PHOTOGRAPH BY IMMO KLINK FOR THE NEW YORKER
The Salon de l’Agriculture, held every year in Paris, is also a political crucible.
[ ... ]
Salonology is a pastime of the French media, particularly in a preëlection year. (France will choose a new President in May, 2017.) This year, BFMTV, the country’s most watched news channel, was reporting a “sinister atmosphere.” The network was, to an extent, sensationalizing the scene. But the suggestion of a certain gloom was reasonable. One could detect the most delicate aftershocks of the November terrorist attacks in the heightened security presence, and in the cancellation of the traditionally rowdy night sessions. (The exhibitors had voted to suspend them, on a trial basis, before the attacks, but the show’s president told reporters, “This year, given the state of emergency, it’s a good thing to not have an evening where we have to manage a lot of entrances and exits.”) The main thing, though, was la crise agricole, which was all anybody could talk about, and which meant that—because of a complicated chain of geopolitical events that had resulted in an oversupply—a litre of milk, on which a farmer needs to earn thirty-five centimes to break even, was now yielding him twenty-nine. In four years, the price of a metric ton of wheat has fallen from two hundred and fifty euros to a hundred and forty.
The farmers blamed the European Union. They had been protesting for months: burning tires in front of supermarkets, dousing government buildings with slurry, blockading roads, dumping potatoes in the street. On a Sunday night in late February, a group of about thirty drove their tractors right up to the house of Stéphane Le Foll, the minister of agriculture, throwing a banner over a garden hedge that read “We are like our cows: on the hay”—a pun, sur la paille meaning “to be broke.” Le Foll, who looks like Josh Brolin, came outside, in shirtsleeves and a fleece vest. He was controlled, speaking to the crowd for almost an hour, but clearly furious. “I understand the anger,” he told Paris Match, but he felt that the intrusion had crossed a line. “Everyone knows my address—for my wife, who’s there by herself all week, it’s disturbing.”
The farmers were well organized, through a network of unions and mutual associations, but they were split on what to do about the impending fair. Emmanuel Ferrand, a grain farmer who also serves as the vice-mayor of Saint-Pourçain-sur-Sioule, in the Auvergne, was urging a boycott. “The Salon has become the festival of neo-rustics, of bobos, of all who in search of their roots come looking for a little bit of local exoticism,” he wrote on his blog, adding, “In going to the Salon, I would feel like I was partying in the middle of a coffin factory.” ...
Posts
