Background

The Réseau Agriculture Durable (RAD) invited IATP to an EU-funded program of the pan-European Sustainable Agriculture Network on "Water and Sustainable Agriculture" in Rennes, Brittany from January 13-16. This is the second meeting of the Network, and follows on from a meeting in Arnhem, Netherlands in June 1997.

From January 13-15, the group focused, through presentations and farm visits, on 3 topics which the Arnhem meeting had identified-farm level action, contractual relationships between producers and consumers (supermarkets, water companies, consumers), and policy reform. It finished with an extremely successful public colloquium in Rennes on January 16. The meeting had an international flavor, with Al Appleton presenting the New York City/Catskills experience, and representatives from the San Pablo Lake program in Ecuador, and producer-consumer cooperatives in Venezuela. A visit to Rennes city council was added on January 12 to discuss their water quality issues, and on January 13, I presented a seminar "Globalization and its impacts on national/regional policy making for agriculture and rural development" with the students of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure Agronomique de Rennes (ENSA), together with Hector Garcia from Venezela and Professors Guy Durand and Christian Mouchet from ENSA.

Water issues in Brittany

• Water quality in Brittany is in crisis. The issue at the forefront is nitrate in drinking water, which, with an average concentration in the capital Rennes (pop. 200,000) of 35 ppm in 1996 and 40-60 ppm today (up from 8.5 ppm in 1970) often exceeds the EU nitrate-nitrogen recommended level of 25 ppm. When it exceeds the EU maximum level of 50 ppm, the local authorities are obliged to inform the public by radio and other media. Atrazine is also an issue, but concentrations are rather low by US standards; the EU's virtual zero-tolerance for pesticides (0.1 ppb for individual pesticides) has a sensitizing effect. School children in Rennes are told not to drink tap water, and to use bottled water instead. The situation is especially difficult considering that 75-80% of Brittany's water comes from rivers, which flow through intensively farmed areas.
• The City of Rennes has gone for source reduction rather than end-of-pipe treatments. They are interested in the NY City-Catskills experience, in which farmers understood that they are in the environment business, and the water utility understood that they are no longer just in the engineering business. The aim of Rennes city is to bring nitrates down below 15 ppm, and to demonstrate that it is possible to have clean water and productive agriculture in coexistence. Of the 1000 km² and 3000 farmers in the total city catchment across 6 watersheds, the city has selected 90 km² and 200 farmers for a demonstration project. Farmers are given individual training to assist in extensification and a shift to organic and grass-based agriculture. The success of this initiative is in doubt; in a hard-hitting speech to the colloquium, Jean-Yves Griot (a Reseau member from Mayenne, Brittany) believes that the city's project Pure Water for Brittany No. 2 will be a failure, just like its predecessor. Consumers, he says, are paying three times-for their food, for taxes to subsidize farmers, and for decontamination of their water supply.
• Another major water quality issue is nutrient-enrichment of coastal waters, which impacts Brittany's second and third-ranked industries-tourism and fisheries. Brittany is France's top tourist destination. The whole Breton peninsula from St. Malo to Nantes suffers from 'green tides' every summer. Algae have to be cleared from tourist beaches before visitors are put off by offensive odors. A very interesting analysis by Renaud Layadi studied three water quality targets: weak (>50 ppm), moderate (25-50 ppm) and good (<25 ppm) and what meeting those targets would mean for three kinds of farming (grass-based, polyculture and factory livestock/feed grain), for fishing/shell fisheries, for tourism and for jobs around a single watershed. The tightest water quality target yielded the most jobs (1557), the highest fisheries income (FF38 million) and the highest tourism revenue (FF 158 million). Corresponding figures for the poor water quality target are 205 jobs, FF 7.4 million in fisheries and FF 44 million in tourism.
• Brittany produces 54% of the pigs, 56% of the poultry, 20% of the milk in France. It is number 1 region in agricultural production, but only no. 18 in value-added. This speaks of an extractive agricultural economy. Farm numbers declined 48% between 1979 and 1995. The most prominent and controversial sector is, like in the US, intensive hog confinement. 7.5 million head were produced in 1995. 4.3 million tonnes of feed are imported for livestock in Brittany, mostly soybeans from the Americas.
• The production of maize/corn is also the source of considerable controversy, especially its heavy reliance on fertilizers and pesticides.
• Brittany, along with parts of Netherlands, Belgian Flanders, and Lombardia, seems headed for serious non-compliance with the EU's Nitrate Directive due to manure production exceeding the absorptive capacity of the agricultural area. The Nitrate Directive, which is aimed at protection of groundwater from nitrates and surface water from eutrophication, limits the application of livestock manure in vulnerable areas to 170 kg N/ha by 2003. In a harsh rebuke of EU member states for failures to implement the Nitrates Directive, the Environment Commissioner recently stated that intensive agricultural production carries a heavy responsibility for the present situation and it will be necessary to take action against the excessive concentration of pig and dairy farming in certain areas.
• The problems of water quality are causing a marked shift in public sympathy away from farming. A speaker from the Confederation of Agricultural Cooperatives, Jacques Painvin, received a very hostile response from the audience at the colloquium.

Outcome of the meeting

US-EU solidarity

• Europeans, including the sustainable agriculture movement, have an impression of US agriculture as an agribusiness-driven juggernaut with a unified globalization and industrialization agenda. In my presentations I stressed that the globalization/ industrialization trajectory has been good neither for family farming nor water quality in the US, and that the situation in Brittany was being repeated in many US locations such as the Chesapeake Bay. I explained that family farm groups in the US oppose the globalization/industrialization project, and have much in common with European sustainable agriculture groups.

Future of the CAP

• Arguments for reform of the CAP include the expansion of the EU, reduction of the agricultural budget (the CAP consumes $40 billion of the $80 billion EU budget) and reinforcing competition between countries for higher profit margins.
• Despite the shift away from price support to direct compensation, and the inclusion of "agroenvironmental measures," there is still much to criticize in current policy and in the proposed Agenda 2000 reforms for the period 2000-2006 regarding sustainability. For instance, production of grain crops such as maize/corn silage receives far more support than regenerative grass crops. In Brittany, farmers receive FF800 million per year for maize silage, and only FF5 million for agro-environmental measures. The position of the Farmers and Citizens group is that farmers have multiple roles-to feed, to protect the environment, and to provide jobs. As food production is rewarded in the market place, CAP assistance should be assigned to the other two non-market functions.
• At the colloquium, the French Minister of Agriculture Louis le Pensec came out very strongly in favor of CAP reform, with a surprising level of consensus with the Ministry of Environment (represented at the colloquium by Maire Jacques, Director to the Cabinet). Both talked about a new contract with society, to meet new expectations of society and a new justification of agriculture, as the context of agriculture has changed. Agriculture must play a full role in maintaining employment, providing services to people in rural areas, and maintaining landscape. This principle of the multifunctionality of agriculture must be brought down to the field level, as a tool of a territorial/land use contract, towards a major modification of how the public intervenes on the farm. The Minister called for strengthening of the agro-environmental measures of CAP, pointing to the 5 agro-environmental cooperatives operating in Brittany over 4,000 ha and his desire to bring this up to 1 million ha. Minister le Pensec believes that 1998 is a turning point for sustainable agriculture; a year when mechanisms for its practical application must be found.
• Unfortunately, the process of developing recommendations from the 3 days of workshops prior to the colloquium was not well managed. The Sustainable Agriculture Network's recommendations for CAP reform presented at the colloquium were rather generic, with no compelling set of resolutions.

Conclusions, recommendations

• Clearly drinking water quality is providing a powerful rallying point for the sustainable agriculture movement and citizens groups. Water quality is seen as the indicator of the food industry's sustainability. The Reseau Agriculture Durable has, partly through the great success of the colloquium on Jan 16, positioned itself as a credible agriculture-based alternative to the intensive, productivist status quo.
• It is difficult to envisage water quality bringing both politicians and citizens around the table of sustainable agriculture in the US except hotspot by hotpsot, often in the wake of concentrated livestock problems, unless (1) pollution problems also reach such catastrophic proportions, and/or (2) sustainable agriculture groups in the US become much better at working the consumption end of the food chain.
• There is a great need to link sustainable agriculture groups in Europe, North America and NE Asia, to understand common problems and exchange successful strategies, around unifying themes such as livestock concentration, water quality, and regional self-reliance. Brittany, the Delmarva peninsula in eastern US, Japan's Inland Sea are all "manure mountains;" in these areas of nutrient excess, "best management" practices are likely to be ineffective.
• The US Midwest-Brittany connections around the problem of water quality in both the US and NW France are profound. Feed grain production, partly for export, is the source of nitrate and pesticide problems in the Midwest, and also feeds the manure mountain in Brittany.