Over a week ago Emmanuel Macron’s team attempted to show how ‘close’ he is to the people and the ‘terre’ by arranging a set piece meeting with up to thirty farmer’s groups at the Salon de l’Agriculture. However, there were two problems. Only a couple of those groups turned up, and another protest group stormed the pavilion where Macron was holding forth, leading to an enormous scrummage with riot police.
In the context of a country where to paraphrase Charles de Gaulle, it is near impossible to govern any country that produces 258 cheeses, there is an important link between politics and food, and by extension farming. In recent years, French politicians have in general failed to live up to this bond – infamously in 2008 when Nicolas Sarkozy insulted someone (‘casse-toi pauvre con’) at the Salon.
Jacques Chirac stands out as a president who visibly enjoyed the Salon, lingering at the stands, tickling calves, eating and drinking everything put in front of him. In recent years I have taken a Chirac-ian approach, consuming agricultural amounts of wine, beer, cheese and meat at the Salon, so much so that in early February I receive multiple invitations from the viticulteurs and agriculteurs of France, asking me back to sample their wares.
Last Friday, as I strolled through the vast setting of the Salon, I wondered about the relationship between food and politics.
In diplomacy, food is deployed to seduce and impress (witness the French state dinner for King Charles last year), or to disappoint (the culinary highlight of a joint German-French cabinet offsite, hosted by Germany, was herring sandwiches). Stalin used to apparently invite Communist Party officials to dinner, get them very drunk, and then hoover up the gossip and secrets that they spilled.
Underlining the link between politics and food, there is a group called Les Chefs des Chefs, a very exclusive gathering of the personal chefs of heads of state, and their slogan is ‘if politics divides people, a good table brings them together’. An infamous incident that haunts the group is George H Bush’s vomit into the lap of the Japanese prime minister at a state banquet in Japan (in 1992), an act that the Japanese refer to as ‘Busshu-suru’.
In the wider world, the food and drink we consume is driving important social changes, some of which I referred to in last week’s note ‘The Great Retreat’ that charted the mostly negative, historic ways in which human interaction is changing.
Markedly, in Europe’s ‘northern’ countries – from Ireland to Germany, the typical shopping basket contains 44% processed foods, as compared to roughly 15% in Mediterranean countries. There is a strong correlation between the consumption of processed foods with obesity and cardio-vascular diseases.
In addition in the ‘south’, households spend more time eating and drinking (mostly together). Research by the OECD shows that the French, Spanish, Italians and Greeks spend close to two hours per day eating and drinking per day, as opposed to a meagre hour for the Americans, Canadians and Dutch.
Against this backdrop, one might think that farmers in France and Italy are happier than their European counterparts, but they have been prominent in sacking the Salon and spreading slurry in Brussels during recent protests. For those of you interested in a dark account of agricultural life, do read ‘Michel Houllebecq’s ‘Seratonin’.
Many of the protests across Europe are driven by smaller farmers, disillusioned at national and EU agricultural policy, together with the purchasing power of large super market chains and the political power of ‘large’ farmer groups. Our own experience in the beer industry is illustrative of how difficult it is to succeed, in the absence of a big distribution network, for example.
It is fashionable to blame globalization for the apparent demise of farming as a profitable small business activity, but I suspect that the high interest rates, inflation and price variability of the post-globalized world will be more difficult.
I have two observations to add from an investment point of view, one is the rise of the agtech sector in Europe – which will help some farmers with data analysis, market places and DNA for fruit crops for instance, the other is how very few professional agriculture investors there are and that surely there is greater scope to have more investment managers focused on this space (notably those with good impact credentials).
In the future, to parse my conversations with French famers, the future will be to, where possible, allow less produce to be processed, and more to be specialised and branded – an example is the very good Toonsbridge buffalo mozzarella from Macroom, County Cork, not a traditional ‘buffalo’ stronghold.
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