Our Man in Paris: The death of the family farm

A sad, and predictable, change has come over our small village in the Norman hills in the past 12 months. Where blotchy, brown and white Norman dairy cows once peacefully grazed on the green and weed-infested Norman grass, there now stand acres of wheat and maize. The half-derelict cow-sheds once used by our charming, disreputable farming neighbour, Jean-Michel, a Gallic Eddie Grundy, now stand wholly derelict and mournfully empty.

Jean-Michel, a ragged, bearded, frail, 30-something, constantly in debt, went bust a year ago. After hanging around for a while doing odd jobs, he has left the area. The other dairy farmers in the village, André and Solange, retired at about the same time. These were the last farms to survive in our hamlet, which once had eight.

Their land has been taken over by two young, larger-scale, highly-capitalised farmers in neighbouring villages. One farmer grazes beef cattle; the other has ploughed up Jean-Michel's grasslands and planted many hectares of subsidy-attracting cereals. According to local people, much of this ground has never been ploughed before. With the help of chemical fertilisers and pesticides, it seems to be growing excellent wheat.

André and Solange are thriving on their retirement, funded partly by the government, but mostly by their own contributions into a farmers' retirement scheme. As dairy farmers, they milked their cows morning and night for 30 years. They had a rare day off, when their adopted daughter, born in the French pacific islands, stood in for them. Until last year, André and Solange had never ventured outside Normandy in their lives.

I bumped into a dapper-looking André the other day. He and Solange had just returned from driving to Prague.

Much of this is inevitable. There were more than two million farms in France 30 years ago. There are now fewer than 700,000 and falling. The question, in Britain as well as France, is where this process should end.

The peasant-scale agriculture that survived in France up to the 1980s was evidently doomed. It would, however, be a miserable fate for the French countryside – socially, environmentally, aesthetically – if everything went the way of the great cereals-growing belt, 100 miles wide in places, which now surrounds Paris. Here, there are immense fields of wheat larger than anything that I've seen in Iowa or Nebraska or Kansas.

Although successive French governments from the 1960s to the 1990s paid lip-service to small and family farms and the mystic soul of la France profonde, they pursued in Brussels a policy of ever more intensive agriculture. The last French government changed all that. It took a muddled and never properly implemented step towards the encouragement of medium-sized, environmentally-friendly farms.

In recent years, Brussels has allowed EU governments to "tax" rich, highly subsidised farmers, by taking away part of their aid and giving it to less intensive, smaller farms. Previously, 80 per cent of EU subsidies in France went to 20 per cent of farms (many of them the big cereals farms around Paris). Only Britain and France took advantage of the new EU rule.

Now it is just Britain. The new centre-right French government has just abolished the "Robin Hood" farm tax.

Little surprise there. President Jacques Chirac and the largest French farmers' union, the FNSEA, dominated by the big, cereal-growing interests, have always been generous supporters of one another.

During the presidential election campaign, Mr Chirac made a speech attacking Lionel Jospin's government for failing to prevent the disappearance of family farms in France. Now the government that President Chirac controls has scrapped a policy intended to do just that. Quelle hypocrisie, Monsieur Chirac. No surprise there either.

No sex please

On the election campaign trail in Lorraine last week, I was in the company of a tall, good-looking, Algerian-origin Socialist called Hacene. We were campaigning on the main street of a small town and it quickly became clear that Hacene knew everyone.

Most of all, he was interested in canvassing young women, but was disillusioned by my lack of technique as a "drageur" ("pick-up artist").

I protested that I was happily married. So what, he said. So was he. I protested that I was "trop vieux" (too old). "No," he said in franglais. "You are not trop vieux. You are trop British."

George Bush, the saviour of Parisian tourism

Journalists of the old school arriving in a country unfortunate enough to be in the news would question taxi-drivers and quote them as "sources close to the government" or "diplomatic officials". No journalist would ever do that today, of course.

The other night I was being driven through Paris by a source close to the government, who was extremely pessimistic about the French economy, especially the tourist economy.

"You can't make a living any more," he said. "There are no Americans coming to Paris these days. They're all scared to go abroad. There used to be the Japanese, but they've got no money for taxis now. They all stay in cheap hotels in the suburbs and travel around in buses."

"What about the British?" I ventured.

"Ha, the British. They were always too mean to take taxis but now, in any case, they come over on the train for a day, have a ham sandwich and go back again."

Er, the French? "Ha, they're never here. Not the wealthy ones, anyway. With this 35-hour week, they're always on holiday. This country is going straight into the wall," he said, accelerating his car almost into the boot of the one in front to emphasise his point.

I checked his assertion that there are fewer tourists than normal in Paris this year with the city's tourist board and with our friend, Michel, who owns a small hotel in the heart of the Left Bank (rates on request). Yes, they said, it is true, that the Japanese have deserted the city-centre hotels. Yes, there are fewer Americans following 11 September.

However, they said, the Americans have been flooding to Paris again in great numbers since mid-May. Why? It must be the example set by President George W Bush (above right), who visited four European countries in just over a week (a modest total, admittedly, by the traditional standards of US tourists).

So not only has he saved the world from terrorism, Dubya is making the world safe for tourism. Europe has much to be grateful for.