Moral Economies in Food and Agriculture: The Influence of Organized French Producers on Contemporary EU Regulatory Policy

One of the principal economic objectives of the European Union is to facilitate a “free movement of goods, services, capital, and people”. Beginning from the Treaty of Rome, and up until the current moment, the “free movement” of agriculture was particularly influenced by French agricultural producers, just as the “free movement” of industrial goods has been profoundly influenced by the preferences of German industrial organizations. Both of these national producer groups historically had corporatist organizations, and in both of these cases government policy has tended to adopt many of the policy preferences of these well-organized producer groups. While French influence appears to have weakened in some aspects of European agriculture—such as in price supports—a parallel between the preferences of French producers and the French Ministry of Agriculture and European regulatory outcomes is still observable.  

This article investigates the linkages between French producers, the French Ministry of Agriculture, and EU food and agricultural policy, with a particular emphasis on organic, traditional, and geographically protected food regulation.  One goal of this paper is to begin to open up the black box of policy formation. For example, it is often thought that European food and agricultural policies are an attempt of the European Union to protect their domestic economies from American competition. This perspective, however, obscures the fact that even the conception of agricultural economic protection is contested: the outcome of political debates, political organization, and cultural conceptions of relationship between society and the market. This paper, then, broadly considers the following questions: what influence do French producers exert on European food and agricultural policy outcomes? Is the influence of French agricultural preferences weakening, persisting, or changing, and why? Finally, what are the preferences of French producers and the French Ministry of Agriculture? Are their preferences something “uniquely French”—i.e., historically and socially constructed, or are they just rote economic preferences, parallel to preferences we would expect to find in any national context? And how is the broader European context shaping or being shaped by historical French market preferences?

EU food and agricultural regulation cross an array of policy areas, including production rules, distribution regulation, trade policy, safety regulation, and economic supports. This article traces the influence of French producer preferences on construction of European food policy in three “differentiated” (non-commodity) sectors: organic, traditional, and geographic production. In French agriculture, there has been a consolidation of food production, processing, distribution, and retailing.  It could be argued that these more economically powerful actors would support “free market” regulation and smaller differentiate producers would support regulation which enables them to create small, differentiated quality markets. How have these actors organized domestically and at the EU level? Do they speak with one voice, or have they divided French agricultural interests? How has the articulated market preferences of smaller producers for differentiation and protection shaped the policy preferences of larger producers and of the Ministry of Agriculture? And finally, who defines what we mean by “free markets”, and how free are those markets?