Page 44 - Biorefinery 2030 Future Prospects for the Bioeconomy (2015)

2 History 11

However, the region’s agriculture also owes a great deal to other initiatives
launched by various powerful local mutual organisations with charismatic leaders.

2.2 Farmers’ Unions in Champagne

The transformation of agriculture in Champagne (forestry, deforestation, develop-
ment of chalk land etc.) was above all the work of large landowners and farmers in
the region. It took place without the encouragement of directives from above.
Joseph Garnotel (1985), for example, mentions that farmers in Champagne have
always used their own initiative rather than call on state help, and that the decisions
made by local producers have mainly been driven by market conditions. This
positioning, which is synonymous with a high degree of efficiency, explains the
rapid growth of agricultural production in Champagne starting in the 1950s.
The region’s agriculture owes a great deal to its farmers’ unions and their
leaders, who developed the structures and services that were vital for the
profession’s advancement. To understand the spirit of this movement, we may
quote one of its leaders, Ge ´rard Lapie, who stated that:

We are farmers; before harvesting you have to sow. It’s the same thing for the leaders of the
profession: you sow, in order to harvest one day, even if, maybe other people will bring in
the harvest. Because we don’t work for glory, but to prepare the future. 2
Historically, the development of farmers’ unions in France began at the end of the
eighteenth century. French agriculture had to adapt to the economic and technical
changes engendered by the industrial revolution, which brought additional costs for
farmers (chemical fertilisers and the use of selected seed) that were much higher
than the value of their production. This phenomenon led to an agricultural crisis
whose effects started to be felt in 1875 and which encouraged farmers to unite,
particularly to negotiate with wholesalers who were sometimes unscrupulous with
regard to the quality and price of the products they supplied. These groups, which
were initially informal, began to be structured as farmers’ unions from 1884, the
year they were recognised as institutions in France.
However, this professional movement developed initially in a climate of intense
ideological divisions between the Christian (Social Catholicism or the Social
Doctrine of the Church) and republican movements.
The Champagne Ardenne region did not escape these divisions, and the first
farmers’ unions were made up exclusively of farmers who shared the same ideol-
ogy. It was thus quite common to have two unions in the same village, whose
members never met since they were made up, symbolically speaking, of those who
went to mass and those who did not.

2
Vecten et al. (2012).