And meanwhile, as Merkozy fiddles....

                     Image via Wikipedia

The gendarmerie van pulls up in the farmyard. Its sole occupant gets out and heads for the barn.

Hoy! Victor! You there?

In here....in the tractor shed...I'm overhauling the muckspreader. Well, you're a stranger these days....what fine breeze blows you in my direction? Here....let's drink to it.

Well, I'm on duty..

So who's going to breathalyse you?

Yes...well, go on then. What've you got there...is that Albert's?

Yes, a good drop, make the most of it, he's got esca in the vines and he'll be pulling a lot out this winter...
Anyway, what's it all about? I see you're on your own...

Yes, I wanted a quiet word...

If it's about young Laurent's speeding ticket then all I can say is that one of those Parisians with holiday homes round here must have copied his numberplate...
How the hell could my muckspreader be doing 170 kilometres on the periphique at three in the morning!

No, no...that'll get sorted out. But the muckspreader is involved, in a way...there've been complaints.

Complaints? What about? If that's those English again complaining about me not ploughing in Bernard's duck manure for him for over a week ...when we had that hot spell a way back...they can just forget it. They're living in the country, not the middle of London.

No...but you know you're supposed...

I know what I'm supposed to do, but I was organising the Algerian veterans do what with Jean-Antoine being ill...and anyway, it's Bernard's responsibility to get it ploughed in in twenty four hours, not mine...I was just giving him a hand.
So what's it about if it's not the manure?

Well, it is the manure....you seem to be collecting a lot of it.

And if I am? Not illegal, is it? I'm a farmer. Farmers always have manure.

Yes, of course.....but there have been complaints that you're not keeping it in an approved manner...you don't have it drained and whatnot in accordance with EU regulations.... it's all in your barns.....piles of it.

You'd think people would have something better to do...what business is it of theirs?

I don't suppose anyone would have been interested but after young Laurent drove the muckspreader through Ste. Conasse last week with the spreader attachment still going, it caused a bit of ill feeling...

With all this rubbish going on about the euro you'd think they had other things to worry about!
I'm sorry if Mme. d'Enculade got her car covered in it, but that's life in the country!

From what I hear it was lucky the cold snap had started...if people had had their windows open you'd have had a delegation round your ears in a flash and a fair few claims for compensation.
Still, let's stick to the point.
Do you or do you not have a slurry facility in line with EU  regulations?

Yes, you know I have...your son's girlfriend works for old Machin who installed it.

So why is all that muck stored in your barns?
I hope you've not been buying it....no one round here has a permit to sell manure..

No, people without 'a slurry facility in line with EU regulations' have been giving it me......for my project.

And what might that be?

Well, with all this crisis and whatnot, we're supposed only to buy things made in France...but there isn't much made here anymore so that's a bit difficult...look at my muckspreader...made in Italy!

I don't know who you think would be buying manure in those quantities Victor...but you'll still need a permit to sell it...even if you stick a tricolour on it.

I tell you, I'm not buying or selling manure!
I was wondering what to do to make a few bob extra....on the small scale, you understand...and then it came to me!
People are getting paid God knows what to make those windmill things...which is why the electricity bills will be going up again...so what about something much more efficient....
Biogas! Made in France!

From the manure?

Yes, to start with...but you can use anything organic. Next year, the supermarkets are going to have to recycle all the stuff they chuck out in their bins and my idea is to get this up and running and go for a contract with The Mutant over in Les Deux Biscouilles.....
They pay me to take it away and I make the gas and sell it!
Win win!

But manure's not the same thing as supermarket waste.....oh no! Don't tell me that's you!

What's me?

The dustmen are complaining that someone took all their food waste bins from here, St. Ragondin and Ste. Conasse this week.....

Well, yes...I wanted to see how it would work so I got young Laurent to nip round the night before the collection and pick them all up...a sort of dry run for The Mutant contract.
Don't worry, I've got all the bins hosed out and he'll take them back as soon as he gets back from the dump...

Where, I suppose, he is dumping all the containers and wrappers....

What do you think we are! We're not fly tipping. This is professional.

And I suppose he'spaying the professional rate at the dump?

No, or course not...we're farmers.....

Isn't it a bit messy, this food recycling?

I should say so...Laurent had to take a shower and put his clothes in the wash by the time he'd finished...but it won't be so bad with the supermarket packs, they won't have been opened and squashed up with other stuff.
I was thinking that I could hire a couple of English pensioners to do the dirty work....they're all on their uppers with the pound the way it is...

Was,Victor, was. The way the euro is going the English will be the only ones with any money round here...apart from the politicians, that is.

Well, all the more reason to diversify...the biogas. It's a way of showing your patriotism...not just national but local....environmentally friendly...
It's win win!

So where are you making this stuff? The food waste gas, I mean?

I've fixed up the old root clamp...few valves and whatnot...it'll be a few days before it gets started properly, but I've already got the manure started...in the slurry facility in line with EU regulations. That's going well. I'll soon be able to sell it off.

But how are you going to sell it? You can't lay pipelines all over the commune?

No, I'd thought of using that old pump  I used to use for the tractors......people can bring their cubis and fill them up at the pump....just like getting your wine in bulk...

Victor, you can't just start up like this. Where are your permits? Have you contacted the Fire Brigade for an inspection? Gas is dangerous stuff!

Typical! No wonder France is in a mess!
You get an idea to make a few bob and help the environment - just like these firms flogging windmills - and the next thing you know it's permits and inspections and all to be paid before before you see a penny...and when you do make a penny you've got the taxman hanging on one of your balls and the social security on the other...all useless mouths!

And don't go on to me about safety...I've worked it all out and there's nothing to worry about.

If the worst came to the worst and the tank explodes my bungalow is behind the cattle sheds so I'll be sheltered from the blast....I can claim the sheds and the animals and whatnot on the insurance and the only house in the path of the blast is owned by English.

And anyway, there won't be an accident. Young Laurent has made this sign to hang on the pump.
What do you think? You can't miss it! And it's in two languages!

Defense de fumer
Now smoking.

Keeping a dog and whimpering yourself

Image by BlikStjinder via Flickr

I know I shouldn't do it..it is like poking my tongue into a sore tooth...irrestistible but to be regretted seconds later.

The latest report of the Cour des Comptes - the body which gives a general audit  of French state activity - has been published, and, of course, I can't resist its' lures.

Apart from the criticism of the government for not acting effectively to reduce France's massive public debt, the criticism in general of the management of the railways - SNCF - with its' wild over recruitment and its' reliance on public subsidy to pay its' pensioners combined with the uncontrolled issue of free railway tickets to Uncle Tom Cobley and all, the section which caught my attention was that of aid to rural development.
Well, I live in the country and I like to know where my money is being wasted. And, preferably, upon whom.
here

There is a body called the CNASEA, which is supposed to oversee the policy of modernisation of agriculture in France - that is, handing out money to farmers - with funds originating from both the French state and the European Union.
According to the Cour des Comptes, the effect of current policy, by which the Minister of Agriculture keeps most of the power in his own hands, means that a body which was set up to control the distribution of public money has in effect become just a payroll clerk, paying out on the say so of the minister.
The Cour des Comptes doesn't think much of this, and, having read the report, I can see why.

Why should the Minister of Agriculture keep a dog while barking himself? Because he doesn't bark. Rather he rolls over on his back whimpering where farmers are concerned and he is not going to allow anyone to upset the gravy train which keeps the farmers on their farms rather than disrupting traffic with their tractors or burning lorries with live lambs aboard.here, but you need to go to the end for the item
He also needs to keep on employing civil servants in offices in each department, to allow the Prefet - Paris's man on the spot  - to avoid conflict with farmers, which might arise if the body who is supposed to be in control was in control.

Why is it necessary to placate farmers? So that they will continue to act as the smokescreen for those who really cash in on the Common Agricultural Policy - the big firms in the agro-alimentary sector, like  Groupe Doux, a poultry processor who trousered 62 million Euros in 2008.

The whole shebang does appear to be imploding, by the by. More efficient producers elsewhere in the EU are able to offer lower prices to the big buyers in the game, who in turn are squeezing the small guys in France on prices, confident as they are that the Minister of Agriculture will intervene to save the small guys with more subsidies, thus further subsidising the supermarkets and the agro-alimentary industry. With the public purse looking more threadbare by the day, the Minister might not be able to oblige in the expected measure.

However, back to the report of the Cour des Comptes.

There appears to be little or no control over the validity of the claims for payment.
When there are deleterious climatic effects, like drought or flood, the Minister of Agriculture insists that seventy per cent of a claim be paid a month before it would be due to be paid without any form of control being permitted to block this advance.
Grants to sheep farmers for precautions to be taken thanks to the re introduction of wolves in upland areas, which depended on how many sheep were being grazed, had controls removed pretty damn quick, due to the 'sensitive' nature of the problem - read farmers blocking roads.
Better still, when they finally nailed one guy in the Loir-et-Cher for false claims, the Minister of Agriculture intervened to lift any threat of proceedings because - get this - by nature of the fact the he was president of a farmers grouping and thus demonstrating his devotion to the cause of agriculture, he would be regarded as a special case!

You can read the whole sorry mess here.

I think I prefer a visit to the dentist to contemplating the waste and inefficiency of the Common Agricutural Policy.

Land of milk and honey

Image via Wikipedia

Despite the level of the pound to the euro, despite the problems of selling property or getting a mortgage, people from the U.K. still want to move to France.
Now, a glance at the Daily Mail would convince you that you would move anywhere...Mars, the outer systems of the universe....to get away from feral children, microchips in your wheelie bin and institutional prejudice against Christians....while a glance at the Guardian would convince you likewise to get away from the mouthy liberals who seem to have produced what the Daily Mail is complaining of. However, is France the answer?

It depends on your question.

If you are looking to retire, then almost certainly it is.
Property is still attractive, especially if you can drop on a cash strapped Brit who bought on loans that are now difficult to repay, though I don't think that there are all that many about, despite the tales from estate agents about people selling up and taking a drop because property in the U.K. is now too cheap to miss. I don't see very much that is cheap in the U.K. compared to what you can buy in France, and consider this to be yet another ploy from agents to get people to drop their prices to put a commission in the agents' pockets.
A retired person qualifies for health care and unless you have something out of the ordinary, health care is good..though I don't agree with the idea that the NHS is dreadful. My mother has excellent care when she needs it, which keeps her independent in her late nineties. French health care isn't the free for all it used to be, where you could go to as many doctors as you liked until you found one who agreed with your view of your illness, the whole shebang paid for by the state, and waiting lists certainly exist, but on the whole, it's a good deal...if you are retired.
Tax is appalling, but so it is in the U.K..
There are, of course, the wine, the cheese and the smoked fish, among other delicacies, to encourage the move and lessen the pain of the bill for the removal van.
A lot depends on your assessment of your ability to take change. The language is the obvious hurdle, though agencies abound to help you...for a price...and they will also assist with house purchase and all the beaurocratic niceties of life in the Hexagon, as the French media refer to their country. You may have friends or family already in place and nowadays there are so many British expats about that you will never be short of an English language social life.....if that is what you want. A French social life is also possible...it takes about as much time as it would do in the U.K., and, like the U.K., areas differ.

The rest depends on your own character. If you are content to go with the stream, pay up whatever you are asked for and be uncritical of your new home, you will be fine. The French love praise...you can lay it on with a trowel...but having always been taught 'France good, everywhere else bad' since they first went to school, the faintest note of criticism brings on the cry of
'Why don't you go back home, then?'
No society is perfect and it is by exchanges that we learn that things do not have to be set in stone, but France is not, generally, open to exchange. It is a one way path. The French are taught that they have a 'civilising mission' in the world, and that they have nothing to learn from other cultures. Thus the horror at Sarkozy presenting himself as leaning to 'Anglo Saxon' ways of doing things...efficiency, etc. ...a horror now assuaged as people see that his government is being run by the same people who always run French governments, the graduates of the Ecole Normale d'Administration, well connected dumbos for whom there is only one question and only one answer, the summit of the French education system.

It all depends what bugs you. For me, it is the inequality in France which, living in the country as I do, is exemplified by the power and privilege of the farmers. I have already discussed the unfairness of their taxation status, which allows their families access to benefits designed for the poor and their dubious agricultural practices which pollute the environment for us all, but the latest sop to their bullying has annoyed me beyond reason.
When the Green Tax comes in in January, we, ordinary people, will be paying about four cents extra per litre for fuel, and living in the country with oil fired central heating and miles from the shops, that is no small amount over the year. Sarkozy's glove puppet, Prime Minister Fillon, has just announced that farmers and fishermen will only be paying one cent per litre...and the three cents refund will be in their bank accounts by February! As if they don't benefit already from cheap fuel to run their businesses with no one to check whether the fuel is delivered to the business premises or the house! Furthermore, for ordinary people, getting a refund for anything takes forever. One poor woman who was fined for speeding in a Brittany town...1 kilometre per hour over the limit....claimed a refund on the grounds that not only was she not there, but that the street in which the incident was alleged to have taken place did not exist - with a certificate from the town hall to prove it! She still had to pay her fine, and, months down the line is still waiting for a refund. She should have been a farmer.
The milk sector is in trouble, the price to producer having fallen dramatically as demand has fallen, and dairy farmers have just ended a fortnight of 'strikes'. Rather than deliver milk to the collection points, they are distributing it to the populace in market towns.....a rapid change of front as their first bright idea was to pour it over the fields in protest. According to a newspaper survey ninety per cent of the French believe that the dairy farmers are right to expect support payments and to demand that the interest they are paying on their business loans should be refunded. Ninety per cent of the French need their heads examining. The country is, whatever the figures say, in a parlous economic condition and all sorts of businesses are suffering. Do we see demands for a refund of interest payments for people running IT businesses or B and Bs? Some of those businesses are the size of dairy installations, so why are they less important? What about small family businesses also feeling the pressure.....the builders, plumbers, painters, electricians etc? Small country bars? Where is the rescue package for them?
As always, give in to one sector and the rest will soon be on the neck of the government....just wait for the transport industry and the taxi licence monopoly holders to start blocking the roads until they get their cut as well, while the ordinary person pays for all, as always. Where do governments think the money comes from in hard times?
I watched the dairy farmer at work at my last house......the pasture where his cattle were grazing was killed off by herbicide, the nitrate sacks dumped on the field and the grass resown, year after year. My well water, which had served the house for centuries, was unusable thanks to the level of nitrates leaching from his land. The maize he grew for silage was treated with 'Gaucho' or 'Regent', agents now held responsible for the decline and near disappearance of the honey bee.
The wild irresponsibility of the European Union agricultural policy and the pusillinamity of successive French governments have led us to a rich land where milk and honey can no longer be produced and all that is proposed is to perpetuate the system.

Different things bug different people. If you're not politically inclined, then a retirement to rural France could be ideal, and when the question is posed to you by your French neighbour
'Why did you want to come to France?'
You, like Israel Hands in 'Treasure Island', can reply
'Because I want their pickles and wines and that.'
But not the milk and honey.

Eating five a day on the fourth

Image via Wikipedia

The producers of fruit and veg are not having a good start to their holidays. Neither am I.
Apparently, France has been dishing out grants to this sector over about ten years from 1992 onwards which the European Union thinks were unjustified. Money was available for extraordinary problems...drought, etc....but France treated it as an annual dole to producers and the EU now wants it repaid.
The sum involved is some 330 million Euros, but with interest it comes to about 500 million and France is contesting the amount in the European Court of Justice. However, whatever the amount, Brussels wants it back.

The producers' organisations have already announced that their members won't be coughing up....they have
a) spent it
b) gone out of business
c) died
or a combination of any of the above, but, more importantly, the money isn't coming from them.

The Regional elections will soon be upon us, the next Presidential election is heaving in sight over the horizon, and, despite the proposed gerrymandering of constituencies, the governing party still needs to nurse the votes of its' traditional supporters......the farmers and growers. Not a good moment to disturb them in the pocket. Not that there ever is a good moment to do same...if it's not elections, then it's fear of them blocking the petrol pumps and attacking lorries carrying foreign produce....or just fear.

So guess who will be paying? Me......and the other three or four taxpayers in France. You know, the ones who don't have three kids and wallow in allowances.

It's about time for another 4th of August in France.
Everyone remembers Bastille Day, 14th of July, when the Paris mob over ran an undermanned fortress containing a few lunatics and debtors, but 4th August of the same year is considerably more significant....though, like Magna Carta, it has acquired a false glamour over the years.
In French thinking, the session of the Constituent Assembly on the 4th of August 1789 was the moment when everyone in the nation achieved equality.......of taxation.

When I was a child, I had one of those picture books of history....for the most part, photographs of Victorian historical paintings. The Bruce rallying his troops at Bannockburn....Piers Gaveston reclining languidly under the disgusted gaze of assorted barons....Sir John Moore dying at Corunna....but among them, several subjects from the Revolutionary period including the trial of Marie Antoinette, which differs little, I assure you, from a modern trial in France....trumped up charges, shifty looking judges who have already made up their minds, gloomy prisoners who know it and rabid prosecutors waving their arms about and foaming. The evening of the 4th August was included - a candlelit scene with aristocratic men in wigs and churchmen in long robes renouncing their privilege of being exempt from taxation.

Things are never so simple as a Victorian historical painting would indicate. The Constituent Assembly, men of property all, met when the starving country people were ransacking abbeys and feudal manors, intent on loot and freedom from the old shackles. How to control them? The army was mostly still loyal to Louis XVI, and to call them in was to risk the balance of power returning to the King.
What was the answer? Throw the ravenous dogs the bone of freedom from the onerous services demanded by their feudal overlords, the forced labour, including, notoriously, in Brittany, the duty to patrol the lake at night to ensure that the croaking of frogs did not disturb the repose of the local squire. This, the practical bit...then, being France, the idealistic bit......the abolition of freedom from taxation of the nobility and clergy. These are the elements of the French myth of the 4th of August.
Something passes under the radar, however. The feudal dues renounced by their holders were not to be abolished, they were to be bought out. How French. Under the smokescreen of philosophy and high ideals lurks the hand ever open for money.


In France today, the inequality of taxation arguments concentrate on the earnings - or, more accurately, income - of the business leaders, rewarded whether they succeed or fail, whether their firm outsources to the third world or not. The 'fiscal shield' promoted by Sarkozy to keep the rich rich also comes under fire.
What doesn't raise its' head is the unfairness of the fiscal arrangements for farmers and growers which allows them to keep their income relatively tax free and gives their children access to grants that are intended for the children of the poor. Why not? Because the leaders of French opinion live, work and breathe in Paris, where you only see a farmer at the annual agricultural fair. The country is where these types spend August. Country people are the 'ploucs'....the great unwashed.....they don't count in the great scheme of things that is France, which takes place in Paris.
So, on the 4th of August, while you are eating your five different items of fruit and vegetables to conserve your health, consider how they get to your table and who, in the end, pays to keep the farmers rich. And eating cake is no solution.


Apologies that the image is that of the Tennis Court Oath....still, it gives you the idea.

A breathless hush

Rural France has been very quiet since Thusday, April 30th. The predominant sounds are the click of the computer mouse and the cry of enraged triumph when the quarry is pinned down.

This beats any all action computer game hands down for excitement and emotion, and it is thanks to the European Union which has decided that, in the interests of transparency, all beneficiaries of the Common Agricultural Policy should be named.

Germany has failed to obey....it's not that long after the disruption of absorbing the old German Democratic Republic, after all....a row about which fat cats have their paws in the cream which is mostly paid for by the German public is not regarded as conducive to solidarity and fellow feeling in hard times.

One has a feeling that all the Greek, Roumanian and Bulgarian beneficiaries are related, probably to their agriculture ministers, but perhaps that is just how their names look to northern European eyes.

One knows, too, that the Queen has had her paws well buttered, but all of this pales in comparison with the emotion felt by a Frenchman able to confirm long held suspicions about his neighbour's finances.

By consulting the website

www1.telepac.agriculture.gouv.fr/telepac/tbp/feader/afficherResultats.action

...which has just gone down, what a surprise!...

the French taxpayer, consumer and, vitally, neighbour can discover just who has had his or her snout in the trough and to what extent.

It is fascinating to learn that a chap up the road who has to my certain knowledge thirty milking goats and a shed full of ducks has raked in seventeen thousand euros in the last accounting year while steadfastly refusing to pay his wife a wage...nomatter what it says on the books...and leaving his house in the state it was in the 1930s where sanitation is concerned. It does account for his smart cars and vans, however.

Then there is the guy across the river. He has a few cattle, mostly to be found in my garden when the river is low enough for them to wade across, and a pig unit which seems to be subject to electrical faults every three years in which animals inevitably die and he inevitably collects insurance. He has received one hundred and four thousand euros. It accounts for his cars too.

The man who steals my ducks as an extension of his declared activity as a cattle farmer has trousered thirty four thousand euros. It accounts for his son's cars.

The French farmer is an unpopular figure abroad, seen as grasping, greedy, environmentally unfriendly and living high on the hog on the backs of European taxpayers and consumers. It may come as a surprise to learn that he is regarded like this in France, as well, except for European taxpayers, substitute French ones....they have no time to worry about the emotions of other European taxpayers. The figures pubished more or less discreetly in the newspapers have unleashed howls of fury in the comment columns and a great deal of earnest discussion at the level of the local bar.

According to my non farming neighbours, there are two aspects to the farmer's unpopularity ...his farming activites and his privileged position when it comes to taxation.

The farming activities are but all too well known. Pollution of wells and water courses by the over use of fertilizers, which now has to be cleaned up at the expense of the general taxpayer. Over use of insecticides which are rendering the countryside sterile....hardly a buzz in my blossoming fruit trees which once were alive with pollinators....and two fingers put up to beekeepers who have seen their hives and their livelihoods destroyed. Paid to sow inappropriate crops which demand irrigation to an extent that domestic water sources are threatened. Spreading his manure on the fields and not turning it in so that the stench overpowers the neighbourhood - I swear the guy with the ducks has a copy of my diary as it seems like every time I have friends to lunch in the summer he spreads his manure the day before and drives us off the terrace. The ability to blight the countryside with chicken concentration camps, silos and sheds, while the ordinary guy has to jump through the hoops of French planning regulations to change the colour of his shutters. There is a lovely village nearby, where the main streeet is all mellow golden limestone. At the end of the street, visible from the moment you drive into the village, is a silo of vast proportions painted a livid forest green. Just try painting your shutters that colour!

Never dare let your field to a farmer...with his nine year renewable leases and his right to first refusal should you wish to sell he is a blight on your property...let alone what he gets up to while he is renting.

It is the underpart of the iceberg that rouses most resentment, however. Thanks to taxation policy, farmers manage to keep the bulk of their money inviolate, while declaring miniscule sums. This enables them to maintain their vehicle fleets at minimal cost, while entitling their children to grants meant theoretically for the children of the poor. Natural disasters have no meaning for them....they are compensated on the grand scale, which in its turn provides permanent support for the car sales industry. You have no idea how much the average guy who has to economise to keep his car on the road resents the fleets of white vans and smart cars issuing from farm gateways. You have no idea how much the general shopkeeper or tradesman resents the handouts for hard times while he faces going bust and being obliged to keep on paying workmen for whom he has no work.

Still, as my elderly neighbours say
'Nous sommes pour rien'......we don't count.

Farmers count. These subsidies keep the French agro alimentary industry turning, and keep the farming vote turning out for the right in French national politics, and, thanks to the European Union, we all pay for their privileges.