The agricultural show that is a festival of hypocrisy

A couple of days ago, I drove across Berry, the rich and rolling, once-pretty country south of the Loire. Cereal fields stretched away into the mist. In two hours of driving, I saw no animals and not a single hedge.

Over the last week, the Salon de L'Agriculture has been attracting crowds to exhibition halls on the edge of Paris. The salon is France's largest festival of agriculture - and hypocrisy.

Visitors are encouraged to believe that French agriculture is all about quality animal-rearing and the production of high-quality food. So it is, in part. But the dominant form of French farming - the true political and economic power - lies in those vast, inhuman cereal fields in Berry and in the Ile de France and Brittany and Beauce and Picardy.

For decades, French governments have glorified smaller, "traditional" farms that produce "quality food". But they have favoured big and "efficient" farms, which generate large quantities of cereals and sugar by ripping out hedges and pouring chemicals (and taxpayers' money) into the ground.

There were three million farms in France in 1970. Now there are 600,000.

More than 80 per cent of streams and rivers - and many beaches in Brittany - have been polluted by nitrogen fertilisers from farms. Under pressure from the European Union, France will finally apply next year the rules on excessive use of nitrogen. There has been a predictable explosion of anger from chemical-dependent farmers.

At the same time, a network of small farmers, in Brittany and elsewhere, is continuing a programme of hunger strikes. Largely ignored by the French press, they have been attempting to draw attention to a startling piece of double-talk by the agriculture ministry.

The EU has shifted its subsidy system away from artificially high prices towards a "single farm payment". The intention is to divert money to family farms, which are friendly to the environment and produce quality food.

Individual EU countries have the right to apply the system as they like. France - and France alone - has interpreted the rules to mean that it should continue to channel 80 per cent of Brussels largesse to 20 per cent of its farms - all of which are mass-production.

Against this peaceful, unchanging pastoral background, I would like to award two agricultural prizes of my own. The silver rosette for agricultural hypocrisy goes to President Chirac.

Three weeks ago, M. Chirac said he was shocked to discover that "wealthy, industrial countries" were subsidising their cotton farmers. Such subsidies, he told a conference of African leaders, were "inhumane and unacceptable", because they impoverished small cotton farmers in Africa.

France exports vast amounts of subsidised wheat, barley and sugar. Such exports are more destructive to more poor Third World farmers than subsidised (mostly American) exports of cotton. M. Chirac omitted to mention that.

When he visited the Salon de L'Agriculture last week (for the last time as President), M. Chirac said he was "profoundly shocked" to find that Peter Mandelson, the EU trade commissioner, wanted to make new concessions on European farm policy to the Third World, including Africa.

However, the gold rosette for agricultural hypocrisy - and prize for Best of Breed - goes this year to the surging, centrist candidate in the April-May presidential election, François Bayrou. M. Bayrou is a farmer's son, and a man who promises to talk straight to the French people. He went to the Salon de L'Agriculture last week and promised a return to an EU policy of propping up farm prices. Pumped-up prices, rather than targeted subsidies, remain popular with many farmers, even some of the small farmers that they ultimately destroy.

It is unthinkable that EU governments would return to a high price farm policy, as M. Bayrou well knows.

Plus ça change.