products, loss of income for farmers, rising prices and difficulty accessing land, soil erosion (over 70% of soils in Europe are degraded), and the decline in biodiversity...

In your book, you talk about the necessary solidarity between farmers and citizens who share issues of poverty. How can we hope to guarantee access to healthy and sustainable food for all, while considering the economic difficulties of both consumers and producers?

This is the very issue of food democracy. The money is there, but there’s a serious problem of distribution, and the failure to account for the negative externalities of the current system. A few figures: of the 9 billion euros France receives annually from the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), about 75% of the aid goes to... 25% of farmers. On the other end of the spectrum, about 35% of French farmers receive no aid at all. On the consumer side, I’ll mention the alarming figure from the FAO’s November 2023 report: the cost of industrial food is estimated at 10 trillion dollars annually worldwide, with 73% of that linked to the ultra-processing of foods.

In my opinion, the solution must be twofold: national and European policies aimed at better distributing public subsidies, with aid targeted at active farmers rather than at expansion, to give peasant agriculture a fighting chance — it’s a question of equality. And then, a localized solution, closer to the citizens, focusing on equity: this is the meaning of the food security social safety nets (SSA) being developed in many regions of France.

The opposition between ecology and agriculture is becoming increasingly common in public debates, with a tendency to blame the proliferation of environmental regulations. How can we effectively fight against this kind of discourse?

The opposition between ecology and agriculture is used as a scarecrow by some agricultural unions who place the blame for the sector's economic difficulties on environmental regulations… Except that the numbers tell a different story: in a BVA survey for the Collectif Nourrir in February 2024, confirmed by the Shift Project in its Great Agricultural Consultation at the end of 2024, more than 80% of farmers see agroecological transition as an opportunity and/or a necessity. Not a threat. The survival of our agricultural activities depends on the resilience of our ecosystems: it is simply suicidal to dismantle environmental safeguards. We are on the front lines of climate change and will be the first to suffer, in both our flesh (and in our financial results…) from droughts, storms, floods, and epidemics.

You will speak at the Université de la terre about agriculture and biodiversity protection: how do you envision the agricultural world of tomorrow, and what challenges lie ahead?

The agriculture of tomorrow can only be realized by improving the resilience of ecosystems: increasing the capacity of soils to absorb and release water into the environment, limiting erosion through soil coverage, giving a central role to meadows, grazing areas, and trees to capture CO2 and promote biodiversity… The solutions are already there and have proven effective: agroforestry, covered soils, hedgerows, organic farming, stopping pesticides, etc. The biggest challenge for tomorrow will be to overturn the political power dynamics that attempt to confine these practices to an alternative model, so that they can be deployed on a large scale across our territories.