The shepherd gave a cursory look around what had been my home, wondering whether this isolated farmhouse would be suitable for him and his six- year-old son. The only thing he wanted to know was the altitude: 660 metres. "I'll take it. I'll get mountain subsidy as well as dry region subsidy on top of basic CAP. With compensation for falling lamb prices and a single parent allowance, the sheep will be purely for show."
In Britain, the common agricultural policy is usually invoked either as a cure for insomnia or as a goad to Francophobia. It was Jacques Chirac who, as minister of agriculture in 1972, created the mountain and dry region subsidies and he remains the hero of many farmers.
Where I live now, farmers have more and better land than the shepherd who took over my C?nol home, but they still double their CAP subsidy with mountain and dry region add-ons. "A farmer in partnership with his wife and their son can collect E76,500 a year (?55,000) before he milks his first ewe," says our district councillor. "That can double his income from milk."
There is only one regular market for that milk: Roquefort. There used to be hundreds of individual producers, each making a blue cheese sold as Roquefort, but in 1925 the dozen most powerful of them lobbied for an AOC (Appellation d'Origine Contr??, forcing the remainder to adapt or die. Over the years they have refined the definition of Roquefort to the point where now it can only be made from a certain species of sheep grazing in a narrow geographic area. This has eliminated competition from other, equally poor regions of France, but is seen by farmers here, suspicious of a free market, as essential protection. This monopoly becomes a problem with the CAP, which encourages ever-increasing productivity. If there is only one outlet, a surplus is inevitable. But farmers won't cut their flocks because the CAP also pays by head of sheep.
Roquefort mops up the surplus milk by making other cheeses-including feta, capitalising on its Greek associations by calling it Salakis. Salakis sells well in many countries, particularly Iraq. Greece was horrified to discover that most of the world, even its diaspora, consumes non-Greek feta (an Italian word, meaning "slice") and asked Brussels for a Roquefort-like AOP (Appellation d'Origine Prot?e) to protect what it considers to be its cheese. In October last year this was granted-to howls of protest from Roquefort and my farming neighbours, hoist by their own petard.
They have another self-inflicted complaint. Brussels, encouraged by Chirac's agricultural lobby, banned the import of hormone-fed beef from the US. In retaliation, the US put a 100 per cent surtax on certain luxury agricultural products, including Roquefort. In order to keep its American market, Roquefort reduces the effect of this by exporting at half price-a loss which the milk producer has to subsidise. They are furious with the British because we are the only EU country to have escaped this surtax (we voted with the US against Europe's hormone-fed beef ban).
I live in a deeply rural area. Across the canton there are eight inhabitants per sq km. Most farms are family affairs, some are out on their own, but some still nestle right in the middle of a village, the milking shed squeezed between the boarded-up shop and leaking church. Twice a day, ten cows clump along the twisting street past my window: "Up here, though, we're well off," says their owner, Monsieur Chiboudelle, a cheerful and kind man. When he was a boy, a good income came from strawberry beds. That was until Spanish fruit flooded the market. The way fruit farming has developed on the plain, though, I think he is best out of it. Down in the fruit and veg farms of Provence, a farmer has to maintain a small army of pickers through spring and summer. Many are north Africans, working illegally, paid low rates, kept away from prying eyes in what Le Monde Diplomatique calls conditions of slavery. They are recruited and controlled by a handful of powerful African families, considered mafia by the police. But it's a system which suits the farmer, the supermarkets (which like to be able to demand 1,000 lettuces, say, at two hours' notice) and the customer. Things will change in a couple of years when legal farm labourers from eastern Europe can demand not only precedence, but also official wages, with pension rights and healthcare on top, none of which the farmers (or consumers) can afford. The north Africans, who have been there for 20 years, won't go without a fight.
My carpenter chuckles. As well as a volunteer fireman, he's the undertaker. He has the sense of humour to go with it: "Dressayre, the timber merchant, he hired some of those Moroccans. He had a few hectares of trees to fell, a fortnight's work. They camped, hidden in the woods, he brought them food. They worked well, all the trees cut and neatly stacked, but on the last day, just as they were leaving to collect their wages, the gendarmes arrive. The Moroccans were shipped back home and Dressayre got the whole job done for just the price of the food." Who phoned the police? That's what makes him chuckle.
