“The total number of agricultural companies in real structural difficulty is undoubtedly limited, because we have dynamic French agriculture.”
When it comes to details, this Tuesday, by Bercy and the French banks of the measures to support the cash flow of French farms in difficulty, Philippe Brassac, the general director of Crédit Agricole SA, wanted to be rather reassuring.
But the situation of certain French sectors and producers sometimes proves to be particularly fragile.
For the moment, neither the executive nor the major French banks are coming forward to quantify the amounts necessary to finance the preferential rate loan system (between 0 and 2.5%) provided for French farmers, as well as that rescheduling of existing loans.
Announced on Tuesday, these measures should make it possible to strengthen the cash flow of farms weakened by climatic hazards, lack of outlets, or inflation in production costs.
Only two things are certain.
Firstly, that the State will no longer put its hand in its pocket.
“There is no more public money,”
recalled Bruno the Mayor on Monday during the Agricultural Show.
Second certainty: it is therefore the banks which will take over, while the State has already promised in the autumn that it would guarantee bank loans for the agricultural sector to the tune of 2 billion euros.
“
There will be no contingent, we will face all situations
,” confirmed Philippe Bressac at Crédit Agricole on Tuesday.
Uprooting in Gironde vines
For the moment, Bercy has asked each agricultural sector and the departmental advisors of each territory to identify, among the 389,000 farms in France, which were the most in difficulty.
While it is not possible to say how many will qualify for these aid measures, certain producers or sectors could crowd into the front ranks.
Among them, wine growers, particularly from Bordeaux, currently victims of an overproduction crisis and launched into a vast campaign to uproot 10% of their vines.
A year ago, more than one in three wine growers in the region declared themselves “in difficulty”, according to a survey by the Chamber of Agriculture of Gironde.
If a plan of 150 million euros (partly supplemented by the Bordeaux wine industry) compensates the winegrowers concerned, some remain in complex situations.
This Tuesday, INSEE completed this table on the financial health of Ferme France.
With an average gross operating surplus of 43,000 euros generated annually by each breeder in 2022, French cattle farms are among the least economically efficient.
Far behind cereal farms (85,000 euros EBITDA per year), or pig farms (178,000 euros).
For the latter, however, this level remains unusual, boosted at the time by the surge in pork prices following the outbreak of the war in Ukraine.
Fractures in peasant income
With median incomes of 22,800 euros per year per person in 2020, the financial reality of agricultural households also hides fairly strong disparities between sectors.
With nearly 25% of households exceeding the poverty rate in 2020, French market gardeners and horticulturists are the worst off in terms of remuneration, according to this report from the national statistics institute published on Tuesday.
Next come sheep and goat breeders (23.6% of “poor” households in 2020), then those of beef (21.5%), then a little further on milk producers (15.1% ).
Finally arrive the winegrowers who, across the whole of France this time, counterbalance the difficulties of the Gironde winegrowers, with only 11.5% of “poor” producers.
If these latest figures do not always reflect an unbearable cash flow situation on farms, they highlight the persistent divides between farmers, when it comes to living with dignity from their work.