PARIS – French Agriculture Minister Annie Genevard announced a €40 million fund to help young farmers gain access to farmland at the Paris Agricultural Show on Thursday, despite the issue being a thorny one at EU level.

Access to land is a key part of the EU’s vision for agriculture, presented by Agriculture Commissioner Christophe Hansen at the Salon de l’Agriculture the same day.

“We have announced a strategy for generational renewal, which will be published this year,” the Commissioner told Euractiv. “We need to improve access to land”.

He lamented “the huge differences between member states, with 12% of farmers in the EU being under the age of 40,” adding the positive example of Austria, where the figure is 24%.

“We have to ask ourselves why it works in some places, and not elsewhere”.

Austria and Ireland, for example, facilitate land exchanges between young farmers to help them achieve a better structural land position. In Italy, agricultural entrepreneurs and young farmers up to the age of 41 can apply for 100% financing for the purchase of land.

France has long been considered a leader in this field, thanks to administrative bodies called Safer. It finds landowners wanting to sell and puts them in touch with young farmers. Or it buys land and rents it to farmers until they are able to buy it themselves.

But support for young farmers’ access to land is not regulated in the same way across the European Union.
High entry cost

“Buying the land is very hard”, Peter Meedendorp, president of the European Council of Young Farmers (CEJA), told Euractiv.

Speaking to Euractiv, Muriel Gozal, director of the National Federation of Safer (FNSafer), defends the French model as “the most successful in the world”, but admits that there are specific problems for young farmers.

“They don’t have the financial resources to launch their project, and the amount of capital required to buy land is so colossal that even if it is profitable, the banks are reluctant to lend,” she said.

With this new plan, French young farmers who rent land through Safer will have a long period of time – up to 25 years – to “invest in the operational capital” of the farm before buying the land, and will be able to choose when they want to buy, explains Gozal.

Low exit rate

The problem of access to land is not only linked to cost, but also to the phenomenon of “land retention”, Marion Picot, Secretary General of CEJA, told Euractiv. The EU’s direct aid to farmers is a subsidy per hectare.

In France, there is a system of “mutual exclusion”, which means that when farmers retire they “either receive their direct payment” from the state “or their pension scheme”, Picot stressed.

“When people retire from farming”, they often “choose to keep their land, to receive the payments that go with it as a source of income,” she added. This further delays young farmers’ access to land ownership.

To meet this challenge, the CEJA’s representatives are calling for “better pension systems in Europe”. They claim that “the Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) cannot replace a decent pension”.

While it will not “change the retirement of farmers” in France, stressed Bruno Bonnell, Secretary General of France 2030, the investment plan of which the new fund is a part, it “can make money available so that the older farmers can manage their retirement income differently”.

Start-up mindset

More generally, Bonnell explains that the new French plan represents a “change of attitude towards farmers” by the government, with the aim of turning them into “entrepreneurs”, as part of an “an agricultural ‘start-up’ approach”.

Other players have already adopted this entrepreneurial approach, competing with farmers for access to land.

“We are seeing an increase in the acquisition of land by other players such as supermarkets, foreign investors and speculative investment funds,” warned CEJA’s Meedendorp.

To tackle this “problem of speculation”, Hansen to Euractiv that “the EU will create a Farmland Observatory”.

But young farmers need more, is Meedendorp’s bitter conclusion. “I hope that this is not the only step we take when it comes to structuring the land market. Much more needs to be done”.

[ADM/DE]