TRUE OR FALSE. Has French agriculture really fallen to 6th place in world exports, as Marine Le Pen claims?

At a meeting in Eure, Marine Le Pen spoke about the fate of French agriculture. “France, a historic agricultural land, which was the farm of Europe until the beginning of the 2000s, has gone from second to sixth place among world exporters, behind Germany and the Netherlands,” he said. she then writes about X. Is the boss of the RN deputies telling the truth?

“Picturesquely, we could say that our plates are in deficit and our glasses are in surplus”, this is how the High Commission for Planning described French agriculture, in its study “Agriculture, a challenge for reconquest”, published in 2021 The formula illustrates the illusion of a prosperous French agriculture through the export of wine and spirits. But the reality is that on the livestock and market gardening side, Marine Le Pen is right, France’s exporting power has declined.

“France remains the world’s leading exporter of a whole series of products: wine, potatoes, seeds, malt, and, at European level, wheat. But it has moved from second to sixth place in the world ranking of exporters of agricultural and agri-food products France has in fact seen its global market share decline from almost 8% in 2000 to 4.7% in 2019, competing in Europe with new agricultural and agricultural powers. agri-food industries, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy.”, details the High Commission for Planning.

France AgriMer confirms this decline, explaining that France has retained “its 6th rank as world exporter of agricultural and agri-food products, with a stable level since 2020”, despite major difficulties linked to the “global geopolitical context”. The French trade balance remains positive despite a fall of 10 billion euros in 20 years, according to RMC which cites Ania, the national association of food industries.

“Dwindling of French production”

This can be explained by several factors, according to economist Bruno Parmentier, interviewed by RMC. To summarize, the French agricultural model would no longer be adapted, nor competitive, compared to countries where labor is cheaper and standards are lower. Too many obstacles to exports remain in France. L’Ania also reveals that while 8 out of 10 German agri-food companies export, there are only 2 out of 10 companies in France. The senators, in their report on the ‘competitiveness of the French farm’, arrived at the same observation in 2022.

For them, this “decline” would be due to a certain “decline in French agricultural production in volume since 1997”, which could be explained by the accumulation of different factors. A “trend decline in the usable agricultural area”, first of all, but also a “reduction in the number of active farmers”, coupled with a “general cap on yields”.

Conversely, France imports massively (70% of fruits, 40% of chickens, and 30% of vegetables consumed in our country), according to RMC. Figures which irritate French farmers in the midst of their fight against the signing of the Mercosur free trade treaty. For them, as for the senators, “what is worrying is not so much that France is no longer an agricultural power; it is that it is less and less so, and that it is engaged in a brutal declining slope whose end we cannot see.”