Agricultural History Review, Volume 67 Part 2 (2019), p. 331

This, the first volume of a series of books on land and agricultural issues, aims to study contemporary relationships to the land. Despite the variety of agricultural conditions in the 28 European Union member states, the land question remains crucial, complex, and universal. Legacies of historic agricultural practice and land ownership systems continue to influence European agriculture, even as new forces disrupt existing models of production. It appears impossible to protect both agriculture and the land that supports it as much as it has been in the past.

The first part of the book is devoted to developments and revolutions in agricultural policies. Several perspectives from different disciplines offer a broad scope, beginning with three papers about France. The agronomist Devienne traces the twentieth-century agricultural revolution. The 1950s saw an increase in the output per worker, while retaining the goal of sustaining soil fertility: polyculture was considered the best solution at that time, but fell out of favour in the 1980s as farmers moved towards greater specialization. Recent developments in information technologies and biotechnology require high capital investments, while the policy agenda has shifted towards sustainability and biodiversity. The second paper, by a sociologist and a political scientist, analyses changes in the relationship between rural society and politics. Acting in the post-war agricultural transformation and the growth of national economy, the peasants aspired to influence agricultural policy decision-making. Indeed, the latter was co-managed by the State and the National Federation of Farmers’ Unions (FNSEA) from 1958 to 1982. This co-management, abandoned by Mitterrand, resumed after 1990 but was weakened by the importance of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and trade union pluralism which reflects the great diversity of farms. The third paper, also about France, by the legal scholar Bosse-Platière, sheds light on the evolution of land law, from the principles of individual good and family good to the common good. Individual landowners were protected by the civil code of 1804, and from 1945, the Tenant Farmer Act consolidated individual farmers’ holdings, assuming every farmer could achieve the status of the small owner. During the mid-twentieth century new organizations helped establish new legal structures for landholding that enabled greater security in inheritance. Yet in 1980, challenges emerged when it became more profitable to invest in technical capital rather than land. Agricultural land equity management (portage foncier), in which a person or a company buys or receives the title deeds of land and manages it, is used increasingly in France. For the farmer, this avoids the burden of land buying, but this has caused the reduction of land ownership and a shift towards land management. All the while, concerns for the environment and climate change challenge this agricultural model and encourage considering the land as a common good. Environmental law now states that: ‘we do not inherit the land of our ancestors; we borrow it from our children’.

Three papers then extend the focus to Europe, reflecting on agricultural policy. Bazin and Trouvé give a very informative summary of the CAP and the evolution of its goals. In 1958, the CAP was largely inspired by the ‘Danish’ model, i.e. a modernized family farm organized by powerful cooperatives. It provided direct assistance to farmers to increase production and ensure a fair standard of living. However, the CAP was subsequently faced with increasingly contrasting realities across Europe, as well as overproduction, while successive reforms after 1980 opened Europe up to the world market. In the present day, debates aim at finding a solution to reconcile a sustainable agriculture and food security. In central Europe after 1989, the ways the land was privatized and the transition to the market economy were influenced by the historic patterns. The creation of cooperatives and landowners’ associations ensured the transition in the 1990s before integration into the CAP. In his chapter, Maurel outlines a trend towards land grabbing for investors controlling agricultural holdings. Mediterranean agriculture is the subject of the third paper. Three types of exploitation coexisted: the aristocrats’ latifundia, the middle class’ estates, leased in mezzadria, and the peasants’ microfundia. In these regions with limited agronomic potential (except in irrigated or viticultural areas), agrarian structures were only modernized on their entry into the CAP.

The second part of the book (four chapters) questions the models of agriculture in France. Since the nineteenth century there has been a lively debate between the partisans of small-scale farming and those of larger farms. Economic and political decision makers were convinced of the efficiency of large-scale capitalist exploitation, yet they protected family farming for social reasons. Cochet advocates systems of family farming which bring together land, capital and labour in the farmer’s hands. He sees in it the source of progress in the post-war boom. It survives through the use of common structures like CUMA (Coopérative d’Utilisation de Matériel Agricole or Cooperative for the Use of Farm Implements). The family farm (sometimes over 300 ha.) coexists with ‘companies’ (F. Purseigle) where land capital, working capital and labour are dissociated. In 2007, France introduced the legal system of the ‘trust’ (fiducie) – a system similar to trusts in the Anglo-Saxon world – which provides a new legal entity into which the ownership of a property can be transferred, under conditions of specific use and duration, to a ‘trustee’ acting for a beneficiary. Labour can also be outsourced to a contractor providing both the workers and the machinery they use. This practice is already common for harvesting fruits and vegetables; hired foreign workers do not enjoy any social protection.

In a concluding chapter, Chouquer presents a wide reflection on the notion of land ownership, which he has developed in a recent masterly book (Le foncier. Entre propriété et expertise, Paris, 2019). Recalling European land tenure systems, in particular British common law and the Roman law, he analyses the current crisis of property in France. The contract system is gradually replacing the land status guaranteed by the State.

The fifteen contributors to this multidisciplinary book help the reader understand the importance of agricultural revolutions since 1945 and the less well known changes since the beginning of the twenty-first century. One of the major interests of the book is the combination of theoretical approaches and precise analysis of land ownership, farming patterns and developments. They have a strong correlation with social organization and are dependent on important historical trajectories, hence their great diversity in different European Union countries.

How can we reconcile a social Europe protecting workers and social aspirations for agroecology with the rise of agro-industrial enterprises and the need to feed a growing population? The readers will not find solutions for the future of agriculture in this book, but at least they will better understand the complexity of the problems and avoid unnuanced opinion.