France has a new favorite word: “food sovereignty.” It sounds like independence, self-determination, and national strength. Who could be against it? Who would want to import food from overseas when they can grow it right on their own doorstep?
The government’s response is very simple: if farmers protest, they relax the rules. If farmers could protest again, they relax them a little more. And if that causes wetlands to disappear, rivers to dry up, or animal species to lose their last refuge – well, nature doesn’t block highways or throw trash in front of ministries.
The real tragedy of this new agricultural law isn’t in its individual paragraphs, but in its message. France suddenly acts as if it has to choose: either agriculture or the environment. Either food or biodiversity. Either the farmer or the beaver.
What an absurd comparison.
Because nature is not the enemy of agriculture. It is its prerequisite. Without water, there is no harvest. Without pollinating insects, there are no fruit trees. Without healthy soils, there is no food sovereignty. Whoever cuts the branch they are sitting on shouldn’t be surprised if they eventually fall.
Very remarkable is the political speed of this turnaround. For years, citizens were told that climate change was the greatest challenge of our time. Protecting biodiversity was indispensable. Water would become the most precious commodity of the century.
Then come a few months of peasant protests – and suddenly politics discovers that environmental regulations seemed more like decoration without commitment.
Nature has a structural problem: it has no lobby with columns of tractors. The frogs don’t march to Paris. The wetlands don’t block prefectures. The bees don’t organize general strikes. They simply disappear. Silently. Irreversibly.
Unfortunately, that is precisely its political weakness.
Thus, a bill to support agriculture becomes a document of political capitulation. Not toward the farmers – whose concerns are often legitimate – but toward the idea that conflicts can be resolved in the short term by worsening problems in the long term.
France today celebrates agriculture. That is understandable. But the bill will come due. And then it might turn out that food sovereignty in a dry field is a concept as convincing as maritime navigation without water.
Nature doesn’t make demands. It doesn’t write petitions. It doesn’t vote.
It only reacts. And its judgments are final.